Technologies of Torture, War And Hoaxes Gone Amok

Last month, two parliamentary reports on the involvement of the British intelligence services in torture and rendition were released last week. What has been hypothesized by several journalists is now confirmed: that British functionaries--to include soldiers, civil servants and intelligence officers with MI5 and MI6--knew about and participated in a vast array of human rights abuses committed during the capture and interrogation of terrorism suspects. The Guardian's Peter Beaumont writes with great contempt for what has transpired since 2001, "[A]s it is now quite clear, it was all a bloody lie. The answers given to journalists at the Observer over the years, as well as colleagues at The Guardian and those at other news organisations, as they investigated these allegations, were rotten with untruth and evasion." Governments' lying to their citizens about covert wars is hardly new, nor is the pervasive use of kidnapping of terrorism suspects by the CIA to include its many "black sites."