The US supported torture hasn’t stopped

Ever since the CIA report on the use of torture was released, last year, many Americans as myself have demanded action to end these human rights abuses. Yet many of our legislators have shown their true colors defending the use of torture and the CIA.

From Kansas our own Congressman Mike Pompeo, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, has told KNSS News that releasing the information was "inappropriate" and “folks could get killed." Pompea has been a big supporter of government secrecy, spying on citizens and the use of torture to get what our government wants.

According to The World Can’t Wait Dick Cheney said “I'd do it again in a minute,” on “Meet the Press” December 14. Cheney has been repeating his basic message that the US has to be ready to go to the “dark side” using, “basically, any means necessary to achieve our objectives.”

The WCW also cited Senator Lindsey Graham, who has never met a piece of repressive legislation he couldn't get behind, who said “We have a lot going for us that our enemy doesn’t. We’re actually good people, and they’re bastards,” as an explanation of why he supports everything that was done post-9/11.-សតិវ​ អតុ

Here is some other information I received from The World Can’t Wait:

One of the presistent fallacies about the US torture camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, is that it was a “mistake” of the Bush Regime, a misguided attempt to “keep America safe.” You hear this from Democrat apologists, who for the last six full years, have been in position to close it.

But listen to those who control Congress now, and those who passed the Military Commissions Act in 2006. That orgy of the complete abrogation of rights for people the US identified as enemies in the so-called “global war on terror” was vengeance against any group of people who challenged American supremacy.

Their goal was to have a place where they could openly defy international norms. They crow about it, still, and do not intend to give it up.....

....So this is what the “good” people did:

“The CIA torturers took sadistic and ghoulish delight in inflicting sexually degrading torture on captives. Detainees were frequently stripped naked and forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. The report describes ‘rectal feeding’—forcing material up the rectums of detainees, a form of rape.

Detainees were subjected to constant and viciously realistic death threats. They were placed in tubs of ice for extended times. One detainee was chained partially nude to a concrete floor and died of hypothermia. Prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation for up to a week, driven to ‘hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.’”

We also learned from the Senate's report on torture last month that, though publicly and privately there is intense struggle over letting out the truth about Guantanamo, the black sites, rendition, and torture under Bush, the Democatic leadership in Congress was fully briefed at the time, and kept quiet.

Those in authority who people expected to act to stop these outrages have not done so. Does that mean we leave it alone? NO, it does not. Protest over the next week should bring out people who are determined to stop these depraved crimes.

The torture report — redacted as it was — has inspired renewed focus on the crimes of the Bush Regime. Democracy Now! reported last month:

“The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has accused former Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of war crimes, and called for an immediate investigation by a German prosecutor. The move follows the release of a Senate report on CIA torture which includes the case of a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was captured by CIA agents in 2004 due to mistaken identity and tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan.”

Torture lawyer John Yoo, defender of almost every single reactionary US position, was given an endowed chair at UC Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School in 2014.

Right now, there are renewed discussions on how to get him disbarred and investigated. Martin Garbus, the distinguished First Amendment attorney, wrote that the memos written by Yoo and Jay Bybee in 2002 providing legal justification for torture were “not used to interpret the law — they were intentionally written to disregard the law.”

Torture is tops with them—Mike Pompeo, Dick Cheney, Lindsey Graham.