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August 14, 2012 Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Perfecting Illegality
Her white hair peeked out from under a
brilliant cerulean blue headscarf. Her lips and teeth were stained red
from chewing areca nut and betel leaf, a mild stimulant favored by older
Vietnamese women. She was missing her right eye. She also appeared to
be in danger of floating away had a stiff breeze swept along the
roadside where we were talking. Le Thi Xuan couldn’t have weighed more
than 90 pounds.
But this 77-year-old whose height topped out at four-feet-and-change was a survivor. That now-empty eye-socket took an elbow from an American Marine back in the 1960s. That same day she survived a grenade attack that killed one of her sons and gravely wounded another. Le Thi Xuan also survived torture. When questioned about the guerrilla fighters that the Americans called “Viet Cong,” she told me, “I did not reveal anything, so they kept on beating me. Once they tired of that, they used electricity to torture me.” Le Thi Xuan’s ordeal was no anomaly. Electrical torture by Americans and their South Vietnamese allies was a commonplace of the Vietnam War. The prime method involved the use of hand-cranked field telephones to produce electricity and two wires that were generally affixed to sensitive areas of the anatomy: ears, fingers, nipples, genitals. The use of “water torture” or the “water rag” technique -- what we now know as waterboarding -- was also widespread. Some years ago, investigating a military intelligence unit that had routinely subjected Vietnamese to torture, I got in touch with former Staff Sergeant David Carmon. When Army criminal investigators questioned Carmon in the early 1970s, he admitted using the water rag method on a detainee. “I held the suspect down, placed a cloth over his face, and then poured water over the cloth, thus forcing water into his mouth," he said, according to his sworn statement. Once-classified military documents show that he also admitted using electrical shock on detainees. Decades later, he was still unrepentant. "I am not ashamed of anything I did, and I would most likely conduct myself in the same manner if placed in a Vietnam-type situation again," he told me. American torturers of the post-9/11 era are, as best we can tell, generally no less unrepentant. Until this moment, Americans (other than those who abused her) could have known nothing of Le Thi Xuan’s torture. Similarly, for decades almost no one knew of the rampant use of torture by Carmon’s unit. (The wartime investigation of it was buried in military files in the National Archives and forgotten.) But torture by U.S. military personnel has a long history, going back to the Indian Wars and to the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the last century, and its use has been no accident. As TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy makes clear in his latest piece, there’s a secret post-World War II and post-9/11 history of torture that’s been covered up and covered over -- a bipartisan effort that extends to the present. It’s a sordid story that McCoy has been unraveling for years and brings up to date in his new book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. Knowing it can teach us a lot about America’s covert past, its present, and where the country may be headed in the years to come. Nick Turse Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad |
