THE CIA TORTURE PROGRAM WAS NOT AN ABERRATION

The CIA’s torture program goes way back to the height of the Cold War and was institutionally linked. The argument that it was the work of a few operatives doesn’t cut ice. Today’s “Democracy Now” show of Amy Goodman’s debunks that myth. When the scandal around the torture committed in Abu Ghraib, Iraq broke in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (whose lying habits over the years have been well documented) attributed the actions to a few “bad apples.” That was the same excuse that some CIA defenders used following the release of the recent Senate committee document. However, the fact of the matter is that the intelligence community developed sensory deprivation techniques during the Cold War. And the fact of the matter is that institutions such as the American Psychology Association have been at least informally linked to the torture program. Furthermore, the fact of the matter is that the ten-year delay in the U.S. ratification in 1994 of the U.N. Convention against torture and the reservations that it formulated is another demonstration of Washington’s failure to renounce the use of torture in no uncertain terms. Finally, as the Democracy Now program demonstrates “"Psychological torture is enshrined in U.S. law."
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/12/16/psychological_torture_is_enshrined_in_us