Torture and humiliation enshrined in US history: Activist

Torture and humiliation are enshrined in the United States’ history, according to an American activist and radio host in California.

Rodney Martin, the chairman of the All Nationalist Association and former US congressional staffer, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Friday.

He was commenting on reports which say that human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

“The United States has a long history of torture and experimentation not only on what they consider enemy combatants – they use the term consider enemy combatants very loosely – but also on their own; the United States has engaged in experimentation on its own citizenry,” Martin said.
“There’re notorious cases where the United States has experimented on African Americans by injecting them with syphilis and other venereal diseases, also experimented on the mentally ill, engaging in medical experimentation,” he added.

“The fact is that experimenting by refining torture methods as macabre as that is, is not new to the United States,” he stated.

“The United States has done this for many years, almost enshrined in their history, when the United States occupied the Philippines, when they took it over from Spain, they engaged in horrific torture and humiliation against the very small Muslim minority in one of the southern Philippine island, and that was done by General [John] Pershing – he otherwise is considered a great hero, but he actually engaged him with very honorific torture and humiliation and tactics,” Martin stated.

“So both torture and humiliation are enshrined in United States policy,” he underlined.
“In the aftermath the World War II, the United States and the British, for that matter, tortured German and Japanese POWs to obtain confessions and other evidence which were later used in Tokyo and Nuremberg war crimes trials,” he pointed out.

“And that’s the great conundrum that the United States faces in these military tribunals. They are creating show-trials, because none of the evidence, confessions, statements they have obtained could ever be used in a real court of law in the United States or any place else, because all of the information and statements, confessions have all been received by way in some of the most heinous torture,” the analyst observed.