Didn't we all grow up in the US being taught that we fought against tyranny and torture?  That our fathers and grandfathers went to war to prevent this from happening?  It was either all a big lie or we have made a very wrong turn somewhere in the last generation.  I just cannot get my head around what it must take (or lack) for an individual to torture another human being.

Only part of the U.S. believes this.  Others believe that the descriptions of war in the Bible set the standards for today.

that this kind of thing has been going on for years and under different administrations?  

I'm not promoting this idea (because I don't know), but I wonder if anyone knows if outsourcing torture has been a longtime practice?  

Ever read "Hitler's Willing Executioners"? We are all murderers and torturers. But very few of us have had that switch thrown inside of us. Torturers say that they are trained to do it by being tortured themselves.

That is, the US armed and supported "irregular" forces such as the contras fighting against the populist government of Nicaragua. These people were trained (yes, trained by the CIA) to torture and kill educators and health workers in the countryside so as to destroy the benefits the Sandinistas were bringing to the peasants. A friend of mine found the "comic book" described here used to train the proxy US forces.

And yes, this makes me afraid. What they will do through proxies, they will do here if they feel their hold on power slipping. I have actually been impressed and heartened by the number of brave professionals in the military, the JAG offices, various policy departments, who have been willing to expose the ongoing destruction of the rule of law under our current leaders.

is the name of the CIA program from the 60s, 70s, 80s - we've always had this double standard, one nice lovely set of "ideals" that we use to make ourselves feel smugly better than all those third world dictators and people in the old days, and then the real set of ideals that we lived by, the Good Germans among us (which is most of us) turning a blind eye to the fact that we were training and paying for those torturing dictators, so long as they claimed to be "supporting democracy."

Do you know about the CIA's involvement in Greece? In Indonesia? In Iran? Read, also, about SAVIK - the Shah's secret police were just as bad as the KGB. Why do you think we were hated and there was a revolution there? Because they're irrational Arabs?

Google and read up on what we have been tolerating all these years. Also, read about Emma Goldman being beaten and molested in jail, after McKinley was assassinated and this was used as a crackdown on US dissidents, a hundred years ago - this is nothing new.  Negroponte is now turning a blind eye to evils committed by our puppets in Baghdad just as he did in Central America. We made Oliver North a national hero, and demonized the Senators who tried to make an accounting for Iran-Contra.

We reap what we have sown. And nobody wants to hear it - you'd all still rather believe that we were always the noble, generous, altruistic saints of the world, and all those people around the world who resent America are just jealous or evil.