MK Ultra and Other Good Times

First, let me say that Morris Davis, a former prosecutor for the "military tribunals" at Guantanamo, has behaved in the most honorable manner his situation and his position allowed, and he should be lauded for it. You can construct elaborate arguments that he shouldn't have been on that damned rock participating in those damnable courts to begin with, and those arguments frankly have merit, but those are small-minded quarrels, for when the man was called upon to act unforgivably, he refused. A lifetime of service to a poor cause can sometimes be forgiven for a single, well-timed "No." I'm inclined to say that Colonel Davis represents such a case.

That said, the notion that the United States was universally believed to not "do stuff like that," by which we mean torture and abuse our prisoners, prior to the current incarnation of the Terror War, is a well-enforced American fantasy, held principally within our own borders. In particular, the practice of contracting out our brutality to third-party proxies is just as old as America itself. The notion that "America doesn't torture" or doesn't support torture would surprise many tens of millions of Latin Americans, say, or Indonesians, or Iraqis for that matter, whose memories actually extend to the days when we were providing Saddam Hussein with hit lists of leftist, "communist" undesirables. Our CIA, in particular, has throughout its many decades of abject failure been especially fond of torture. During the headier midcentury days, they kept unwitting, American test subjects dosed on LSD for weeks straight. One fellow who they dosed without knowledge or consent killed himself by jumping out a window, evidently afraid that he had gone mad. For America to foreswear torture would be revolutionary, not restorative.