I fear that there are many in the United States who feel that the legalisms around torture and its justification by the Bush-Cheney administration written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee was the only period in which the United States engaged in torture. Actually this is entirely mistaken. Actually the tortured legal machinations of John Yoo and Jay Bybee were simply an attempt to create a systematic justification within the legal system that would prevent those who engaged in torture from being prosecuted. Under the Obama administration, the legal fiction was rescinded, with a public declaration of a no torture policy, but the torturers were not held to account, not prosecuted as is required by the legal international treaties that the United States is a signatory to nor were the torturers remanded to an international court to stand trial for torture. This sent a message to all within the United States government that torture was legal.
More importantly, looking back it becomes obvious that the Bush Cheney administration was not the first administration to engage in torture. In fact the United States has engaged in torture through all of the US Presidencies going back to the Johnson era. What is most damning in this look back is the dawning realization that not only is the United States a nation that engages in torture, but the United States is the primary nation that trains other governments in the torture of their citizens. Through the School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) some of the most infamous dictators and engineers of genocide were at one time students of the United states government which trained them and gave them monetary and armed support. They learned at the knees of masters and not one of the criminals who ran this school has ever been charged or brought to justice. We are the torturers.
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