America's History of Torture

[malatesta1137]

The United States likes to see itself with a halo on its head, and whenever a revelation like Abu Ghraib or My Lai surfaces, U.S. citizens tend to shrug it off as an anomaly. When you look at the last fifty years of U.S. history, it is anything but. From Greece to Iran to Indonesia to Vietnam and throughout Latin America, the U.S. government has been complicit in the torture or murder of hundreds of thousands of people. "If we had photographs of what our so-called allies in Honduras and El Salvador and Chile were doing, based on training they had received from us in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the American public would have been even more horrified," says Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. This was torture by proxy, but it was at the direction of Washington. "The only difference between this kind of conduct now and in the past is that there wasn't somebody with a digital camera back then keeping track of what was going on," says Kornbluh.

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http://www.progressive.org/july04/roth0704.html