The US does torture: Bagram for one place...

Face It: With Bagram, the United States Does Torture
May 13, 2010 at 9:08AM by Charles P. Pierce

Bagram's been a dirty little secret for a while now. The concentration for the most part has been on Guantánamo. It's closer to the U.S. mainland, and it's some place with which some of us have been conversant since even before JFK and Khrushchev started playing chicken in the Caribbean, causing those of us attending Catholic school within six miles of a primary target to dive under our desks every three minutes during October of 1962, and it became even more famous as the setting for Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men, which, among its other charms, was a candy-assed extended liberal legal brief in defense of William Calley — or, at least, in defense of how William Calleys get made. In the witchery of the past decade, Gitmo always has been our familiar. Bagram is the dark place over the horizon.

If the BBC's reporting this week is correct, then the U.S. military — and, by extension, the U.S. government — has been caught lying once again as to what is being done to other human beings in the name of the people of the United States. And it's becoming very plain that we have no real objection not only to the lying, but to the various exercises in inhumanity that the lying is meant to protect.

The president of the United States has demonstrated very little real interest in revealing what his predecessors were about, and even less interest in punishing them for their crimes, and he has suffered no perceivable political damage as a result. We are told now, by him, and by his underlings, that the United States no longer tortures, but there is no real reason any more to trust the United States government on this score, no matter who may be temporarily in charge of it. We are a constitutional, self-governing republic that has decided to torture. Period. It would be good if we could look ourselves in the face and admit it to ourselves. At the very least, we could give ourselves a break from our own tattered sanctimony.

EARLIER: McChrystal's Record and the Nuances of Interrogation
JOHN H. RICHARDSON: Welcome to the Middle Ground on Torture
THOMAS P.M. BARNETT: Why Nothing Came of the Torture Probe
IN-DEPTH: My Father, the Guantánamo Defense Attorney
VIDEO: Meet the Man Behind A Few Good Men
Photo Credit: AFP via Getty

Read more: World Politics Blog (See more from No More Gitmos, International Justice Network, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Jeremy Scahill, and more to come here)

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