When torture becomes policy all our rights are threatened 
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
The thousands of honorable soldiers and civilians who bravely serve with honour and those who gave their lives for human dignity would be outraged if they knew that torture, brutality, dehumanisation and human rights violations was the policy of the present United States administration. If this is so, it contradicts the articles of the U.S. constitution and revives the worst practices of the Nazi Holocaust.
They would despair too if they knew about the gross violations of human rights by the CIA and other western intelligence services and countries where suspects are secretly brought for interrogation and torture.
Such practices and policies are not new. The training of torturers by the CIA goes back a long way. The routine torture training given to police and military from other nations, including the Philippines, at the U.S. Military School of the Americas based in Panama (before it moved to Fort Benning, in Georgia) is detailed in the CIA manuals from the 1960’s. Torture survivors in the Philippine and South America have recounted how they suffered the same torture techniques. The CIA training manuals and the testimony of former torturers who talked to journalists confirm it.
These same torture tactics with new additions have been used in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay detention centers and by torturers in other countries where terror suspects have been delivered by the CIA planes. The Photographs of the dehumanising and humiliating techniques are now well known in all their horror.
A former army - specialist, Anthony Lagouranis, as reported by Newsweek (7 November 05) told Human Rights Watch in New York that “I think our government polices required abuse”, he admitted he tortured detainees in Iraq... “The stuff that I did was mainly torture like: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions and hypothermia. We used dogs”. There were freaking horrible things people were doing.
Other acts of abuse have also been reported such as repeated semi-drowning, electric shocks, sexual humiliation, hooding, threats, mock executions, physical beatings, isolation, stress positions and much more.
U.S. Senator John McCain, a victim of torture during the Vietnam War said it is just the “tip of the iceberg in the military today”. He had an amendment passed 90-0 by the U.S. Senate banning “cruel inhuman, degrading treatment and containing the phase regardless of nationality or physical location”. (I previously incorrectly reported that this phase was left out, this is what the White House wanted left out).
Bush signed the law but said (or his handlers said for him) in an official statement he would, as commander-in-chief, interpret it as he choose. In other words if torture was deemed necessary to safeguard “national security”, he would approve it. Who, we ask, has the right to approve torture? No one, it is always wrong, inhumane cruel and unjust. It is against everything we stand for in preserving the dignity of the human person.
Army Captain Ian Fishback, a practicing Christian, a courageous and exemplary solider, believed this and told Senator McCain that the brutal practices he had witnessed at Abu Ghraib, as seen in horrific photographs, were “in accordance with what I perceived as U.S. policy”. We have to admire and support those great Americans taking a stand for what is right and just.
Captain Fishback is courageous and brave to speak out, most others are scared. In the 19 December 2005 edition of Newsweek there are twelve quotations from high ranking political sources asking not to be identified out of fear of annoying the Bush administration. Fear is a powerful controlling influence.
A former member of the Justice Department, John Yoo wrote the policy guideline for the George W. Bush administration that said the Geneva conventions will not apply during the “war on terrorism” because the enemies “do not operate according to the Geneva conventions”.
If that is so, then civilized nations can descend to the same level of evil practised by the terrorists and become torturers and human rights violators. Some have already descended. [End]
Fr. Shay Cullen is a Columban missionary: PREDA Centre, Kalaklan, Olongapo City. www.preda.org
