But ... the United States does not torture ...
TAOS, NEW MEXICO — Keith McHenry notes that the United States Congress has recently voted to allow torture. Keith knows that torture has been used in the U.S. for a long time.
" I thought I was going to die, but I didn't, so I'm writing my memoirs."
Keith McHenry has fibromyalgia. Keith's malady comes from being tortured by the CIA.
"It was intense," says Keith.
He now runs the Taos Peace House. Keith has been a foot soldier for the peace movement for over three decades. It began as an art student in Boston where he and friends fed the needy.
He also ran an ad agency in Boston. His clients were the Boston Red Sox, Boston Patriots, Boston Celtics.
"It's wild, huh?" he says.
Keith is the co-founder of the worldwide organization Food Not Bombs. It's growing all the time. There are even fifty chapters in Russia.
In the '90s he received forty-seven felony charges in San Francisco for feeding the hungry. He was framed with three other convictions and was the first white person to face the three strikes life in prison law. He spent months in prison going through trial on those charges and was on Amnesty International's victims list.
Keith says he was tortured in the San Francisco county jail by CIA agent Tom Gerard on four separate occasions, over a period of years. He know the name because he later went to court to sue, but did not win.
He says the torturers hung him up by his arms, and stuck him inside a little cage, thus the pain he suffers today. He didn't talk about the torture, not publicly, until after Abu Ghraib.
Keith was also the one responsible for the WTO protests in Seattle. In the late '90s he took a tour of cities around the country talking about the WTO and the coming dominance of corporations over individuals.
"We said the minute the WTO announces a meeting in North America, we're going to start planning."
He also started Indymedia, coming out of the Seattle days. He also ran Leonard Peltier's defense committee, in Lawrence, Kansas, for three years.
Keith says that after Clinton failed to pardon Peltier, Leonard got depressed and fired everybody. I say that I just don't understand why Clinton didn't grant the pardon. Keith says he thinks it was because "they," the FBI, CIA — they — threatened to kill Clinton if he did.
"That's the way this country works," Keith says.
