Senate Torture Report:
Crimes Against Humanity, Complicity, and the Need for Justice
December 10, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The release of the Senate report on CIA torture, detailing the most sadistic, inhuman, and systematic torture imaginable by agents of the United States government poses profound moral and political challenges to everyone with a shred of conscience.
In 2009, in the midst of revelations of the orgy of torture that took place under the Bush Regime, we wrote:
Let’s make it plain: torture is, literally and in essence, a crime against humanity. Like rape, it is a systematic attempt to violently degrade people and rob them of their very humanity. Any government which not only tolerates such things but which, from its highest offices, justifies and insists on them as "instruments of policy"…any government which does not, once this has been exposed, prosecute the perpetrators but instead provides them in advance with immunity...reveals itself as a system that requires such crimes, and such criminals, for its functioning. Any people that does not resist such crimes, and demand prosecution of the torturers and, even more so, those who formulated the policy at the highest levels, reveals themselves to be complicit in those crimes. And in passively allowing the humanity of others to be degraded and attacked, they lose their own.
And we posed:
And on the other hand, if people DO resist, if they DO demand that the criminals be prosecuted and wage a serious political struggle to make that happen, it can be the beginning of a struggle that can, among other things, lead to the beginnings and possibility of real justice—and not some phony, feel-good, "let’s-forget-about-the-past-and-move-on" so-called redemption and/or "reconciliation" that only ultimately enables still more, and still worse, crimes by the bloody criminal enterprise known as America.
(read the entire article, “The Torture Memos … And the Need for Justice”)
We will have more to say on what is revealed by the release of Senate Torture Report, but the stakes, and challenge posed in 2009 are all the more real and urgent today.
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.