WHY They Hate Us

WHY They Hate Us

An excerpt from:


'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate
Naomi Klein
...
what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.
It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture." It is here in Panama and, later, at the school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found. According to declassified training manuals, SOA students--military and police officers from across the hemisphere--were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since migrated to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation," humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions--and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."


or from another of the 500,000+ links that came up under a search about American torture in South America:
...
When it comes to torture, Jennifer Harbury knows of what she speaks. A Harvard educated attorney, she fell in love with a Guatemalan man, Everado, who was leading an uprising of the poor against the oligarchy and military in his native country. In Central and South America, speaking out on behalf of the poor -- and fighting for economic justice -- is considered a crime of subversion.
The punishment for such crimes is either death or torture. And as Harbury reveals in this follow-up to her moving book, "Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala," the torture is often done with the knowledge of the CIA, people trained by the CIA, and graduates of "The School of Americas" in Benning, Georgia.
This are not radical, fringe political accusations. This is fact.
The torture her husband endured before he died was horrifying and ghastly. A doctor was on hand to make sure he didn't die until the Guatemalan military felt that he was no longer useful. Harbury publicly battled on his behalf in Guatemala and the U.S., but she was unable to save him. She did, however, achieve one goal, an admission by the U.S. Government that they were aware of his detention and torture.
"It is important to remember that he was only one of many who suffered a similar fate. All 300 were eventually killed.
It is now known that the torture was carried out with the full cooperation of the CIA, in concert with eight to twelve other individuals who had been trained at the School of the Americas.
http://www.buzzflash.com/reviews/05/08/rev05077.html


Or,

August 25, 2005

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INTERVIEW ARCHIVES



Jennifer K. Harbury Knows American Torture Starts at the Top, and It Has for Decades

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
What's happened is what has happened in the past. Very low level people, such as, in this case, the MPs who were ordered to carry out those tortures, are held up to the public as scapegoats, put on trial, and sent to jail. Whereas, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Tenet, who are in clear violation of two felony statutes within the United States which prohibit torture abroad by any U.S. official, or conspiracy to do so, or ordering or condoning such actions – these people have remained completely free. Why are they free with no charges brought against them? Because the person who would decide to indict them would be the Attorney General – formerly Mr. Ashcroft, now Mr. Gonzales. We have a clear breakdown of the checks and balances system here. They should be under indictment, but they're not, so their crimes are continuing. And that, in fact, is going to greatly increase the risks of more attacks against our country.
* * *

Torture and the Logic of Domination
Kristian Williams Pages: 240ISBN: 0-89608-753-0Format: Paper


Abner Louima. Abu Ghraib. The Humboldt Five. Extraordinary Rendition. Lynchings. School Of The Americas. Prison Rape.
Whether or not it makes front-page news, make no mistake: Torture is an everyday tool of dominance and terror in the United States. On the heels of Our Enemies in Blue, his controversial chronicle of policing, Kristian Williams once again upsets the notion that “excessive force” by the state is anything but altogether American.
American Methods is a damning audit of the US record in underwriting human rights violations around the globe. In the last 25 years alone and under several administrations, we confront death squads in El Salvador, genocidal campaigns in Turkey, brutal interrogations done on our dime, even in our name by various “friendly governments,” and more. Returning to our shores, Williams observes the banality of violence at home—on both sides of the prison wall. What emerges is the distinct character of American torture, particularly its emphasis on sexual violence, misogyny, and racialized spectacle.
Ultimately, American Methods offers devastating conclusions about the centrality of rape, racism, and conquest to both the state and our national culture.

Other books by Kristian Williams

Our Enemies in Blue (paperback original) Police and Power in America (Revised Edition)Kristian Williams Released 2007-08-01 More than a history of police brutality, Our Enemies in Blue examines the centrality of violence to everyday policing. From slave patrols to “community policing,” Williams traces the evolution of the modern police force as a violent guard of the social order.
More Information Purchase for $20.00

American Methods (Paper)Torture and the Logic of Domination Kristian Williams Released 2006-04-12 This pathbreaking study observes torture as a veteran tool of American power. Examining the racial and gender politics of torture, Williams draws powerful conclusions about the centrality of rape and white supremacy to US empire and life at home.
More Information Purchase for $18.00 See all books by Kristian Williams
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Freedom Under Fire (Michael Linfield; Ramsey Clark (Introduction))
Collateral Damage (Cynthia Peters (Editor))
War at Home (Brian Glick)
Index
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Excerpt
Chapter SevenThe Centrality of Rape
On August 9, 1997, Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub following an altercation between police and some number of the patrons there. Louima was not involved in the conflict, but police mistook him for another man who had been fighting. The officers who transported Louima to the precinct stopped twice en route and beat him. Later, inside the station house, Officer Justin Volpe removed Louima from his cell and led him to a bathroom. While another cop held Louima down, Volpe shoved a broken broom handle into his ass, and then into his mouth.
Louima was returned to the holding cell, until other inmates complained that he was bleeding. He was then moved to a hospital, where a nurse reported the abuse to Internal Affairs. Among Louima's injuries: a ruptured bladder, a torn colon, and broken teeth.
The response of the authorities was surprisingly swift. Officer Volpe was arrested and charged with violating Louima's civil rights. Officer Charles Schwarz, who was accused of holding Louima down, was also arrested, as were Officers Thomas Wiese and Thomas Bruder, who were charged with obstructing justice. Volpe pled guilty and was sentenced to thirty years.
This outcome was virtually unique among the many high-profile brutality cases under the watch of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was in office between 1994 and ...
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Praise
"In horrifyingly impeccable detail, author Kristian Williams argues that US policymaking, even before Sept. 11, actually pivots on the use of torture. He shows how US torture tactics in Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, and US prisons are strikingly similar, employing systematized racism, misogyny, and rape ... American Methods cogently gives the reader evidence of how the US uses torture to control society and to protect US hegemony, compelling us to rethink power and to question the terror enacted in the name of democracy."—ColorLines

“Kristian Williams peels away the mythic veneer of American Innocence with an eloquence, power, and precision that stands largely unrivaled. The result is a book which not only deserves, but quite literally demands inclusion among the handful of works essential to understanding where it is we find ourselves at this awful moment in history. Read it if you dare, and especially if you don’t.”—Ward Churchill, author of A Little Matter of Genocide and On the Justice of Roosting Chickens

“American Methods shines an unmediated light on this country’s use of torture as an essential component of social control, both at home and abroad. Williams’s exhaustive analysis exposes a history of rout...
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Press Release
For Immediate ReleaseContact:

Jocelyn Burrell, jocelyn@southendpress.org

AMERICAN METHODS Torture and the Logic of Domination by Kristian Williams

“I’m told that these photographs that are coming out now are nothing more than the same things that came out before, if not identical of the same type of behavior.” —Donald Rumsfeld, 2/16/06
More of the same. So went the official Pentagon response after new photos of US soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison were leaked to Australian media. Like Rumsfeld, many of us seem to be suffering a terrible sense of déjà vu:
again, evidence that torture is not aberrant but a standard tool in the US “war on terror”
again, the media fixed on the “problem of the photos,” not the reality of open criminality they expose
again, the administration scrambling to direct public outrage away from questions of accountability with the false “choice” between protecting American lives and upholding the law—moral standards be damned
One voice in surprising, if sad, agreement with our secretary of defense is Kristian Williams, author of the forthcoming American Methods: Torture and ...

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Author Article
Torturers ‘R’ Us
President Bush denies realityI
In These Times, November 28, 2005
The national debate on torture reached a new level in October when the Senate voted 90 to nine to restrict Defense Department interrogation techniques and prohibit the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in U.S. custody. The vote came as a major rebuke to President George Bush, who threatened to veto the military spending bill if the proposals were included.
Bush responded to the vote by publicly defending the United States’ existing practices. During his Latin American tour in early November, he said, “We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do … in this effort, any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture.”
Yet earlier that very week, Vice President Dick Cheney pleaded with Republican senators in a closed door meeting to exempt the CIA from the cruelty ban. The administration clearly does not like having its bluff called.
To understand the panic buzzing through the White House, you have to understand its philosophy. The administration has consistently read the law so as to minimize the protections offered to official enemies and maximize the power of the president. This approach has shaped almost every aspect of the “war on terror”—the suspension...
...
Dr. Sam Valkin in the American Chronicle:
In November 2002, the law firm of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll joined other American and South African law firms in filing a complaint that "seeks to hold businesses responsible for aiding and abetting the apartheid regime in South Africa ... forced labor, genocide, extrajudicial killing, torture, sexual assault, and unlawful detention".
Among the accused: "IBM and ICL which provided the computers that enabled South Africa to ... control the black South African population . Car manufacturers provided the armored vehicles that were used to patrol the townships. Arms manufacturers violated the embargoes on sales to South Africa, as did the oil companies. The banks provided the funding that enabled South Africa to expand its police and security apparatus."
Charges were leveled against Unocal in Myanmar and dozens of other multinationals.

In September 2002, Berger & Montague filed a class action complaint against Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport. The oil giants are charged with "purchasing ammunition and using ... helicopters and boats and providing logistical support for 'Operation Restore Order in Ogoniland'" which was designed, according to the law firm, to "terrorize the civilian population into ending peaceful protests against Shell's environmentally unsound oil exploration and extraction activities".
The defendants in all these court cases strongly deny any wrongdoing.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=36639

So next time you hear George W. Bush and Stephen Harper mouthing off about the threat of terrorism, take a good long look in the mirror. Our ignorance is playing right into their hands, and remember that within days of Afghanistan's defeat - Unocal was in that country to complete a pipeline they had been attempting to negogiate with the Taliban, and of course the current poppy crop is larger than the Columbian CIA drug plot, and they had the Canadians die defending it. They must be high-fiving in board rooms across Bushite land.

The Iraq occupation, torture and incarceration will continue as long as the corporate paid off media continues to block the truth from the populace and given they have not reported the truth about the Bush crime family for sixty years - it is not likely they will come to the party now. That leaves it to us to be all that we can be.

The other day George Bush said, "Mandala is dead"...his tortured logic meaning that there was no one left to lead a freedom march in Iraq. There are two incredible things about that statement:

1. If the Iraqi Mandala is dead, US forces are the more likely of the lot to have killed him.

2. Anyone who would lead a freedom march in Iraq would lead it AGAINST the USA.

The world hates us because we have a lying, stealing, cheating, torturing, leadership and intelligence agencies who abuse populations all over the world in support of their corporate funders. While our "leaders" claim they are bringing democracy to the world and we pay for their crimes funding genocide after genocide ..now in the name of "our way of life."

This is why they hate us - not because of our way of life - because we destroy their way of life and then demand they thank us for it.

People who should be in the Hague on trial for war crimes are running our countries - that is why they hate us. they hate us because we cannot seem to see that every election is merely a run off of who the corporations are planning to select via Diebold for the new corporate CEO.

They hate us because we do human rights reports on every country in the world EXCEPT the USA and then chastise some other country for human rights abuses when in fact the USA is not only the worst, it is the incubator of war, terrorism and torture.

I guess in a country that sanctioned slavery for nearly 200 years, we should not expect much else. Especially since both Dyncorp and Halliburton have been cited in the sex slave trade and both continue to receive directed contracts from the totalitarian US government.