Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture -- from Latin America to Iraq

By Greg Grandin, Tomdispatch.com. Posted December 13, 2007.

This introduction is by Tom Englehardt, editor of TomDispatch.

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, reporter Siobhan Gorman offered a striking little portrait of Jose A. Rodriguez, who, in 2005, as chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, ordered the destruction of those "hundreds of hours" of CIA videotapes of the…

Now, what do we want to call it? Gorman refers to "extreme techniques" of interrogation (putting the two words in quotes), then repeats the phrase a second time later in the piece without the quotes: "… [Rodriguez] took a careful approach to controversial practices such as renditions -- sending detainees to countries that use more extreme interrogation methods…"). In this mini-portrait of Rodriguez, as painted by his colleagues, and of the disappeared videos, the word "torture" is never used, but don't blame Gorman. As Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher pointed out recently, she's hardly alone.

"One Associated Press article referred simply to 'interrogation' on the tapes, at one point putting 'enhanced interrogation' in quotes. Another AP article called it 'harsh interrogation.' Mark Mazzeti in The New York Times used 'severe interrogation methods.' Eric Lichtblau in the same paper chose the same phrase. David Johnston, in a Saturday article for [the] paper's Web site, referred to 'aggressive interrogations' and 'coercive techniques.' Reuters, in its lead, relied on 'severe interrogation techniques.' Dan Eggen and Joby Warrick in The Washington Post on Saturday opted for 'harsh interrogation tactics.'"

Whatever is on those tapes, we've come a long way, baby, since, in Medieval Times in Europe, waterboarding was crudely known as "the water torture."

In any case, Rodriguez, according to his colleagues, turns out to be for the little guy -- or the little torturer, anyway. He supposedly destroyed those videos so that "lower-level officers would[n't] take the fall" for the high-level ones who dished out the orders. But there's a slight catch in the text. What if some higher-level ones might have been in danger of taking the fall as well?

Here's Gorman's money passage, just dropped into the middle of the piece without further explanation or discussion: "One former official said interrogators' faces were visible on at least one video, as were those of more senior officers who happened to be visiting." Happened? Visiting? Keep in mind that we're talking about CIA officials in a torture chamber, not tourists at a local landmark.

Then again, for background, Gorman offers this on Rodriguez: He is, she writes, "a product of what one former agency colleague called 'the rough-and-tumble' Latin American division" of the CIA from the 1980s. "Rough and tumble"? You won't find out what that means from her column, but just keep reading this post. In our period, men like Rodriguez, under the leadership of George W. Bush, have essentially globalized those "rough and tumble" methods of the CIA's Latin American division. As Greg Grandin -- whose superb book, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, nails those "rough-and-tumble" years -- points out, they have turned the "unholy trinity" that the U.S. developed in Latin America into a global operation. Tom

The Unholy Trinity

Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture -- from Latin America to Iraq
By Greg Grandin

The world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene's 1958 novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the untorturable. "There are people," Segura explained, "who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea."

Then -- so Greene thought -- Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA's deployment of Orwellian "Special Removal Units" to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere and the whisking of these "ghost prisoners" off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term "extraordinary rendition," a hauntingly apt phrase. "To render" means not just to hand over, but to extract the essence of a thing, as well as to hand out a verdict and "give in return or retribution" -- good descriptions of what happens during torture sessions.

See more stories tagged with: war on terror, latin america, dirty wars, iraq, abu ghraib, torture, rendition, empire

Greg Grandin is the author of a number of books, most recently Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. He teaches history at NYU.

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