The painful truth: torture has been part of the American way for decades

[JohnyCanuck]

Perhaps we protest too much. Torture, after all, is a venerable American tradition. If not quite as homespun as apple pie or lynching, it is at least as old as our imperial aspirations. We were waterboarding captives in one of our earliest wars of occupation, the Philippine-American War, which cost as many as 1 million civilian lives. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt himself wrote with laconic praise of "the old Filipino method."

Other techniques, crude or sophisticated, have filled the war bag since. CIA interrogation manuals from the 1960s, which lay out the basic stress-position and sleep- and sensory-deprivation techniques later applied at Bagram and Guantanamo, have been public since 1997. Despite our protestations, we have little to be surprised about. The Bush administration's great act of hubris was not to allow torture -- that was nothing new -- but to attempt to shelter it within the law. Now, when President Obama vows that "the United States does not torture" and spars with the former vice president over details, he crosses his fingers behind his back and saves himself a loophole. Via "extraordinary rendition" -- a Clinton administration innovation -- our government is still free to outsource torture and claim it doesn't know. The Obama administration has been relying increasingly on foreign intelligence services to detain and interrogate our suspects for us. Our hands, in a way, are clean.

Yet as more classified documents dribble into the headlines, we hold tight to our outrage. The scandal has been slowly breaking for five full years (I wrote about the abuse of detainees in these pages in April 2004), but still we claim not to recognize ourselves. Despite hundreds of front-page stories, we pretend we didn't know, that it was all somehow kept secret from us. " 'Secret,' " author Mark Danner has observed in the New York Review of Books, "has become an oddly complex word." It refers not to things we don't know but to things we won't admit to seeing. This blindness serves a function. By declaring torture anomalous, by pushing it once again to the margins of legality, we can preserve a vision of U.S. military power -- and of American empire -- that is essentially benevolent.

That vision -- of our nation's messianic role, its unique destiny to shower the world with freedom and democracy -- has for more than a century been at the root of our self-image. Even when we know better, we are loath to let it go, even when we understand that those showers often take the form of 500-pound bombs and that self-determination is not something that can be bestowed at gunpoint. Maintaining military and economic hegemony over the planet remains an inherently bloody affair. Seen from the other side, empire is a synonym for subjugation, and hence for violence on a massive scale.

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/thatseemsfair/latimes0208.html

[provis99]

1. torture started right with the Revolution

we all know the phrase "Lynching", which started with the Revolutionary war, as Charles Lynch advocated terrorizing, torturing, and killing Loyalists outside of the law. And of course there's "tarring and feathering", a uniquely American form of torture, also instituted by the Revolutionaries against Loyalist supporters.

Torture: as American as apple pie, baseball, and the Founding Fathers.