By then the American people will be as corrupted as the foreign "leaders." In his review of The United States And Torture, edited by Marjorie Cohn (New York University Press, 2011) in the Fall 2012 Independent Review, Anthony Gregory writes:
"In Reagan's America, a common theme in Cold War rhetoric was that the Soviets tortured people and detained them without cause, extracted phony confessions through cruel violence, and did the unspeakable to detainees who were helpless against the full, heartless weight of the Communist state. As much as any other evil, torture differentiated the bad guys, the Commies, from the good guys, the American people and their government. However imperfect the U.S. system might be, it had civilized standards that the enemy rejected."
By 2005, a year after torture photos from Abu Ghraib were leaked, polls of Americans showed that 38% had succumbed to the propaganda that torture was justified in some circumstances. After four more years of neoconservative advocacy of torture, an Associated Press poll reported in 2009 that 52% of Americans approved of torture.
Torture apparently was an instrument of US cold war policy. Torture was taught to Latin American militaries by the US School of the Americas, which operated in Panama and subsequently at Fort Benning, Georgia. However, this was a clandestine operation. It awaited the neoconservative Bush regime for US Department of Justice (sic) attorneys, graduates of the best law schools, to write legal memos justifying torture despite US statutory and international laws prohibiting torture, and for both the president and vice president of the United States to openly acknowledge and justify torture. Some of the criminals who wrote these memos are now teaching in prestigious law schools. One was appointed to the federal judiciary and sits as a judge sentencing others for their offenses.
We can conclude with Anthony Gregory that it is not only foreign political regimes that are corrupted by Washington's evil, but also Americans themselves. "Nothing better demonstrates the moral degeneracy of American political culture than the U.S. torture state."
Washington still masquerades wearing the white hat, and most of the rest of the world is paid to go along with the masquerade.
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