CIA Was Using Torture Long Before Abu Ghraib:

"No one paid any attention when, in early 2002, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group was the only NGO to report on the use of torture and detention without trial in US military bases in the Balkans...In Bosnia in early 2002, six Algerian men who had been detained by the Bosnian authorities were released without charge. The Americans kidnapped them on the spot, and transported them to Guantanamo Bay, where they presumably still remain.

"Nor was the abuse confined to the Balkans. Remember Mike Span? He was the CIA operative who was torn to pieces in a prison riot at Qala-i-Janghi in Afghanistan in November 2001. He was given a hero's funeral in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, attended by President Bush, because he was the first American to die in Afghanistan. But the riot had been started by Span, who was caught on camera threatening to kill a prisoner if he did not answer his questions. Span did eventually shoot dead two or three prisoners, according to witnesses, but it is not clear whether they had started to riot by then. When they did, American warplanes were called in and they bombed some 400 prisoners to death.

"Bush has said that America incarnates liberty, that “liberty is Heaven’s plan for humanity” and that America’s enemies are the enemies of liberty. The logical corollary of this is that they are the enemies of humanity and, as such, not human themselves. With the President of the United States de-humanizing his country’s enemies in this overt way, is it any wonder that Lyndie England treated her captives like dogs?"