CIA torture reveals dark side of US

The US Senate Intelligence Committee has released a 535-page report on the torture of terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency. The report which took two years to prepare is merely the executive summary and conclusion of the committee's 6,300-page document. But even the declassified short version is enough to expose the CIA's brutality on the pretext of fighting the "war on terror". Shocking as it is, the report says 119 suspects, not 98 as the CIA long claimed, were at the receiving end of the agency's brutal treatment. The agency brutalized them in its prisons clandestinely set up around the world after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.

There is no dispute that the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 or other such attacks should be brought to justice. The international community even approved the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and many countries collaborated to hunt the terrorists who planned and executed the 9/11 attacks. In fact, it is necessary to take measures to prevent similar attacks.

But it is essential to interrogate imprisoned terrorists or detained suspects in accordance with the laws. It is on this front that the US government has seriously and persistently violated the laws, both domestic and international.

In 2002, the George W. Bush administration approved the brutal interrogation methods, termed enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, which can be compared with some of the methods used by the Gestapo. The CIA has been systematically attempting to cover its brutality from the president, the Capitol and the public. But even when former US president George Bush was informed of the truth in 2006, he made no effort to stop the rampant violation of human rights universally accorded to prisoners.

The US has made a habit of preaching human rights to the rest of the world, but its own human rights record has been controversial and complicated, to say the least. It has a long record of violating Native Americans' rights and giving legal sanction to slavery and racial segregation. Despite the abolition of segregation following the mid-1950s-to-late-1960s civil rights movement, the continued killing of black people by white police officers reveals its ongoing problem with social justice.