His Guantanamo detainee ID number is 654. His first Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) unanimously concluded there was no evidence he was ever an “enemy combatant”, and yet he has languished in isolation and sensory deprivation for 5 years in notorious Camp 6 at Guantanamo Prison in a steel windowless room, with no charges ever brought against him.
Forty-five year old Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi was diagnosed with hepatitis B and tuberculosis over a year ago. Amnesty International has issued a worldwide alert, as his condition has deteriorated significantly, and the prison authorities refuse to allow treatment. Please read the following and consider contacting the authorities indicated. A man’s life is at stake… and a country’s soul. [Update at end of essay]
On October 17, Louis Vitale and Stephen Kelly, two priests arrested for trespassing as they sought to deliver a letter protesting U.S. violations of the Geneva Convention in relation to torture, were sentenced to five months in prison. Fr. Vitale is 75 years old.
On November 19, 2006, Vitale and Kelly had tried to give their protest letter to Major General Barbara Fast, then-commandant of Fort Huachuca Army Base, and previously intelligence chief for the U.S. command in Baghdad during the period the worst abuses took place at Abu Ghraib. Fort Huachuca itself is the site for the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School. It is alleged that torture techniques are taught at the school. See my article “Torture on Trial in Arizona Desert” for more on the trial and on Ft. Huachuca. Most notable was the judge’s refusal in the case to allow any evidence about U.S. use of torture or “the morality or immorality of the government’s use of interrogation techniques…”
Watching a DVD of the New York Metropolitan’s version of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (or Twilight of the Gods [TOG]) the other day, I was struck at how prescient the otherwise reactionary composer was in anticipating the destruction of the voracious classes. (One should not find it odd that in Wagner one finds mixed the most progressive and the most reactionary of views and trends, as in this he is the exemplar of the age, which mixes reason and progress with vile reaction, destruction, and mass murder.)
Dick Cheney, who is Alberich in my analogy with Wagner’s opera, was on the stump beating war tom-toms against Iran during a 35-minute talk at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which The New York Times calls “a research organization”. In reality, WINEP is a well-known right-wing pro-Israel lobby. While praised by liberal dreamboat Al Gore as “Washington’s most respected center for studies on the Middle East”, according to Right Web:
The story, out of England, is pretty straight-forward, but the implications are stunning; or, they would be stunning, if the repeated crimes and inhumanity of the Bush Administration had not fried whatever synapses allow us to feel stunned.
Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.
The New York Times continues to cover the Senate confirmation hearings for Bush Attorney General nominee Michael B. Mukasey. As the general consensus built for a Mukasey confirmation, doubts have crept in through the cracks, as it became obvious Mukasey was as adept at parsing his language regarding torture as former Justice Department head, the despised Alberto Gonzales.
This came out more clearly today, when Mukasey told a dubious Senate panel that he didn’t even know what waterboarding, a well-publicized CIA torture technique, was. Really. Would I make this stuff up?
“Is waterboarding constitutional?” he was asked by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, in one of today’s sharpest exchanges.
“I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” Mr. Mukasey replied. “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”
So Federal Judge Michael B. Mukasey said he was against torture in his confirmation hearing, and the liberals are ready to fall all over him. His confirmation as Bush’s new attorney general is presumably a given. Never mind that he refused to comment on the secret 2005 Bush Administration memorandums authorizing harsh, “enhanced” interrogation techniques by the CIA. Listen to Mukasey get all huffy at his nomination hearing today:
When Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, suggested in his questioning that the 2005 opinions might authorize torture, Mr. Mukasey stopped him. “You characterize it as torture,” he said. “I do not know of such a policy and I hope not to find them.”
Nor would he comment in detail on the legality of the so-called warrantless wiretap program that was authorized by President Bush shortly after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been harshly criticized by civil liberties groups and lawmakers from both parties as possibly unconstitutional.
“I am not familiar with that program,” said Mr. Mukasey, who knew enough about the program to refer to it as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the name preferred by the White House.
This is a review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, a detailed, journalistic history of neoliberalism which emphasizes its connection to “shock therapy,” torture, and other means of tearing down people and society so that they can be rebuilt along the lines of “perfect,” ideological models. My review differs from others in that it focuses upon a sequential review of important themes and close analysis of key quotes within the book.
Frank Rich just ran through the unspoken barrier that got Dick Durbin in such hot water two years ago. He’s made the historical comparison that no one has been allowed to make, for fear of diminishing the scope and scale of an evil that reigned a half-century ago. A comparison that someone in the MSM has needed to make, because we are surely walking down that same road.
In the latest of a seemingly endless series of shocking revelations about the Bush Administration’s attempts to punish anyone who attempts to hold them accountable to the rule of law, it is being reported today that the CIA is investigating its own Inspector General for investigating the CIA for committing acts of torture.
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.
Detention and interrogation programs? In other words, torture.
A small team working for General Hayden is looking into the conduct of the agency’s watchdog office, which is led by Inspector General John L. Helgerson. Current and former government officials said the review had caused anxiety and anger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hill that it posed a conflict of interest.
Concern? This warrants more than concern! This warrants an immediate and aggressive investigation by Congress into a clear case of attempting to suppress dedicated public servants because they may believe the United States should abide by international law and basic human morality.
Any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would be unusual, if not unprecedented, and would threaten to undermine the independence of the office, some current and former officials say.
To state the obvious: that’s stating the obvious.
The CIA, of course, officially says this investigation of the investigators is no big deal, completely appropriate, have a doughnut and some coffee and- hey, how’s the weather, today?
The New York Times had a front page article on the legal peregrinations of the Bush Administrations as it seeks safe harbor for its ship of torturers. The next day, the scandal spills out into official Washington, and the stubborn evil denizens at 1600 Pennsylvania trot out for a desultory press conference. There’s the snarling, contemptuous Bush, explaining, “This government does not torture people.”
Away, in countless rooms in millions of houses, the populace reads the stories and sighs and does nothing. Politicians screech, and pundits blather, and the war their generation shouldered with both protest and calm continued its carnage. Slowly, the news media formed a tight narrative around the new scandal: Bush’s Justice Department had found a way to legally, and yet secretly (and only in 2007 America can this occur without oxymoron), legitimate forms of torture too bestial to contemplate — beatings, simulated drownings, freezing men half to death… you know, Bush had growled, interrogation techniques that were “tough, safe, necessary and lawful.”
But no one knew, no one could know, that in the bowels of CIA headquarters at Langley, a group of men and women were safeguarding a group of techniques that were already exposed, and already forgotten, that were carefully cozened, that men were trained in, that were meant to outlast the worst New York Times editorial or Congressional investigation. And if they were referred to, if anyone should have to whisper them, they could use the awful acronym that had referenced them for over fifty years now: DDD.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A German citizen who alleges the CIA mistakenly kidnapped, detained and interrogated him was denied a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court when the justices rejected his appeal for review Tuesday.
The German citizen is Khaled el-Masri, who was kidnapped in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve, 2003 by U.S. government agents and taken via secret “extraordinary rendition” to a prison in Afghanistan. El-Masri was beaten, humjiliated and drugged. When the U.S. could get nothing out of him, or recognized it was a case of mistaken identity — we don’t know because it’s a “state secret” — he was unceremoniously flown and dumped in a forest in Albania.
I got a little out of the news loop when I was on vacation. Now it’s 3 AM and I have jet lag, so I’m catching up. The Blackwater stuff keeps piling up, and Media Matters did me the favor of a day-by-day review of what happened with the Rush Limbaugh fiasco. I see where some MN vets are being denied the GI bill, and that it is apparently okay to deny medical coverage to small, vulnerable children.
George Carlin talks alot about “euphemisms.” You know – where they simply replace words that make people uncomfortable, to shade the truth? So “toilet paper” becomes “bathroom tissue”? A “mattress” is a “sleep system?” “Torture” is now “interrogation methods”.
So anyway, the President says we don’t torture, but maybe the shock has just worn off. Otherwise, how do you explain this commercial?!
(Thanks toNyc Alberts, NYC, who originally saw this commercial on television late at night in a longer version, and finally tracked it down & also wrote about it)
By the way, The New York Times Sunday editorial was entitled |”On Torture and American Values” and contained this statement:
“Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of
international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. The people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values. The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect.”
UPDATE: I posted this after it had been up all day at Democracy Cell Project and I wanted more discussion. On Nyc’s suggestion, I sent it to the main women at Feministing, who he’d contacted after he first saw it. I’m headed for Docudharma. Any other ideas, let me know. Don’t see comments on here but have gotten some email such as “It’s no better than if it were about child molesting” or “It’s an obvious example of corporate propaganda to soften the image of torture.”
Not to mention:
Ordinary commercials (which are usually in bad taste or have crappy music) are annoying enough….
Have we gotten so low in our degradation scale under the Bush administration that we can make light of torture, the worst thing we can do to our fellow human beings (and other animals on the planet) and casually accept pseudo-torture to sell beauty products…? (Beauty products?!?)
I find the commercial offensive in the extreme. Eeeeeeeeowwww doesn’t begin to describe the mental/emotional recoil I had when watching it.
Gotta go wash out my eyes and disinfect my ears… but how do I get the images and the sounds out of my brain…?
