Outsourcing Torture
If you are the least bit squeamish, don’t read “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition,” an Open Society Justice Initiative report published by the Open Society Foundations. The OSF was established by philanthropist George Soros, one of the handful of the super rich still guided by a moral compass. Soros was a Hungarian Jewish teenager when Nazi Germany occupied his homeland and is therefore aware of the depravity which can emanate from a society that lays claim to being a high point of human civilization.
After all, the Germans who voted Hitler into power in 1933 were among the world’s most well-educated people, as well as largely being followers of Christian scripture. That so many of them came to equate barbarism with patriotism is a warning sign to those Americans who find assurance in our “values” cloaking our nation’s collective descent into the darker realms. It is an arrogance starkly challenged by the systematic savagery practiced by a widespread network of agents of our government, ostensibly in response to the attacks of 9/11.
But the purpose of the OSF report is not to shock with examples of the most extreme cases from the sinister world of torture into which America sank. It methodically defines the norm in a vast terror operation that the United States has sponsored around the globe.
