This is pretty comedic: The Canadian government put out a list of countries that practice torture, which includes Israel and the US along with China and Iran. The Americans and the Israelis objected -- despite the absolutely undeniable fact that both the US and Israel do most certainly and without any question whatsoever practice legalized torture--and so the Canadian government has -- yet again -- buckled to US pressure and removed the US (and I assume also Israel) as a list of countries that practice torture. Heck if Canada won't protect its own citizens who are falsely charged with terrorism from being "renditioned" to Syria where they're savagely tortured, why should they bother making such a list at all?
This is of course so counter-factual as to be funny. There is in fact a long, long history of the use of torture by US forces, which predates Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In fact, the US trained the secret police of quite a few tin-pot dictators around the world in the use of torture. 'Hidden Terrors,' a well-documented book on U.S. police training efforts in Latin America by former New York Times Saigon bureau chief A.J. Langguth, provided a searing indictment of these programs and the men who ran them. A more recent contribution to the study of the use of torture in democracies is by Darius Rejali.
And one of the tin-pot dictators who benefitted from this was of course the Shah of Iran:
The respected American journalist, William Worthy, visiting Iran, wrote in his journal on February 10, 1980: Two months ago, Kurt Waldheim was badly shaken when introduced in Tehran to five-year-old Abolfazi Safayi, who at the age of three, had been tortured by SAVAK in the presence of his father, to make the father reveal who had given him a taperecording of a Khomeini speech. Both the boy's arms were cut off. The father still wouldn't talk. Two of Abolfazi's brothers, one six months old, were then tortured to death in the father's presence. He still refused to talk.On January 9, 1979, the New York Times reported: "Jesse J. Leaf . . . had been chief CIA analyst on Iran before resigning from the agency in 1973. . . . Mr. Leaf said a senior CIA official was involved in instructing officials in SAVAK on torture techniques. . . . The CIA torture seminars, Mr. Leaf said, 'were based on German torture techniques from World War II. . . . I know that the torture rooms were toured (by Americans) and it was all paid for by the USA'."
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