Tag: Torture

Yes, there is much corruption in the Democratic Party. Yes I would personally like to throw Nancy out on her ear. Yes I am disgusted by the shameless cowardice and/or self aggrandizement of too many Democrats in Congress.

However

I do not belive the Democratic Party is capable of what The Republican Party  – lead by its criminal  leaders have done to this country. Make no mistake. The Democratic Party must improve it’s pathetic records of sheep like cowardice as represented by the current Congress. But stoop this low? No. Only Today’s GOP leadership is capable of this

Tonight I had the tremendous opportunity to hear Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch give a lecture on Defending Rights without Courts and Judges: War Stories from Around the World and Our Backyard. I’ve long admired HRW and Roth. Many of you have probably seen him speak or read him, and you know what a thoughtful, articulate, and humorous person he is, and I must say I left the lecture feeling both hopeful about the world and hopeless about our nation–how’s that for a powerful evening?  

As anyone paying attention knows, torture is nothing new to American security agencies. It was meticulously studied and practiced, and its techniques were then taught to our puppets and allies abroad. And never mind that, besides being a moral outrage and a crime against humanity, torture simply doesn’t work. Our nation has engaged in it. A brief glint of sunshine may have temporarily tempered its usage, but it’s never gone away.

That the Bush Administration engages in torture should come as no surprise. What it really means may be.

Hina Shamsi is a human rights observer at the U.S. military tribunal hearing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, in Guantánamo Bay. Hamdan was supposedly Osama bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard. Shamsi writes, in Salon:

At issue in Hamdan’s hearing was whether under the Military Commissions Act the government had the authority to try Hamdan as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” Congress passed the law in October 2006, under pressure from the Bush administration, on the eve of the midterm elections. The law circumvents due process safeguards that are a hallmark of American justice, in both the military’s own court-martial system and in the federal courts. For the more than 300 men held in Guantánamo for over six years, the Military Commissions Act stripped their right to challenge detention without charge through the ancient writ mechanism of habeas corpus. (The prisoners’ challenge to this provision was before the Supreme Court last Wednesday.

Hamdan’s defense wants to call three witnesses who are considered “high-value” detainees, whom they claim can refute the charge that Hamdan was part of a conspiracy to murder civilians. The judge refused to allow the three to testify, because the request was not timely. This is where it gets fun.

Government lawyers argued that the three were part of a highly classified special access program — a situation of the government’s own making, of course — and that only those with top secret clearance had access to them, which took time.

In other words, there was only one catch.

Furthermore, even though Hamdan’s military defense attorney has top secret clearance, the government says treatment of the three witnesses is highly classified, and cannot be revealed, as it would undermine national security. All three, of course, have been reported by the media to have been abused, if not tortured. So, Hamdan cannot get a fair trial because the government doesn’t want it known that witnesses for his defense may have been tortured. This dynamic will play out again, in the trials of “high-value detainees.”

But this is where Bush administration policies will come back to haunt us with a vengeance: Unlike the majority of Guantánamo detainees who appear to be low-level players or even innocent, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others did likely engage in serious and heinous crimes. If so, they should be prosecuted and sentenced — but based on lawfully obtained evidence in full and fair proceedings that comport with the best traditions of American justice.

But they won’t be. To Bush, they can’t be. People have been tortured, and for it, justice will continue to be tortured.

(more)

Every statement George Bush has ever made about torture is wrong.

Every statement George Bush has ever made about torture has been based on the delusion that waterboarding is not torture.

George Bush authorized waterboarding after his pet lawyers told him it wasn’t torture. (It doesn’t cause organ damage, which was essentially their  standard)

NOW six years after the fervor of 9/11  ……waterboarding has been rejected by our society and the world, the “debate” is over. Waterboarding IS torture.

Let me state it clearly:

Waterboarding is torture. America has waterboarded. America tortures.

Crossposted at Invictus and Daily Kos

Notoriously (depending upon your point of view), this past weekend the Washington Post published an article revealing that a number of top Democrats and Republicans were briefed in September 2002 on CIA interrogation methods. They were “given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.” The reported techniques are said to have included waterboarding.

Yesterday, Pelosi released a statement clarifying what happened from her perspective. This must have shocked even a little those Democratic Party stalwarts, but no, as we’ll see, their Nancy can make no mistake. She was, you see… helpless.

(cross-posted from kos at buhdy’s request; thanks for all the recs, dd people!)

We know that one of the two destroyed CIA interrogation tapes documented the torture of Abu Zubaydah.

We know that Zubaydah was no “high-value” Al Qaeda operative, but an “insane, certifiable” gofer. We know that when this truth was conveyed to George II, his response was to personally press the CIA to pursue further “information extraction.” We know that Zubaydah provided no actionable intelligence, but that his desperate attempts to placate his torturers may have resulted in US-directed “dark side” operations that killed innocent people. And we know that George II, aware of all this, has nonetheless persisted in attributing an increasingly important role to Zubaydah as both Al Qaeda fiend, and key to “cracking” the 9/11 plot.

We can assume, then, that the tape documenting Zubaydah’s interrogation was destroyed not only because of the monstrous nature of the torture techniques inflicted upon him. It likewise represented a dangerous lever, one that could have toppled the tower of lies that BushCo has erected upon the tormented mind and tortured body of Abu Zubaydah.

It could have exposed the truth. That what has been done to this man may be the filthiest, most outrageous act committed by an administration that has redefined, in our name, filth and outrage.    

I’ll start by saying I find USAToday an example of everything bad and wrong about today’s print media.  Well maybe not everything, WaPo is worse because they’re also dishonest.  But USAToday is deliberately designed (and has been since it’s inception) to be the McEyewitness News of Newspapers, a pile of print for you to step in on the way out of your room at the Marriott in the morning.  Reading it takes no longer than a cup of coffee and a danish.

But lots of people do because it’s free and a step up from a local ‘shopper’ newsprint magazine, so I occasionally check their opinion section to get the pulse of what’s supposed to be mainstream.

Today one of their opinions was No torture, no need to destroy videotapes.  Whoever wrote this has no doubt that the tapes would make us look bad-

Had the tapes ever gotten out, they might have made the Abu Ghraib prison photos look tame. Imagine the propaganda value Osama bin Laden could reap from video of Arabs struggling in pain as Americans subjected them to waterboarding or other torture. The fact that the prisoner might have been a murderous thug would be lost in the revulsion and condemnation of the United States for barbarism.

Then again the prisoner might not have been a murderous thug, just a low level wacko, but I digress.

Like all things USAToday it’s a very quick read and I encourage you to do so.  The author mostly gets it right.  “The original sin was the torture itself, not the tapes or their destruction.  Spy agencies don’t get to write their own laws.”

What I think the author misses though is how much seeing these tapes would inflame not only Arabs, but Americans.

Who among us, a society that buys its meat shrink wrapped in plastic at best, in microwavable breaded nuggets more often, really wants to see sausage made?

I’ll tell you who.  The 30%.  Dogfighting, executions, we’re Romans and we deserve the best circuses to display the power and wealth of our empire!

It puts me in mind of later empires too, where dictators and their sycophants giggle and eat popcorn while flickering images of state traitors dance at the end of piano wire nooses like obscene puppets.

Do you suppose W watched these tapes?  How many times?  Special bonus question- how many times for Saddam’s execution?

My Mom will be 78 on Tuesday.  She is a stiff-upper-lip Yankee, born and raised in a tiny town in Vermont.  This was the 4-room school she attended (and at which she received a superb education) and graduated from as the top 14 percent of her class of 7:

I just love watching the news on Fridays.  The most interesting things come out at the very end of the week.  Like this story, broken by the New York Times today,:  

/shaking head in disgust…

Also posted at Daily Kos, NION, and Invictus

First it was the leak of the 2003 Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) Manual for Guantanamo. The SOP included procedures for psychological torture and abusive conditions of detention, including long-term isolation to foster dependence upon interrogators and “enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process”. Also, prisoners were hidden from the International Red Cross.

The military assured critics that “SOPs by definition, undergo periodic review and change as situations warrant. Detention operations at JTF-GTMO have evolved significantly since 2003…”

Now Wikileaks has released a copy of the 2004 SOP, and guess what? Nothing changed, unless (mostly) for the worse! As the Washington Post notes, since the Supreme Court “prepares to hear arguments this week on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the public is getting another peek at how detainees have been treated there.”

Also posted at Invictus

Once again, the indefatigable Stephen Soldz has jumped out on the Guantanamo SOP story, providing readers with important analysis on exactly what is in that document, and how it links to what we already know about U.S. torture policies. He also discusses the document in the light of the struggle he and other psychologists have waged in the American Psychological Association against the latter’s collaborationist policy of staffing the interrogation rooms and prisons of Bush’s anti-democratic and bloody “war on terror”.

This is from his latest article, “Leaked Guantanamo Document Confirms Routine Use of Isolation as Psychological Torture”, posted yesterday at ZNet.

The Guantanamo SOP now provides official documentation that, at the time of the Rumsfeld memo and despite its warnings regarding the techniques’ potential illegality and physical and psychological dangers, isolation was routinely used by the Defense Department at Guantanamo on all new detainees. The Rumsfeld memo complements the SOP in that it documents the central role of “medical and psychological review,” and, thus, medical and psychological personnel in the administration of this technique….