What? Me Torture?

I don't believe a word of it.

Donald Rumsfeld has finally said he's sorry. Sort of.

In an interview with biographer Bradley Graham, the former secretary of defense says he has regrets about the administration's controversial detainee policy.

The twist is that Rumsfeld doesn't regret the policy itself -- specifically the abandoning of the Geneva Conventions for detainees picked up in Afghanistan. Rather, he regrets how the policy was formulated.

Just like Rumsfeld was shocked over the photos from Abu Ghraib, it wasn't the torture, it was the outing of the torture. It's weirdly semantic. He and his cohorts still haven't understood exactly WHAT the world's revulsion is all about.

In comparison to this feeble reasoning, Robert McNamara's repentance appears saintlike.:

HUFFINGTON POST: In the course of producing the Fog of War what did you learn about Robert McNamara? And how did he see his place in history?

MORRIS: There are no simple answers to those questions. He is an extraordinarily complex figure and will probably remain as such... It is an amazing career and an amazingly complex career I might add. I don't share this view that McNamara is this clearly evil man. I think that he is extraordinarily complex and that may be a result as well of the extraordinarily complex history that he was part of. Nothing has a simple answer. Maybe nothing ever does. It's very easy to condemn him for these policies but harder to understand what his role was in these policies.

By the end of his life, McNamara clearly felt a sense of contrition. But did he feel as if he was responsible for what happened in Vietnam or did he think of himself as a victim of history, engulfed by the events that surrounded him?

I think that it is part of who we are, in general, that we would prefer to see ourselves as victims rather than as villains. Having said that, dealing with McNamara was dealing with a person who agonized about his past.

Update, emptywheel has more.

crossposted at Rants from the Rookery

Nobody wants a Spanish Inquisition ... except Christains

The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate

Amid intense public debate over the use of torture against suspected terrorists, an analysis by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life of a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press illustrates differences in the views of four major religious traditions in the U.S. about whether torture of suspected terrorists can be justified. Differences in opinion on this issue also are apparent based on frequency of attendance at religious services.

Please note that the question posed was about torture of suspected terrorists, not 'harsh interrogation tactics' of 'known terrorists.'

The 'Christians' supported torture. Evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, all think some torture is OK even if the subject of that torture is just suspected of being a 'terrorist.'

I'm not an atheist, I believe in god, but this is yet another reason I'll never believe in religions. The more you go to church the more you believe that torture is justified!

WTF is wrong with this picture!? Religionists are always saying how their belief keeps them on a moral path. I've always thought that knowing right from wrong had nothing to do with religion, but I never would have suspected it would be so flipped from right to wrong in the faiths I grew up in.

It seems to me that the way you treat others will be how you will be treated.

It's not exactly original, since it's been phrased in all the major faiths in the world.

Maybe my conclusions are wrong, I'm just going by the stats ... and my beliefs.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Mean What You Say, Say What You Mean

Guess who said this?

March 17, 2003
War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."

The people who performed the torture, the people who used tortured legal logic to rationalize the torture, the people who approved the torture, to the people who knew about the torture and did nothing to stop it should be tried for war crimes.

This isn't a partisan issue, it's a war crime issue. Whether you're a Dem or a Repub, go to the International Court; do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to the court and get a fair trial.

p.s. CIA official: no proof harsh techniques stopped terror attacks
p.p.s. Torture does work! (If by 'work' you mean being tortured until you tell the torturers exactly what Bushco wanted to hear.)

I can't believe there is even a debate about torture in our country. Or even a debate about what constitutes torture. We've had this debate, as has the rest of the world, and we came to specific conclusions about torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Ronald Reagan signed it.

Even if it did work, which it doesn't for purposes of 'actionable intelligence', it's wrong, it's wrong on so many levels!



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one

Obama consulted widely on memos

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says President Barack Obama spent about a month pondering whether to release Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques, and considered it “a weighty decision.”
[...]
A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos “unbelievable.”

“It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake."

I'll ignore the standard Politico method of giving anonymity to anyone who asks for it, (it's been covered), and go straight to the heart.

Those 'techniques' the Bush official was unwilling to lay claim to? Yeah, that would be torture, illegal by moral, US & International laws. And the 1st thing President Obama did in office was to outlaw those methods.

Now back to Bushworld "It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are" - actually the torture methods have been proven not to work. They weren't designed to elicit information, they were designed to elicit false confessions.

And, point of fact, the methods have already been published, (raise your hand if you've heard of 'waterboarding?'), just not the memos that authorized the torture. And what Obama was signifying to the world was that we have begun to climb out of the immoral & illegal abyss that 8 years of Bush & Co sunk us in.

More from the NYT:

Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by the CIA.

[...]
Together, the four memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the C.I.A.'s methods and the Justice Department's long struggle, in the face of graphic descriptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Passages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention Against Torture.
[...]
In the memos, the Justice Department authors emphasized precautions the C.I.A. proposed to take, including monitoring by medical personnel, and the urgency of getting information to stop terrorist attacks. They recounted the C.I.A.'s assertions of the effectiveness of the techniques but noted that interrogators could not always tell a prisoner who was withholding information from one who had no more information to offer.

The memos include what in effect are lengthy excerpts from the agency's interrogation manual, laying out with precision how each method was to be used. Waterboarding, for example, involved strapping a prisoner to a gurney inclined at an angle of "10 to 15 degrees" and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth "from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches" for no more than 40 seconds at a time.

But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used "with far greater frequency than initially indicated" and with "large volumes of water" rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.'s inspector general.

Further:

2 Suspects Waterboarded 266 Times

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.
[...]
A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Wow, either waterboarding doesn't work or these guys really like their job!

p.s. John McCain, that flaming liberal, says:

"It's unacceptable," McCain said, adding:

One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period. I can ensure you that once enough physical pain is inflicted on someone, they will tell that interrogator whatever they think they want to hear. And most importantly, it serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us.

p.p.s. Digby says it better than I can.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

What do you think the teacher's gonna look like this year?

(Bergen, McCarthy, Snerd, WCFields-You Can't Cheat an Honest Man)

Chapman University (used to be called Chapman College; University sounds much more chi chi) is a small college deep in Orange Co., CA. My mom lived a few miles away, as did I once upon a time. And my brother even took a class or 3 there.

Notable faculty include Hugh (I'm actually a tool) Hewitt, so that doesn't speak well of the staff. In fact, 2 quotes from Wikipedia (yeah, I know) clearly demonstrate HH's bias and hypocrisy:

1. A recurring theme on Hewitt's show is accusing the mainstream media of liberal bias and lack of transparency, and the unwillingness of its members to answer questions about their own political beliefs. Hewitt has said that the modern paradigm of reportage, whereby journalists make a claim to objectivity while never answering questions about their own beliefs, allows a deep-seated culture of liberal media bias to be perpetuated.
2. He returned to California in 1989 to oversee construction of the Richard M. Nixon Library as the Library's executive director from groundbreaking through dedication and opening. In 1990, Hewitt sparked controversy by proposing screening of researchers wishing to use the library resources — e.g., Hewitt suggested refusing admission to researchers deemed "unfriendly," — specifically Bob Woodward — because he was "not a responsible journalist."

Yeah, so HH's bias is OK, anyone else's is, you know Teh Liberal Bias™.

But Chapman U. has landed an even more important fish. As Ian points out:

Academic freedom is very important. Universities exist to produce knowledge, uncontrained by political winds or the whims of wealthy donors. If professors live in fear of termination without good cause, they cannot contribute their university’s mission.

So even though I would have fired John Yoo from the Berkley faculty—not because of his repugnant viewpoints, but because his incompetent representation of a former client, the United States of America, calls into question his ethical fitness to train young lawyers—I am sympathetic to the reasons why Berkley allows him to stay.

What is completely incomprehensible to me, however, is why a different university, which is not bound by a tenure agreement with Professor Yoo, would nonetheless hire him as a visiting faculty member. Admittedly, that school is Chapman Law School, whose faculty boasts such legal luminaries as Rush Limbaugh wannabe Hugh Hewitt, but Chapman’s most recent hire can do little more than take a school whose most famous professor makes them a punchline, and turn that school into a tragic embarrassment.

Chapman Law Dean John Eastman, who worked with Yoo as co-clerks to Justice Thomas, claims that this new hire is to bring “publicity” to his relatively young law school, and it has already accomplished that goal. I could also garner publicity by advising my client to torture helpless captives, but I doubt it would turn out well for any organization foolish enough to hire me afterwards.

John Yoo, who wrote the comically awful memos approving anything done to prisoners of war that GWBush dared to dream, that John Yoo. The John Yoo who deemed Habeus Corpus too lenient. John Yoo, who sat alongside David Addington on Dick Cheney's lap like Mortimer Snerd & Charlie McCarthy, saying the words of the master who pulled the strings inside his back.

John Yoo; a legal mind for the ages. The Dark Ages.

Good on you, Chapman U. Fight on for . . . torture.

Bastards.

Quotes of the Day

"He'd rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers."

[Morgan Johnson, president of the United Auto Workers local representing General Motors workers in Shreveport, said] "I don't know what Sen. Vitter has against GM or the United Auto Workers or the entire domestic auto industry; whatever it is, whatever he thinks we've done, it's time for him to forgive us, just like Sen. Vitter has asked the citizens of Louisiana to forgive him," said Johnson, president of Local 2166. Otherwise, Johnson said of Vitter, it would appear, "He'd rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers."

"It may just prove that when I have a lot of morphine in my system, I make the right decisions"

Ashcroft was confronted with a question about a March 2004 incident, in which the former AG was visited by his would-be successor as he lay sedated in a hospital bed.

Ashcroft was asked by Gonzales to re-authorize a controversial domestic spying program, over the objections of Ashcroft's deputy, James Comey. He refused to reverse the Justice Department's decision, sparking a power struggle which saw the White House re-authorize its own program without the approval of the Justice Department.

"So, I think the system worked. And I'm glad that it did. It may not prove a whole lot about a lot of things. It may just prove that when I have a lot of morphine in my system, I make the right decisions."

In honor of John Ashcroft, who still thinks illegal detention & torture are OK, but bare breasts are bad, I declare War!




Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Listen, They're Playing my Song

Musicians Don’t Want Tunes Used for Torture

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Blaring from a speaker behind a metal grate in his tiny cell in Iraq, the blistering rock from Nine Inch Nails hit Prisoner No. 200343 like a sonic bludgeon.

The auditory assault went on for days, then weeks, then months at the U.S. military detention center in Iraq. Twenty hours a day. AC/DC. Queen. Pantera. The prisoner, military contractor Donald Vance of Chicago, told The Associated Press he was soon suicidal.

The tactic has been common in the U.S. war on terror, with forces systematically using loud music on hundreds of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the U.S. military commander in Iraq, authorized it on Sept. 14, 2003, "to create fear, disorient ... and prolong capture shock."

Now the detainees aren't the only ones complaining. Musicians are banding together to demand the U.S. military stop using their songs as weapons.
[...]
According to an FBI memo, one interrogator at Guantanamo Bay bragged he needed only four days to "break" someone by alternating 16 hours of music and lights with four hours of silence and darkness.
[...]
Vance, in a telephone interview from Chicago, said the tactic can make innocent men go mad. According to a lawsuit he has filed, his jailers said he was being held because his employer was suspected of selling weapons to terrorists and insurgents. The U.S. military confirms Vance was jailed but won't elaborate because of the lawsuit.

There might be a temptation to make jokes about being subjected to loud music being a form of torture, but it isn't funny, and it is torture.

And there might be a temptation in some folks less evolved to OK torture for them foreign brownish folks, but as noted above, our government also tortures white, christain, veteran, FBI informant, Americans.

More here:

Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment

and here:

A different kind of hell for one American in Iraq FBI informant imprisoned and treated like an insurgent for 97 days

When Bush said "we don't torture"? He lied.

And his enablers continue to lie over and over.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

I'm in the room without a light, The room without a view

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq

I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.

I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.
[...]
Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

I urge you to read the whole article.

It confirms, once again, what all the experts say, torture is not an effective means of eliciting information.

Torture only works to get someone to say what you want them to say. e.g. John McCain wasn't tortured for information, he was tortured to confess to war crimes. And it worked.

The torture and callous disregard for human rights that our nation has openly displayed for the last 8 years has dimmed the shining beacon of liberty, but it has not doused it.

I leave you with the last paragraph of the article:

I'm actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We're better than that. We're smarter, too.

Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

I want To Live in Manchuria America

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

These techniques were designed to break torture victims and get them to say anything that a corrupt regime wanted them to say.

And while experts agree that torture doesn't work to obtain accurate information, it works great if you want the prisoner to say anything you want them to say.

Just ask John McCain. He not only made a video confessing war crimes for his captors, the torture he experienced drove him to attempt suicide. (He wrote a book about it.) And while McClain admits to his capitulation to torture, he also alleges he refused early release. (We have only his word that this happened. It requires a suspension of disbelief to think that a broken, tortured, powerless prisoner can dictate the terms of his release to his captors.)

So when lunatic wrongwingers send a viral email that Senator Obama is the "Manchurian Candidate," maybe they should look closer to home. Maybe they should look at John McCain, who actually was tortured, broken, and then sent back home by the communists.

The same John McClain who shortly after being released by his captors cheated on his wife, and then divorced her while she was permanently disfigured from a car accident.

The same John McCain that cheated on this faithful wife? Yeah, he did it with Cindy, a 20 year younger multimillionaire heiress, (heiress, drug addict and thief). But John did the right maverick thing, he dumped his crippled wife and married his mistress, who just happened to have $100 million. And that's when he began his political career.

If you wanted to write a script about a hero who'd been tortured & brainwashed, cut himself off from those who knew him best, suddenly had unlimited financing and decided to run for president ... oh, wait a minute, George Axelrod already wrote that script. Hmmm, what was it called?

BTW, this is the same John McCain whose former interrogator in communist Vietnam wants him to be president.

The same John McCain who said "I didn't really love America until I was deprived of her company."

I'm not disparaging John McCain's service, I'm not saying he's the Manchurian Candidate, I'm just stating facts.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Congress passed a law, I tell you! It's not my fault!

Watch how Bush immediately goes into a semantics game to explain Abu Ghraib. Apparently asking this question means you are slandering America....

GEORGE W. BUSH: This was a law passed, Adam. We passed a law. Bypassing the Constitution means that we did something outside the bounds of the Constitution. We went to the Congress and got a piece of legislation passed.

REPORTER: Which is now being struck down, I think.

GEORGE W. BUSH: It is, and I accept what the Supreme Court did, and I necessarily don't have to agree with it. My only point to you is, is that yes, I mean, we certainly wish Abu Ghraib hadn't happened, but that should not reflect America. This was the actions of some soldiers.

The question unanswered is this, Georgie. WHY did you get Congress to pass a law bypassing the Constitution? WHY was there this odd need to torture? WHY?



Shorter Bush: We wanted to torture so we changed the meaning of the word so it wasn't called torture so we didn't torture so we could watch the tapes of ... uh ... it was the soldiers that did it!

crossposted at Rants from the Rookery

They even watched.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Alberto Gonzales’s trip to Guantanamo, could you talk about that?

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, I’ve spoken for the first time, or at least people I’ve spoken with have for the first time now become publicly identified as closely involved. Diane Beaver was the lawyer down at Guantanamo. Mike Dunlavey was her boss. General Hill was the commander of United States SouthCom based at Miami. I’ve spoken to all three of them, and both Diane Beaver and Mike Dunlavey, who have largely been scapegoated by the administration, described to me the visit that Mr. Gonzales made, accompanied by Mr. Addington, who’s Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, and Jim Haynes, who is Rumsfeld’s lawyer.

They came down. They talked about interrogation techniques. They apparently even watched an interrogation or two. I was told that the driving individual was Mr. Addington, who was obviously the man in control. And I was told in particular by Diane Beaver that she was quite fearful of Mr. Haynes, and she also shared with me that Alberto Gonzales was rather quiet.

I've it before and I say it now, these members of Bush's cabal were into torture. It made them feel like they could shock and awe the world with their mighty and powerful ... military and bombs.



Hard to push how mighty and powerful we are when all this war has shown is how craven and cowardly these creeps actually are.



If we can't bring ourselves to do it, let there please be one brave European country who can take our war criminals to the Hague!



Because torture is always immoral.

Even the military knows this:

The former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a new book by one of Britain's top human rights lawyers.

Retired general Michael Dunlavey, who supervised Guantánamo for eight months in 2002, tried to locate records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused by the US of plotting the 9/11 attacks, but found they had disappeared.

The records on al-Qahtani, who was interrogated for 48 days - "were backed up ... after I left, there was a snafu and all was lost", Dunlavey told Philippe Sands QC, who reports the conversation in his book Torture Team, previewed last week by the Guardian. Snafu stands for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

Saudi-born al-Qahtani was sexually taunted, forced to perform dog tricks and given enemas at Guantánamo.

The CIA admitted last year that it destroyed videotapes of al-Qaida suspects being interrogated at a secret "black site" in Thailand. No proof has so far emerged that tapes of interrogations at Guantánamo were destroyed, but Sands' report suggests the US may have also buried politically sensitive proof relating to abuse by interrogators at the prison camp.

Other new evidence has also emerged in the last month that raises questions about destroyed tapes at Guantánamo.

We need to see accountability, responsibility, justice. We need to see impeachment.



crossposted at Rants from the Rookery

Yoo who?

Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has the timeline and lists of torture memos and statements that puts Yoo right up there with the Nazi apologists and enablers.

Anyone for the Nuremberg Defense?

The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was "only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl", literally "order is order") and is therefore not responsible for his crimes. The defense was most famously employed during the Nuremberg Trials, after which it is named.

Yoo really did want to please his overlords, didn't he?


crossposted at Rants from the Rookery

Oh, this is right big of them

Gitmo prisoners can now phone home:

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - The U.S. military said Tuesday that it will allow detainees to make regular phone calls to their families from Guantanamo Bay prison, where many have been confined in extreme isolation for as long as six years.

The new policy by the Defense Department, which previously said security concerns prevented such calls, is part of a strategy to ease conditions for frustrated prisoners at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said the telephone policy reflects a commitment to maintaining the health and well-being of Guantanamo detainees. No start date has been set for the program.

Inmates' contact with the outside world generally has been limited to mail delivered by the International Committee of the Red Cross and meetings with their lawyers. The military has allowed a small number of detainees to speak with their families, but typically only on "humanitarian" grounds such as following a death in the family.

Detainees' attorneys welcomed the phone calls but said reconnecting with family could make life more painful for those at Guantanamo, where the U.S. military holds about 275 men on suspicion of links to terrorism, al-Qaida or the Taliban.

Marc Falkoff, a Northern Illinois University law professor who represents 17 detainees, said one of his Yemeni clients has a 6-year-old daughter with whom he has never spoken.

crossposted at Rants from the Rookery

The Reign in Spain Declines To Extradict Due to Pain

Spain drops extradition attempt against Guantánamo torture pair

Spain yesterday dropped its attempt to extradite two British residents who had been freed from Guantánamo Bay, after accepting that torture they suffered during five years of American custody had left them too weak to stand trial.
[...]
The Madrid judge who issued the warrant, Baltasar Garzon, accepted British medical reports which found the men were suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other serious medical conditions.

Banna is said to be severely depressed, suffering from PTSD, and to have diabetes, hypertension and back pain, as well as damage to the back of his left knee. Deghayes is also suffering from PTSD, and depression, is blind in his right eye, and has fractures in his nasal bone and his right index finger. Both men are said to be at high risk of suicide.

And Bush says he doesn't torture.

One would think it would end there, but the British Home Office still wants to not only break these men, but break their families:

The Home Office refused to guarantee to let the pair stay with their families in Britain and said: "Their immigration status is under review."

Deghayes and Banna arrived back in Britain with a third British resident, Abdennour Samuer. Banna, from north-west London, was arrested in the Gambia in 2002 after he did not accept an MI5 request to become an informant.

I guess that's not surprising since they don't mind sending political refugees back to their home countries to a fate worse than, but including, death.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

It's torture, it's torture, it's torture

US judge steps in to torture row

[...]
In the interview with the Law in Action programme on BBC Radio 4, [Justice Scalia] said it was "extraordinary" to assume that the ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" - the US Constitution's Eighth Amendment - also applied to "so-called" torture.

"To begin with the constitution... is referring to punishment for crime. And, for example, incarcerating someone indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime."

Justice Scalia argued that courts could take stronger measures when a witness refused to answer questions.

"I suppose it's the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?" he asked.

"It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that. And once you acknowledge that, we're into a different game.

"How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?"

Jeebus, I'm so sick of these morons and their fantasies about Jack Bauer. It is "extraordinary" for a justus of the US Supreme Court to try to justus-ify torture. We've signed treaties, we've passed laws, and regardless of what scaliawag sez, waterboarding is water torture.

"To begin with the constitution... is referring to punishment for crime." Actually the 8th amendment says: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

INAL, but I don't see anything in the 8th that says only punishment for the guilty falls within its guidelines. It seems to me to also incorporate people just charged with a crime, (that 'excessive bail' terminology is the key.)

Besides the fact that when the CIA tortured suspects there was no ticking bomb! And they didn't torture them to find out about the future but about their past. And guess what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to after they water tortured him:

* The February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City
* A failed "shoe bomber" operation
* The October 2002 attack in Kuwait
* The nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia
* A plan for a "second wave" of attacks on major U.S. landmarks to be set in the spring or summer of 2002 after the 9/11 attacks, which includes more hijackings of commercial airlines and having them flown into various buildings in the U.S. including the Library Tower in Los Angeles , the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Plaza Bank building in Seattle and the Empire State Building in New York
* Plots to attack oil tankers and U.S. naval ships in the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Gibraltar and in Singapore
* A plan to blow up the Panama Canal
* Plans to assassinate Jimmy Carter
* A plot to blow up suspension bridges in New York City
* A plan to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago with burning fuel trucks
* Plans to "destroy" Heathrow Airport, Canary Wharf and Big Ben in London
* A planned attack on "many" nightclubs in Thailand
* A plot targeting the New York Stock Exchange and other U.S. financial targets
* A plan to destroy buildings in Eilat, Israel
* Plans to destroy U.S. embassies in Indonesia, Australia and Japan in 2002.
* Plots to destroy Israeli embassies in India, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Australia
* Surveying and financing an attack on an Israeli El-Al flight from Bangkok
* Sending several "mujahideen" into Israel to survey "strategic targets" with the intention of attacking them
* The November 2002 suicide bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya
* The failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet leaving Mombasa airport in Kenya
* Plans to attack U.S. targets in South Korea
* Providing financial support for a plan to attack U.S., British and Jewish targets in Turkey
* Surveillance of U.S. nuclear power plants in order to attack them
* A plot to attack NATO's headquarters in Europe
* Planning and surveillance in a 1995 plan (the "Bojinka Operation") to bomb 12 American passenger jets
* The planned assassination attempt against then-U.S. President Bill Clinton during a mid-1990s trip to the Philippines.
* "Shared responsibility" for a plot to kill Pope John Paul II
* Plans to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf
* An attempt to attack a U.S. oil company in Sumatra, Indonesia, "owned by the Jewish former [U.S.] Secretary of State Henry Kissinger"
* The beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl

BTW, he also shot Lincoln and both Kennedys. Confessions obtained thru torture are not trustworthy. It is impossible that KSM was involved in all those events.

"incarcerating someone indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime" How interesting. The Gitmo detainees are incarcerated indefinitely. Without charges, without trials, except for these 6 detainees they're 'prosecuting' ... just in time for the election.

"courts could take stronger measures when a witness refused to answer questions" Uhh no! Not if it would incriminate them, and I tend to think telling where you planted a bomb would be self-incriminating.


"how severe can the infliction of pain be?" Pain = torture. That's simple enough. There can be no infliction of pain.

Any questions?




Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Shower the people you love with love

Some time ago, the lovely and talented Darkblack, before he actually joined the team here, created a fantabulous graphic that we haven't used in a while. Today it springs forth:

From Think Progress:

Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, has consistently voiced opposition to waterboarding and other methods that critics say is a form torture. But the Republicans, confident of a White House veto, did not mount the challenge. Mr. McCain voted “no” on Wednesday afternoon.

The New York Times Times notes that “the White House has long said Mr. Bush will veto the bill, saying it ‘would prevent the president from taking the lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack in wartime.’”

After Bush vetoes the bill, McCain will again be confronted with a vote to either stand with President Bush or stand against torture. He indicated with his vote today where he will come down on that issue.

John McCain: He was against waterboarding before he was for it.

Bastard. McCain is our Douchbag of the Day.

Tortured argument

We don't torture because what others call torture the preznit doesn't call torture, so nobody can call it torture even if it is torture because we said it's not torture....

In 2005, CIA officials ordered the destruction of videotapes depicting the harsh interrogation of prisoners in the agency's secret overseas prisons. CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted that in December 2007 amid a public debate over the use of "waterboarding" on detainees and whether or not the technique — which simulates drowning — constituted torture. At that time, Hayden said that only a few prisoners were ever subjected to "special interrogation techniques," which can include waterboarding, and that nothing was recorded on video after 2002. That claim is now coming under additional scrutiny, in part due to a classified briefing that will be delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this Friday. Lawyers for one current Guantanamo detainee tell TIME that they plan to present evidence that he was subjected to unspecified "systematic torture" that was videotaped when he was held in secret CIA prisons. The lawyers say the alleged videotaped torture took place after his arrest in 2003.

Majid Khan, 27, a former suburban Baltimore high school student, was first seized by authorities in Pakistan, where he said he was visiting his brother. Khan then spent more than three years in a secret overseas CIA "black site" before President Bush ordered his transfer to Guantanamo along with 13 other high-value detainees. Also transferred was alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Mohammed, who had allegedly ordered Khan to research attacks on American water reservoirs and gas stations.

Khan's lawyers are armed with more than 500 pages of top-secret notes taken during recent sessions with their client at Guantanamo; they will use the material to describe his interrogation and detention to the Intelligence Committee. Though details are highly classified, his lawyers claim that he and others were tortured and videotaped, charges that Hayden and other CIA officials deny. On Feb. 5, Hayden admitted to Congress that the CIA had used waterboarding on Khaled Sheik Mohammed and two others. The CIA continues to assert that it does not engage in torture.

Picture taken from article.

Attorney General Mukasey joins the ranks of those using the Nuremberg excuse,"I was just following orders."




Crossposted at Rants from the Rookery.

Update: The White House would consider using waterboarding again:

In congressional testimony yesterday, CIA director Michael Hayden confirmed that his agency used waterboarding on three al Qaeda suspects. In 2006, Hayden banned the use of waterboarding in CIA interrogations. The Pentagon also banned its employees from using it, and the FBI said its investigators do not use coercive tactics in interviewing terror suspects.

But in today’s gaggle, White House said that it may approve the use of waterboarding again “depend[ing] upon circumstances”:

“It will depend upon circumstances,” spokesman Tony Fratto said, adding “the belief that an attack might be imminent, that could be a circumstance that you would definitely want to consider.”

Later, in a press briefing, Fratto tried to distance himself from these remarks, claiming that he only was talking about “the process” of approving waterboarding. “I’m not speculating,” he declared.

Click on the link to watch him backpedal.

Update 5:00: Blue Girl at BlueGirl, Red State says it best:

When the current occupant authorized waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" (call them what they are: torture) he sold America's soul, and illustrated Ben Franklin's observation that those who would trade away their freedoms for a false sense of security deserve neither.

Waterboarding is torture. Period. Full stop.

It has long since been classified as such, and Congress is considering taking up legislation banning the CIA from using it. It is already prohibited under the Army Field Manual.

I am the ultimate Cold War brat. I have some pretty set-in-stone ideas and ideals. One of them is that we simply don't do things like that. There truly are prices that are simply too high to pay. Abdicating the moral high ground out of fear is one of them.

I realize full measure that "American Exceptionalism" was always a myth - but at least we used to pretend to behave in an exceptional manner.

'Cause everytime I breathe, I take you in

This is the mindset of the sociopaths running ruining America:

Intelligence Chief Couches Reference to Waterboarding as 'Torture'

The nation's intelligence chief says that waterboarding "would be torture" if used against him, or if someone under interrogation was taking water into his lungs.

But Mike McConnell declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique categorically should be considered torture.

"If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it," the director of national intelligence told the New Yorker in this week's issue, released today.
[...]
"If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful! Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture," McConnell told the magazine.

A spokesman for McConnell said the intelligence chief does not dispute the quotes attributed to him.
[...]
McConnell said the legal test for torture should be "pretty simple": "Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?"
[...]
CIA interrogators were given permission by the White House in 2002 to waterboard three prisoners deemed resistant to conventional techniques. The CIA has not used the technique since 2003; CIA Director Michael V. Hayden prohibited it in 2006.

Last summer, President Bush issued an executive order allowing the CIA to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" that go beyond what is allowed in the 2006 Army Field Manual. Waterboarding is among those techniques.

For anyone who thinks I used sociopath as hyperbole I recommend you read the definition.

It perfectly describes bush, cheney and DNI McConnel's statements and actions. McConnell basically stated that if it was done on him it would be torture but when done on others it's not.

That's the definition of a sociopath. And bush has personally authorized this torture repeatedly.

And McConnell has categorically stated, just like bush, that the US doesn't torture.

They are lying.

Waterboarding is torture. The US has successfully prosecuted other non-Caucasians for employing it.

They also destroyed evidence of the torture, in a so far successful attempt to avoid prosecution for war crimes. Bush and McConnell and everyone else involved are just plain lying so as to avoid prosecution for war crimes. e.g. "Mike McConnell declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique categorically should be considered torture"




Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

When you decide to torture your enemy

You've already lost the war.

Going through some of my posts, I came across this excellent article by Vladimir Bukovsky for the Washington Post. It bears repeating:

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a "ticking bomb" case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria's predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

Vladimir Bukovsky knows what he is talking about:

Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, is the author of several books, including "To Build a Castle" and "Judgment in Moscow." Now 63, he has lived primarily in Cambridge, England, since 1976.

But everything is okay, because we've changed the meaning of the word torture from brutalizing someone by waterboarding them to giving them a mild bath with soap suds....

(Cross-posted at Rants from the Rookery)