CIA torture, & US Police brutality - article by David Bromwich

[Mal7]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n01/david-bromwich/working-the-dark-side ["Working the Dark Side" by David Bromwich. London Review of Books, 8 January 2015]

This article is a year old. It is principally about the Senate Select Committee report, released in December 2014, on CIA torture in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

I thought it interesting that the article makes a link between how terrorists were treated, and police brutality and killings (specifically the killing of Eric Garner). In both cases, people are treated as being without rights, as people who it is has become standard procedure to treat brutally or even kill, even when they may turn out to be have been innocent. A nation that can treat suspected "terrorists" without any respect for humane treatment, may easily become one that can treat its own citizens the same way.

Cheney worked hard to eradicate from the minds of Americans the idea that there can be such a thing as a ‘suspect’. Due process of law rests on the acknowledged possibility that a suspect may be innocent; but, for Cheney, a person interrogated on suspicion of terrorism is a terrorist. To elaborate a view beyond that point, as he sees it, only involves government in a wasteful tangle of doubts.

The evil consists in the ability to dominate other persons without check, the ability to do with them what you will, armed with assurance of impunity. Such a custom of acquittal or habit of non-accountability may have broad consequences in the treatment by the state of its own people – the treatment, for example, of a large black man on the streets of New York by a huddle of police who are determined to subdue him.

The article also mentions the US "Continuity of Government" exercises, in which key military and political personnel are huddled away into a safe bunker. Interestingly, both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney continued to be included in these exercises even when they no longer held official government positions.