[R-G] U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-langguth3-2009may03,0,6987276.story

 From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
U.S. has a 45-year history of torture
The difference between American involvement in South American  
atrocities in 1964 and 'enhanced interrogation' now is that some  
modern-day officials appear proud of themselves.
By A.J. Langguth

May 3, 2009

As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S.  
agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom  
Daschle.

I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James  
Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign  
against CIA abuses.

At the time, I was researching a book on the United States' role in  
the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle  
arranged for me to inspect the senator's files, and I spent an evening  
reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from  
Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and  
the rest of the continent's Southern Cone.

Despite my past reporting from South Vietnam, I had been naive enough  
to be at first surprised and then appalled by the degree to which our  
country had helped to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.

Our interference, which went on for decades, was not limited to one  
political party. The meddling in Brazil began in earnest during the  
early 1960s under a Democratic administration. At that time,  
Washington's alarm over Cuba was much like the more recent panic after  
9/11. The Kennedy White House was determined to prevent another  
communist regime in the hemisphere, and Robert Kennedy, as attorney  
general, was taking a strong interest in several anti-communist  
approaches, including the Office of Public Safety.

When OPS was launched under President Eisenhower, its mission sounded  
benign enough -- to increase the professionalism of the police of  
Asia, Africa and, particularly, Latin America. But its genial  
director, Byron Engle, was a CIA agent, and his program was part of a  
wider effort to identify receptive recruits among local populations.

Although Engle wanted to avoid having his unit exposed as a CIA front,  
in the public mind the separation was quickly blurred. Dan Mitrione,  
for example, a police advisor murdered by Uruguay's left-wing  
Tupamaros for his role in torture in that country, was widely assumed  
to be a CIA agent.

When Brazil seemed to tilt leftward after President Joao Goulart  
assumed power in 1961, the Kennedy administration grew increasingly  
troubled. Robert Kennedy traveled to Brazil to tell Goulart he should  
dismiss two of his Cabinet members, and the office of Lincoln Gordon,  
John Kennedy's ambassador to Brazil, became the hub for CIA efforts to  
destabilize Goulart's government.

On March 31, 1964, encouraged by U.S. military attache Vernon Walters,  
Brazilian Gen. Humberto Castelo Branco rose up against Goulart. Rather  
than set off a civil war, Goulart chose exile in Montevideo.

Ambassador Gordon returned to a jubilant Washington, where he ran into  
Robert Kennedy, who was still grieving for his brother, assassinated  
the previous November. "Well, he got what was coming to him," Kennedy  
said of Goulart. "Too bad he didn't follow the advice we gave him when  
we were down there."

The Brazilian people did not deserve what they got. The military  
cracked down harshly on labor unions, newspapers and student  
associations. The newly efficient police, drawing on training provided  
by the U.S., began routinely torturing political prisoners and even  
opened a torture school on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to teach  
police sergeants how to inflict the maximum pain without killing their  
victims.

One torture victim was Fernando Gabeira, a young reporter for Jornal  
do Brasil who was recruited by a resistance movement and later  
arrested for his role in the 1969 kidnapping of Charles Burke Elbrick,  
the U.S. ambassador. (Elbrick was released after four days.) In  
custody, Gabeira later told me, he was tortured with electric shocks  
to his testicles; a fellow prisoner had his testicles nailed to a  
table. Still others were beaten bloody or waterboarded. When Gabeira's  
captors said anything at all, they sometimes boasted about having been  
trained in the United States.

During the first seven years after Castelo Branco's coup, the OPS  
trained 100,000 Brazilian police, including 600 who were brought to  
the United States. Their instruction varied. Some OPS lecturers  
denounced torture as inhumane and ineffectual. Others conveyed a  
different message. Le Van An, a student from the South Vietnamese  
police, later described what his instructors told him: "Despite the  
fact that brutal interrogation is strongly criticized by moralists,"  
they said, "its importance must not be denied if we want to have order  
and security in daily life."

Brazil's political prisoners never doubted that Americans were  
involved in the torture that proliferated in their country. On their  
release, they reported that they frequently had heard English-speaking  
men around them, foreigners who left the room while the actual torture  
took place. As the years passed, those torture victims say, the men  
with American accents became less careful and sometimes stayed on  
during interrogations.

One student dissident, Angela Camargo Seixas, described to me how she  
was beaten and had electric wires inserted into her vagina after her  
arrest. During her interrogations, she found that her hatred was  
directed less toward her countrymen than toward the North Americans.  
She vowed never to forgive the United States for training and  
equipping the Brazilian police.

Flavio Tavares Freitas, a journalist and Christian nationalist, shared  
that sense of outrage. When he had wires jammed in his ears, between  
his teeth and into his anus, he saw that the small gray generator  
producing the shocks had on its side the red, white and blue shield of  
the USAID.

Still another student leader, Jean Marc Von der Weid, told of having  
his penis wrapped in wires and connected to a battery-operated field  
telephone. Von der Weid, who had been in Brazil's marine reserve, said  
he recognized the telephone as one supplied by the United States  
through its military assistance program.

Victims often said that their one moment of hope came when a medical  
doctor appeared in their cell. Now surely the torment would end. Then  
they found that he was only there to guarantee that they could survive  
another round of shocks.

CIA Director Richard Helms once tried to rebut accusations against his  
agency by asserting that the nation must take it on faith that the CIA  
was made up of "honorable men." That was before Sen. Frank Church's  
1975 Senate hearings brought to light CIA behavior that was deeply  
dishonorable.

Before Brazil restored civilian government in 1985, Abourezk had  
managed to shut down a Texas training base notorious for teaching  
subversive techniques, including the making of bombs. When OPS came  
under attack during another flurry of bad publicity, the CIA did not  
fight to save it, and its funding was cut off.

Looking back, what has changed since 1975? A Brazilian truth and  
reconciliation commission was convened, and it documented 339 cases of  
government-sanctioned political assassinations. In 2002, a former  
labor leader and political prisoner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was  
elected president of Brazil. He's serving his second term.

Fernando Gabeira went home to publish a book about kidnapping the  
American ambassador and his ordeal in prison. The book became a  
bestseller throughout Brazil, and Gabeira was elected to the national  
legislature. In an election last October, he came within 1.4  
percentage points of becoming the mayor of Rio de Janeiro.

But in our country, there's been a disheartening development: In 1975,  
U.S. officials still felt they had to deny condoning torture. Now many  
of them seem to be defending torture, even boasting about it.

A.J. Langguth is the author of "Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S.  
Police Operations in Latin America."