Breaking the Cycle by Probing the Past

As speculation mounts over the potential scope of a Department of Justice investigation into Bush era torture, its important to keep in mind the importance of a broad, backwards seeking inquiry. A narrow search into violations by individual interrogators in days after 9/11 would only bolster the Rumsfeldian notion of "a few bad apples" while leaving top torture architects unscathed. "It would implicitly bless the torture that it did not prosecute", noted Sullivan. But simply looking at the role of Cheney, Addington, Yoo, Bybee and others-- though vital-- is not enough. Instead, any DOJ inquiry into torture must dig into the United States' long history in the practice.

Since the April 09 release of four Bush OLC torture memos, there has been a trickle of articles from across the political spectrum referencing US torture in Vietnam, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere. Alfred McCoy, author of the indispensable, A Question of Torture, summed up the importance of a broad inquiry amid questions raised by recent revelations of US torture:

Over a 40-year period, Americans have found themselves mired in this same moral quagmire on six separate occasions: following exposés of CIA-sponsored torture in South Vietnam (1970), Brazil (1974), Iran (1978), Honduras (1988), and then throughout Latin America (1997). After each exposé, the public's shock soon faded, allowing the Agency to resume its dirty work in the shadows.

Unless some formal inquiry is convened to look into a sordid history that reached its depths in the Bush era, and so begins to break this cycle of deceit, exposé, and paralysis followed by more of the same, we're likely, a few years hence, to find ourselves right back where we are now. We'll be confronted with the next American torture scandal from some future iconic dungeon, part of a dismal, ever lengthening procession that has led from the tiger cages of South Vietnam through the Shah of Iran's prison cells in Tehran to Abu Ghraib and the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Eric Holder must appoint a prosecutor with the mandate to follow the trail of Bush-favored debility-dependency-dread torture back to where began: 1950's CIA mind control research and the implementation of SERE. Only then can we begin to undermine the bunk science and expose the cruelty of an interrogation paradigm based in fear, isolation and sleep deprivation that is still currently authorized for military and CIA.