Call to Decision

Subject: The Global Torture Archipelago
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:22:54 -0500

The Global Torture Archipelago
Very important regarding police abuse in US and where its origins.

Lieutenant General John (Jeff) Kimmons, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence has directly contradicted what his commander-in-chief has been saying at the White House (about torture). Kimmons declared: "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that. And, moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of
abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't afford to go there." Prisoners by George Packer, The New Yorker, September 18, 2006.

The "war on terror" has promoted a form of collectivism that's not different in principle from that championed by the Soviet Union: Since the State represents the interests of the "collective," individual rights are instantly disposable, and those who abuse the rights of the innocent are above accountability. The policies, practices and assumptions of the new torture regime have become deeply woven into the fabric of our law enforcement culture. On July 8, 2004, Lester Eugene Siler, a small-time drug dealer from Tennessee was beaten, tortured, sexually degraded, and repeatedly threatened with death by a gang of five law enforcement agents (one of them the DARE officer for the local school district) during the space of two hours.

On the pretext of enforcing a warrant for a probation violation, a pack of 5 rogue officers descended on Siler's home and ordered his wife and child to leave. Before she departed, Siler's wife activated a tape recorder that captured about forty minutes of the torture session. For two hours, less than half of which was caught on tape, five grown men took turns beating and taunting a terrified, illiterate, handcuffed man – a convicted drug peddler on probation, yes, but a human being and an American citizen whose rights are still protected by law. Surely it wasn't necessary to beat, abuse, molest and terrorize Silence in order to find a pretext for searching his house. So why did these 5 renegade policemen do so? Because they could. Such is the logic of the new torture state under which we are living. William Norman Grigg, Liberty in Eclipse