U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and ‘enhanced interrogation’ now is that some modern-day officials appear proud of themselves.

By A.J. Langguth

May 3, 2009

As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle.

I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses.

At the time, I was researching a book on the United States’ role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator’s files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent’s Southern Cone.

Despite my past reporting from South Vietnam, I had been naive enough to be at first surprised and then appalled by the degree to which our country had helped to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.

Our interference, which went on for decades, was not limited to one political party. The meddling in Brazil began in earnest during the early 1960s under a Democratic administration. At that time, Washington’s alarm over Cuba was much like the more recent panic after 9/11. The Kennedy White House was determined to prevent another communist regime in the hemisphere, and Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, was taking a strong interest in several anti-communist approaches, including the Office of Public Safety.

When OPS was launched under President Eisenhower, its mission sounded benign enough — to increase the professionalism of the police of Asia, Africa and, particularly, Latin America. But its genial director, Byron Engle, was a CIA agent, and his program was part of a wider effort to identify receptive recruits among local populations…..

Some guy, knut, and blue, thanks you all for your trenchant points. As you’ve collectively observed, how can we explain a very high ranking military man keeping his commission when he appears to continually side with America’s secret police, spooks, and their clients against the C-in-C?

Did Obama promote a rogue – or did he appoint for his DNI an Admiral he already knew would defy international law, secretly collaborate with Presdients who covertly provided material support to death squads and our military dictatorships from who they took orders, provide false testimony to duly cosntituted Congressional authority, and in so duing violate his Oath to uphold the Constitution as well as the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s standing order to refuse illegal orders?

As we watch DNI and Obama’s choices to either defy of comply with America’s obligation under the International Convention Agaisnt Torture to investigate and where indicated try all officials complicit in the war crime known as torture, I’m gonna to wonder whether – this time – Adm Blair is double-crossing the President, or colluding with the President in double-crossing the Constitution, and hence the rule of law.

I’ll even say Obama’s not an American, if you’ll make it stop. Evidence? Um, OK.
.

But I have expected better of our nation since I protested the Viet War in the late 60’s.

Great post, hoss, thanks again.

Very, very important history here, that’s easily been forgotten.

And that’s how we get into trouble, when we let real history be forgotten, and then, rewritten.

Hell of a post Doc Kirk . . . . nice linkages, attributions. REAL nice.

Almost like I was reading about the Dulles Brothers, all over again . . . .

Thanks for your work.

That being said, maybe his track record is known and they want him for exactly that reason hoping that not many people would be aware of his past.

I have that book by Chomsky in my library also and it’s disgusting how much has not changed over the years regardless of which of the two war parties is in power.

I believe Obama like Bush before him is quite happy to take advantage of the fact that the American people just don’t have the requisite knowledge expected of an informed electorate and therefore just about anything can be put over on them. We are to blame for that as people who live in the communities that have done away with teaching, I mean really teaching instead of testing with an eye to hit some nebulous mark that ensures our kids know less than nothing about their history.