Saturday, March 28, 2015

Double standards on torture

McClatchy recently published a story about a suspected Pinochet-era torturer who had been working for the US government as recently as 2014. Clearly, the angle being pushed is that Americans should be outraged that a foreigner who might have been a torturer 40 years ago in Chile was working for the US government.

If that's the case, McClatchy might be interested in some more recent history. Not so long ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that documents torture conducted by Americans and our foreign agents during the ongoing war on terror. Other than Lyndie England (of Abu Ghraib dog leash fame) and her ex-fiance, no one is in jail. A few people higher up the chain were demoted, but didn't lose their jobs. The few that did lose their jobs (Dick Cheney and John Woo for example), only lost them due to the change in administrations.

It seems safe to say that there are hundreds of people currently working in the US government that were complicit in torture. Not just the torturers themselves, but the officials who sanctioned it, the medical staff that consulted, and everyone else that tried to keep it a secret. Maybe McClatchy can get to work on that story, unless torture is only an issue when foreigners do it.

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