{"id":50954,"date":"2014-12-15T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=50954"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:27:10","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:27:10","slug":"misery-made-me-a-fiend-latin-america-and-the-torture-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/12\/misery-made-me-a-fiend-latin-america-and-the-torture-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Misery Made Me a Fiend: Latin America and the Torture Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

11 Dec 2014 – <\/em>A central player in the Bush-Cheney\u2019s torture program is Jose A. Rodriguez, who, according<\/a> to The New York Times<\/em>, was then the head of the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center during the worst of the barbarity\u2014the rectal hummus flushes, drills, dogs, broken limbs, sexual humiliation and assault, sleep deprivation, intense heat, intense cold, blood thinners, beatings and deaths from exposure. When agents in the field began sending e-mails to voice dismay, Rodriguez told them to shut up: \u201cStrongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-\u00e0-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic (email or cable traffic).\u201d \u201cSuch language is not helpful,\u201d he said. Rodriguez was involved in an earlier scandal regarding Bush-Cheney torture, fingered<\/a> for destroying \u201cvideotapes recording the interrogations of top al Qaeda operatives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico and joined the CIA in 1976. Nineteen seventy-six was a key year in the evolution of the national security state\u2014the high point of congressional efforts to rein in the imperial presidency (Gerald Ford was forced to sign<\/a> his \u201cno assassinations of foreign leaders\u2019 pledge that year) and the start of the New Right\u2019s efforts to build a workaround those regulations (i.e., Iran\/Contra). Rodriguez spent most of his career in Latin America, bridging the Cold War and the war on drugs. His background is sketchy\u2014there\u2019s not too much public information on what he was doing where in Latin America and his autobiography is vague. According to<\/a> the The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Rodriguez \u201cis a product of what one former agency colleague called \u2018the rough and tumble\u2019 Latin American division, which was responsible for thwarting Russian aggression in that part of the world. That strategy eventually evolved into the Iran\/Contra scandal.\u201d The Latin American Division was thick<\/a> into Iran\/Contra, and Rodriguez was involved in Panama when Noriega was in charge, that is, at the height of the scandal. He was in Mexico in 1990, where he served as CIA station chief at the beginning of that country\u2019s descent into narco-NAFTA madness.<\/p>\n

After 9\/11, he was tapped by the CIA to manage its torture program\u2014even though he didn\u2019t speak Arabic and had no experience in the Middle East<\/a>. He apparently had other talents. Mark Mazzetti in the Times <\/em>writes<\/a> that he \u201cwon praise while in the job for an aggressive strategy to capture, detain and interrogate leaders of Al Qaeda.\u201d Rodriguez\u2019s promotion to a top slot in Washington\u2019s torture program is a pretty stark example of Latin America\u2019s serving as \u201cempire\u2019s workshop<\/a>.\u201d Elsewhere, I\u2019ve given an overview<\/a> of the torture techniques the United States helped work out in Latin America during the Cold War (as have others, including Patrice McSherry here<\/a>). These included waterboarding, a technique called, in Spanish, \u201cel submarino<\/a>.\u201d (After a 1992 investigation, the Pentagon destroyed copies of the seven infamous<\/a> torture instruction manuals it had used to train Latin American allies; Marcy Wheeler, though, writes<\/a> that Dick Cheney and his legal counsel, David Addington \u201csaved the only known copies\u201d for their personal files).<\/p>\n

More recently, though, with the return of the Latin American left to political power, the region has refused<\/a> to participate in Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld\u2019s global torture archipelago, that is, its extraordinary rendition program, which implicated every region of the globe, even peace-loving Scandinavia, except South America.<\/p>\n

As for Rodriguez, after he retired from the CIA he went private<\/a>, walking through that \u201crevolving door<\/a>\u201d that connects Langley to any one of those Virginia-based private security companies (Blackwater apparently recruited him, but he chose another firm). In any case, he is back in the public eye, writing one<\/a> op-ed after another defending torture. \u201cI know it worked,\u201d he insists<\/a>, contrary to critics who say that forced rectal flushing garnered no serviceable intelligence. He\u2019s joined other former CIA officials to set up a webpage<\/a> to push back on criticism: CIASavedLives.com.<\/p>\n

Considering Rodriguez\u2019s background in Latin America, and reading about the techniques<\/a> he helped take global after 9\/11, revisiting those awful<\/a> photographs, and learning of the role<\/a> doctors played in carrying out the torture, I think of the epigraph that I used to open Empire\u2019s Workshop<\/em><\/a>, from Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein: <\/em><\/p>\n

I kept my workshop of filthy creation: my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work ear to a conclusion.<\/p>\n

But witnessing the cowardice of those who know torture is a crime against humanity but say we have to move on, and the moral idiocy of those who insist<\/a> we were forced to do it, even as they chant<\/a> we are \u201cawesome,\u201d just \u201cawesome,\u201d I also think of this other line from Shelley, spoken by the creature: \u201cI was benevolent and good\u2014misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The ‘pau-de-arara’ was a preferred form of torture in Brazil, introduced by the CIA in the 60\/70’s Operation Condor. Electric shocks were applied to limbs, genitals, anus. Cigarettes butts put out in body, beatings to unconsciousness.<\/p><\/div>\n

UPDATE\u2014Thursday, Dec. 11, 2:00 pm: <\/strong>Two things: 1. The Senate Report specifically mentions those instructions manuals (and their use in Latin America) that Cheney kept for himself on page 19<\/a>. 2. Brazil\u2019s National Truth Commission just released<\/a> its own report on political terror, which states that more than 300 members of the Brazilian military had received training by the United States in both the \u201ctheory and practice of torture.\u201d Among those they applied their lessons on when they got home was the current president of the country, Dilma Rousseff, who in the 1970s \u201cspent<\/a> three years behind bars, where interrogators repeatedly tortured her with electric shocks to her feet and ears, and forced her into the pau de arara, or parrot\u2019s perch, in which victims are suspended upside down naked, from a stick, with bound wrists and ankles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Dec 2014 – A central player in the Bush-Cheney\u2019s torture program is Jose A. Rodriguez during the worst of the barbarity\u2014the rectal hummus flushes, drills, dogs, broken limbs, sexual humiliation and assault, sleep deprivation, intense heat, intense cold, blood thinners, beatings and deaths from exposure. Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico and joined the CIA in 1976.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}