Tag: Torture

Today, the NYTimes Editorial Board opines:

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. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And 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. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.

And then asks:

For the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this really who we are?

Indeed America is not simply a Nation that tortures. It is a Nation that insists that an American flag lapel pin be worn while we torture.

Patriotism? No, jingoism. Fascism.

Disco Inferno

And he was left in a room soldiers blithely called The Disco, a place where Western music rang out so loud that his interrogators were, in Qutaji’s words, forced to “talk to me via a loudspeaker that was placed next to my ears.”

I have an idea that everyone, regardless of location or nationality wants one thing more than any other in the world: to love and to be loved. I think there is a moment in everyone’s lives when they understand love, whether it is making love, holding a newborn infant, or having an honest and intimate conversation. The feeling is undeniable in these precious moments. Similarly, there is a breathtaking moment with a song that makes a positive difference in our lives.

Amnesty International has a new, graphic campaign to gather together the many voices who demand that the United States  tear down Gitmo.

Crossposted from Invictus

Scott Shane, David Johnston, and James Risen of the New York Times have written a stinging article on U.S. Justice Department decisions that have — and still do — provide supposed legal justification for harsh interrogation techniques amounting to torture.

In the article, “Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations”, the Shane et al. describe the role of former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales in quashing an internal revolt at the Justice Department over the unprecedented spate of legal alibis for barbaric levels of torture. Some of the department’s “opinions” remain secret to this day.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Has there ever been a more disgraceful Attorney General than Alberto Gonzales? Has there ever been a more disgraceful Administration than the Bush Administration? No:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

The nation may never recover from the damage done by these scoundrels.

I just got back from a speaking tour through New Mexico with Mike Otterman, the author of American Torture and my colleague Tom Moran.

Here is a piece we wrote from the South West that unfortunately it didn’t get picked up by the local press at the time we were out there. Nevertheless we wanted to post it and hear readers thoughts.

by Michael Otterman, Raj Purohit, and Tom Moran

—- —- —-

Thomas Harrison, of Clovis, New Mexico, called it the “water treatment”.

On May 21, 1951, Lieutenant Colonel Harrison’s F-80 was shot down over North Korea. Two years later, Harrison returned home to Clovis a broken man. Harrison recalled:

“After two weeks of talking, they weren’t getting the information they wanted. So one day in November ten of them came into my cell. They used the water treatment. They would bend my head back, put a towel over my face and pour water over the towel. I could not breath. This went on hour after hour, day after day. It was freezing cold. When I would pass out, they would shake me and begin again. They would leave me tied to the chair with the water freezing on and around me.”

Under torture, Harrison signed whatever was put before him. Every man has his breaking point. In a North Korean prison, Harrison had reached his.

Today, the “water treatment” has a different name though the torture is still the same. In 2002, President George W. Bush authorized the CIA to “water-board” al Qaeda suspects captured during the War on Terror. ABC News reports that 9/11 plotter, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was water-boarded in a secret CIA prison in Poland. KSM was chained to a wooden board, a rag was fixed in his mouth, then cellophane was firmly wrapped over his face. Cold water was then poured over his mouth until he began to gag and lurch. After two and a half minutes, KSM broke. He admitted to an incredulous 31 different plots- nearly every act of terrorism against the United States since the early 1990s.

Last week we learned from ABC News that White House authorization of water-boarding has been rescinded. While we would like to applaud the decision to move away from using this tactic, the fact that no White House or CIA official has confirmed this on shift on-the-record still gives us pause.

In response to the ABC News report, Arizona Senator John McCain stated: “Water-boarding is a form of torture. And I’m convinced that [banning it] will not only help us in our interrogation techniques, but it will also be helpful for our image in the world.”

While we acknowledge that the Senator has been an important voice on the torture issue, we have to express concern with his belief that: a) water-boarding has in fact been ended by the Administration; and b) that an off the record suggestion that the CIA no longer water-boards will do anything to improve the US image across the globe.

The Bush Administration’s refusal to adhere to core international legal norms in the interrogation arena have made it difficult to believe that such a change has in fact happened without some type of public statement. A positive change in US interrogation policy needs to be articulated by those in positions of real power in the Administration both to improve the US standing in the world and, frankly, to reassure ordinary Americans that their country is once again living up to the ideals of its founding. To restore the American image in the world the Administration needs to do the right thing and be seen to do the right thing.

As we tour through the South West discussing the issue of torture, we are finding that the American public understands that methods of torture once used by our Cold War enemies on New Mexicans like Thomas Harrison have no place in America today. It is past time that their elected leaders in Washington, DC begin to grasp this reality is well.

This essay is a reprint of a posting made a while back on my own blog, Invictus, and over at Daily Kos. Given the emphemeral nature of blog pieces, and the importance of this well-researched essay and the material herein, I am reposting it for the readers of Docudharma.

As an added bonus, I’d like to give a link to a site where for a small fee you can download the entire 1977 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Hearings on MKUltra in Adobe format. (Thanks to an anonymous commenter for this link.) For those interested in researching or studying the covert actions of this government, this is not only an important historical document, but a crucial resource for understanding what has happened to the U.S. government since World War II.

In the opinion of myself and others, the move to total war in the struggle against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan initiated a major shift in power within the United States to the Department of Defense, and increasingly, the intelligence apparatus of the government. Both became inextricably intertwined with the scientific, educational, and medical establishments, until today, it seems there is no severing the connection and control of the government over civil society.

When reading what follows, in essence you are studying an important case history — of much significance in and of itself, of course — of this overarching influence of military-government design covertly taking over an entire portion of the intellectual establishment, e.g. the fields of behavioral psychology and psychiatry/neurology.

I hope you will appreciate the reposting of this most significant presentation.