Full circle

It is sometimes said of America that it is the only state on the planet to have gone from barbarism to decadence without having passed through civilisation along the way. The release of a report into the use of torture during interrogation and detention programmes by the CIA post-9/11 suggests that America has now come full circle, and reverted to barbarism. This is not to say that all Americans are barbarians because they are not, but it is clear from the report by the US Senate intelligence committee that the extensive use of torture, sometimes killing those being interrogated such was the severity of that torture, that the CIA had overstepped every conceivable boundary. The chairwoman of the committee, Diane Feinstein, called the torture programme “a stain on our values and on our history” and that the programme was “morally, legally and administratively misguided”. Many of the details of what was done to detainees to extract information are appalling. One died of hypothermia after being chained naked to a concrete floor. In several cases, the detainees gave false information to satisfy their torturers. Of the 119 estimated detainees, at least 26 were found to have been “wrongfully held”.

There is now a call from a UN special human rights rapporteur for the prosecution of those who were responsible for the torture programme. The programme was wider than the CIA, with other agencies and countries being complicit in it, allowing ‘rendition’ of detainees and hosting secret prisons where they were illegally held. The US Senate report exposes the lies, the cover-ups and the duplicity of the CIA. The Obama Administration fought to protect the CIA from these disclosures for the last 10 months — itself a stain on the American escutcheon. President Barack Obama banned torture when he took office in his first term, and has since done little to bring the torturers to account. That streak of barbarism goes right to the top, and whatever trappings of respectability the CIA might have had, are now stripped away. The 9/11 attacks changed the world, and the barbarians have become the gatekeepers.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 11^th, 2014.

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