Unlike much of the global coverage of the the torture issue, this article from France’s Liberation sets out to explain how it came to be that officials of the United States, regarded by many people around the world as the the foremost defender of freedom, came to use the very practices U.S. forces have fought and died to prevent.
For France’s Liberation, essayist and historian Tzvetan Todorov writes in part:
“The documents made public by the Obama Administration on April 16 relating to the practice of torture in the prisons run by the CIA, shed new light on one question: What explains the ease with which people working on behalf of the government of the United States were able to accept the practice of torture on their prisoners? … If we want to understand why these brave Americans so readily agreed to become torturers, we hardly need to look to a hatred or ancestral fear of Muslims and Arabs. No, the situation is far more serious. The lesson of these revelations is that any man, if the situation is carefully framed and in obedience to noble principles dictated by the ‘sense of duty,’ by the need to “defend his country,” or moved by the elementary fear for the lives and well-being of his own family, can become a torturer.”
By Tzvetan Todorov*
Translated By McKenzie Zeiss
May 6, 2009
France – Liberation – Original Article (French)
The documents made public by the Obama Administration on April 16 relating to the practice of torture in the prisons run by the CIA, shed new light on one question: What explains the ease with which people working on behalf of the government of the United States were able to accept the practice of torture on their prisoners? The fact of this torture was already well known, but the new documents carry a great deal of information on the manner in which the torture sessions were conducted and perceived by their agents. What is most striking is the discovery of incredibly nit-picking rules, formulated in the manuals of the CIA and followed by the responsible legal officials in government. One would imagine that up to that point, the practice of torture concerned what might be called blunders, the inadvertent exceeding of the norm provoked by the urgency of the moment. We can see from the documents that, to the contrary, it was a question of procedures set down to the minutest detail, to the centimeter and nearly to the second.
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