by Debra Sweet

As 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners call on Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama to release the long-awaited report on torture that the Senate conducted, and the Obama administration debates codifying key aspects of Bush doctrine which allowed torture on foreign soil, it's worthwhile to analyze why this has continued to be such a unsolvable problem for the rulers of the U.S.

Nobel Peace Prize winners — as we've seen lately, especially — aren't the standard of justice in the world, but the standards of one in particular are an outrage. The Obama administration is micro-managing the release of the Senate's report on CIA torture, already delayed for years, watered down and admittedly tampered with by CIA spying.  Obama doesn't want the report out before the November 4 election.  In that he's in sync with the most rabid pro-torturers from the Bush regime.

But this is not about history only, as important as setting the record straight is. Men are being tortured in Guantanamo now by indefinite detention and forced-feeding. Governments set up and bought by the U.S. in Afghanistan & Iraq are torturing with impunity in the very prisons built by the U.S. and CIA to originate the torture.

When — or if — the Senate CIA torture report becomes public, we can't let that moment go by without mass protest.

From Rob Crawford's piece The CIA, the President, and the Senate’s Torture Report, September 26:

“Many military, security and political elites recognize that U.S. torture, approved at the highest levels of government, created an unsurpassed crisis of legitimacy for the country.  Their foremost objective is to restore that legitimacy.

“Arguably, this is the principal reason why Obama issued his executive order rejecting torture in 2009 (I believe that McCain would have likely done the same). It is why the new president counseled amnesia about torture and why he refused to initiate criminal investigations or even a commission of inquiry.  It is why he has fallen mostly silent about the issue of torture.  The U.S. relies on an image that it conducts its wars humanely and in accordance with international law. Brutality and illegality belong to the enemy.  Occasionally, however, the brutal and unlawful exercise of state violence becomes public knowledge.  The inhumanity of violence “shocks the conscience.”  Legitimacy crises follow.  For the U.S., the Abu Ghraib photos were a disaster but the disaster kept growing with a cascade of revelations that included documentation of torture of prisoners in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and CIA kidnapping, renditions, and torture in secret prisons.  The reverberations are still being felt.”

Above, World Can't Wait activists in Chicago protesting on October 22 against mass incarceration, police brutality, torture and Guantanamo.

Stop Mass Incarceration Calls “Wear Orange” on Thursday October 30, as a continuation of the October 2014 "Month of Resistance" to mass incarceration, police terror, repression, and criminalization of a generation.  A good time to get out those orange jumpsuits... and remember they stand for opposing US torture around the world.