Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

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During the 1980s, the CIA gave indispensable support to the infamous Battalion 316, which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of citizens, using shock and suffocation devices for interrogation, amongst other techniques. The CIA supplied torture equipment, torture manuals, and in both Honduras and the US taught battalion members methods of psychological and physical torture. On at least one occasion, a CIA officer took part in interrogating a torture victim. The Agency also funded Argentine counter-insurgency experts to provide further training for the Hondurans. At the time, Argentina was famous for its Dirty War, an appalling record of torture, baby kidnappings and disappearances. Argentine and CIA instructors worked side by side training Battalion 316. US support for the battalion continued even after its director, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, told the US ambassador that he intended to use the Argentine methods of eliminating subversives. In 1983, the Reagan administration awarded Alvarez the Legion of Merit for encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras. At the same time, the administration was misleading Congress and the American public by denying or minimizing the battalions atrocities.26

Panama

During the US occupation of Panama following its invasion of December 1989, some American soldiers engaged in torture of soldiers of the Panama Defense Forces. In one case, a metal cable was inserted into an open wound, producing intense pain. In another reported case, a PDF soldier was hung up by one arm on which he already had an injury to the elbow, which had been stitched up,27

At home

For those readers who have difficulty believing that American government civilian and military personnel could be closely involved in the torture of foreigners, it is suggested that they consider what these Americans have done to other Americans.

At the US Navys schools in San Diego and Maine during the 1960s and 1970s, students were supposedly learning about methods of survival, evasion, resistance and escape which they could use if they were ever a prisoner of war. There was in the course something of survival in a desert, where students were forced to eat lizards, but the naval officers and cadets were also subjected to beatings, jarring judo flips, tiger cages - hooded and placed in a 16-cubic-foot box for 22 hours with a coffee can for their excrement-and a torture device called the water board : the subject strapped to an inclined board, head downward, a towel placed over his face, and cold water poured over the towel; he would choke, gag, retch and gurgle as he experienced the sensation of drowning.

A former student, Navy pilot Lt. Wendell Richard Young, claimed that his back was broken during the course and that students were tortured into spitting, urinating and defecating on the American flag, masturbating before guards, and, on one occasion, engaging in sex with an instructor.28



In 1992, a civilian oversight board revealed that over a 13-year period (1973-1986), Chicago police officers and commanders engaged in systematic torture and abuse of suspects, including electric shock to penises, testicles and other areas; beatings, suffocation (plastic bags secured over the heads, stopping the flow of oxygen; some subjects passed out, and when they recovered, the bag was placed over their head again); guns stuck in prisoners mouths and triggers pulled; prisoners hung from hooks by handcuffs attached to their wrists and beaten on the bottoms of their feet and on their testicles; as well as much psychological torture. Some were released after being tortured and were never charged. More than 40 cases were collected. According to one of their attorneys, All of the victims were black or Latino, so far as weve seen, and the people who were doing the torturing were white officers. 29

A Human Rights Watch investigation of more than 20 US prisons and jails in New York, California, Florida and Tennessee, and a close look at prison litigation for a ten-year period, showed extensive abuses of the U.N.s minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners...amounting to torture ...a handcuffed prisoner forced into a tub of 145-degree water...prisoners dying after receiving repeated jolts of electricity from stun guns or stun belts (50,000 volt shock for 8 seconds)...prisoners held in outdoor cages, rain or shine...prisoners held in total isolation from other human beings for long periods of time with sensory deprivation... 30

Amnesty International has released reports such as Torture, I11 Treatment and Excessive Force by Police in Los Angeles, California (1992), and Police Brutality and Excessive Force in the New York City Police Department (1996), as well as later reports dealing with Chicago and other cities. Amnesty states that US police forces have been guilty of violating international human rights standards through a pattern of unchecked excessive force amounting to torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment . 31

Lest any of the above give the impression that the United States government is not disturbed by the practice of torture, it should be pointed out that Congress passed a bill in 1996 allowing, for the first time, an American citizen to sue a foreign government in a US court for having been tortured in the foreign country. There was one small limitation imposed, however. The only countries that can be sued under this law are Washingtons officially-designated enemies (ODE), those categorized as terrorist states .32

For other states, the situation may be like the case in the early 1990s of Scott Nelson, an American who sued Saudi Arabia in a US court for torture. A Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that he had a right to sue, but the State Department helped the Saudis to get the case reversed in the Supreme Court. 33

CHAPTER 6 : The Unsavories



During the 1980s, there were a number of disclosures of past and present CIA involvement with torturers, death-squaders, drug traffickers and other types not fit for American schoolbooks. At some unrecorded moment, a government spinhead came up with the term unsavory persons , implying that the government was as much repulsed by these types as any decent American citizen ought to be.

The media obediently picked up on it. With each new revelation of the CIAs connection to human rights violations in the company of some despicable people abroad, who were on the Agency payroll, we were told-and told officially-that the CIA had no choice but to associate with unsavory persons if it wished to obtain certain important information in foreign countries; information, of course, vital to our national security . A new whitewash cliche had been born, which is still very much alive.

Even when the media is critical of the CIA for working with unsavories, theres no indication that the relationship was ever anything more than paying for information while holding ones nose.

But it should be clearly understood that these unsavories have not been simply informants.

To the CIA and the US military these men are Americas allies on the same side of a civil conflict.

US propaganda insists that the side these men are fighting on is the side of freedom and democracy.

We champion their cause, for it is our cause as well.

We select certain of them to attend American military schools and we bestow graduation certificates upon them.

We wine and dine them in the US, we give them gifts, we set them up with prostitutes. We train them and give them their weapons and uniforms.

We teach them methods of bomb-making, methods of assassina-tion and methods of interrogation (read torture).

We provide them with information about individuals from the CIAs mammoth international databases. Some of these individuals then wind up tortured and/or murdered.

We cover up their atrocities.

We facilitate and cover up their drug trafficking.



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