Lulled into believing there exists ‘good evil’ such as torture, or the wanton waging of war under false pretenses, America knows decency no longer, or did it ever?

“Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime” was the title of an article written by an ex Judge Advocate General of the National Guard, Evan Wallach exposing America’s double standard. “To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death,” wrote Wallach in his article published by the Washington Post in 2007.  “The U.S. government…has not only condemned (in the past) the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it,” stated the professor of the ‘law of war’ at New York Law.

Despite this knowledge and after reversing the Bush era practice of warterboarding, the tangled web of atrocities is hard to avoid even for a well-intentioned Obama administration.   Now the White House attempts to stop the release of additional torture photos, and might even be forced by its own party to renege on its promise of shutting down Guantanamo, all in the name of national security.

Torture might have been prosecuted and punished ‘severely’ in the past -Japanese war criminals were executed for trying it on American POWs. In Latin America though, the experience was that many of the military juntas throughout the 20th century freely practiced torture on political dissenters, at the behest and sometimes the active expert support of the U.S.  Whether during the ‘Banana Wars’ in Central America, or in the deterrence of left-wing movements in South America during the ‘Operation Condor’, where CIA and U.S. military advisers and foreign assets such as Chilean Secret Police Chief, oversaw torture practices as per documents declassified in November of 2000 and published by The National Security Archive.

Torturing abroad, whether in the name of the Cold War and now the War on Terror, has some kind of exotic appeal.  It blurs the responsibility of the perpetrators in the twilight of confused jurisdiction; Guantanamo may not be U.S. territory as per the Bush era military commissions, so ensuring impunity and numbing public opinion.

Not publishing torture photos will numb the conscience of Americans, just like the disappearing of thousands of tortured-later murdered dissenters by the military juntas of Latin America emboldened its perpetrators. 

The lack of blood and cadavers turned those disappeared into non-persons, non-existent, those mourning them into a mere nuisance, like the Mothers of ‘Plaza de Mayo’ in Argentina.  Latin America mourns its dead, and also mourns courageous writers such as the late Mario Benedetti who extensively exposed State Crimes throughout the continent. 

Two of Benedetti’s literary works,  a poem entitled “Desaparecidos” and the play “Pedro y el Capitan”, depict the atrocity of ignoring, justifying and trivializing torture.   The tortured disappeared or were kept off limits, as the Uruguayan poet Benedetti wrote: “disappearing as if without blood, as if faceless, and with no reason…”

Moral turpitude remains such whether the crime was perpetrated by an individual or by a state.  No degree of self-delusion will change acts of terrorism perpetrated by a state into heroic acts of defense, that wasn’t the case for the Nazis, neither for Imperial Japan, or the Taliban.  Neither will acts of terrorism by America make it better.