"ALFRED McCOY: Dick Cheney has been a forceful advocate for the enhanced interrogation techniques. He’s been unapologetic. He’s been vociferous. He’s given dozens of interviews over the years. In effect, Dick Cheney is the leading voice for those in the intelligence community that are determined to win impunity for their violations of law and international conventions.
And we’re now—as a result of the Senate report, we’re now in what I call the fifth and final stage of a decade-long struggle over the torture issue, a decade-long struggle for impunity. And the United States, just like other nations that have emerged from these sad practices at the end of the Cold War, has been going really through a five-stage process of impunity.
When the Abu Ghraib photographs were released back in April 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blamed it on the so-called "bad apples." That’s the first reflex—blame the bad apples. Then Dick Cheney and others, right away, began saying that it was an imperative for national security: We had to do it for reasons of safety. That’s the second stage in impunity. Then, when President Obama came into office in April 2009, he visited CIA headquarters, and he brought us to the third stage of impunity by saying that the past was indeed unfortunate, but it was time to move forward together. In other words, national unity means we can’t investigate this troubled past.
Then we hit stage four, which is essentially exoneration for the perpetrators and the powerful that ordered them to commit these acts. That occurred, ironically, after the death of Osama bin Laden in May of 2011, when an a cappella chorus of Republican neoconservatives arose on the media and said that these enhanced interrogation techniques led us to Osama bin Laden, they kept us safe. To use to Dick Cheney’s words, they saved thousands of lives, tens of thousands of lives. At that point, the U.S. Justice Department terminated its investigation of nearly a hundred CIA excesses that were potentially crimes, and the perpetrators had won exoneration.
Now what they’re fighting for is not just exoneration, they want vindication before the bar of history. And that’s critical on a couple of levels. First of all, policy level, if they achieve that, if they win the fight and say that these techniques were, first of all, not torture, and, second of all, they kept us safe, they will then, first of all, be exempt from civil litigation by the victims, second of all, to possibly U.S. criminal investigations, to international arrests should they travel abroad. More importantly, in terms of policy, that means that this doctrine will remain in the presidential toolkit so that a future president can set aside President Obama’s restrictions on these methods and torture again.
And so, that’s why this is a desperate and very serious battle over impunity. And that’s why the Senate committee’s report is so important, because up to this point the perpetrators and their powerful were winning the debate. Now, in fact, the debate has shifted its tone, and it’s looking to me like it’s a much more neutral, much more positive outcome."
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/12/16/psychological_torture_is_enshrined_in_us?autostart=true
= new reply since forum marked as read
