Torture: it’s the American way

But the American public remains sanguine about the use of force,
says alexander cockburn

Torture has always been a word that stirs the CIA to hot denials of its practice, despite copious documentation to the contrary. The CIA's earliest years saw the importing of Nazi torture technicians after World War II. By the early 1950s the agency was financing research into sensory deprivation and isolation techniques.

The 1960s missions in Vietnam and Latin America saw relentless applications of torture in every form, though the denials continued full tilt. Even today, though the Bush administration is officially pro-torture, the CIA shrinks from the word, preferring more genteel vocabulary, like 'harsh interrogation'.

This prudery has now landed the agency in a PR debacle, trying to explain a) why in 2002 it secretly videoed 'harsh interrogation' of two members of al-Qaeda and, b) why it secretly destroyed these tapes in 2005.

Torture has been used by the US since the end of World War II

Explanation for the video-taping takes the pious line that this allowed supervisors the ability to assess whether harsh interrogation had slipped over the line into the no-no land of torture.

"It wasn't up to individual interrogators to decide, 'Well, I'm gonna slap him,' or, 'I'm going to shake him,' or, 'I'm gonna make him stay up for 48 hours'," one retired CIA interrogator named John Kiriakou told ABC News. "Each one of these steps, even though they're minor steps - like the intention shake, or the open-handed belly slap - each one of these had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations."

What they were actually doing to the al-Qaeda men - Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri - was abusing them physically in various violent forms, ultimately suffocating them under water, the notorious 'water-boarding' technique.

If the sessions were being filmed to ensure only legal applications of force, then why hastily destroy the tapes three years later? The CIA says destruction was prompted by