Klein vs Ivins on US Torture

Naomi Klein [8 December 2005] has noticed that liberals, like Molly Ivins [13 November 2005], were echoing Senator McCain's talking point--that 'never before' has the United States government been involved in torture:

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing recently in Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as [Alfred] McCoy writes [in A Question of Torture], "its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more," a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.

Torture has been part of American foreign policy for at least five decades. Please read Ms. Klein's article for more details.

What's new is the openess with which torture is discussed and defended by the Bush administration. My prediction: as long as the United States pursues empire, the United States will continue to use torture--not because torture has any effectiveness as an interrogation technique, but because of its effectiveness as a terror technique. Only when the United States has an explicitly anti-imperialist foreign policy, will American support for torture stop.

The enslaving nature of sin is apparent in the powers of evil, which work through both individuals and groups and in the entire created order. These powers, principalities, and elemental spirits of the universe often hold people captive and work through political, economic, social, and even religious systems to turn people away from justice and righteousness. But thanks be to God, who has not allowed the powers to reign supreme over creation or left humanity without hope.
--from Article 7, Sin
Confesion of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, 1995.