| |  July 25, 2005
A nationalist is someone who not only overlooks atrocities committed by his own side. He has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. –George Orwell July 23 2006 -- Deleting torture with a pen
 Solid blocks of black obscure official reports
By Karen J. Greenberg. San Franciso Chronicle
Withdrawal of information has been a deeply rooted tactic of the Bush administration. The urge not to tell, never to reveal, has been at the heart of its approach to government, whether what's at stake is court records, statistics on Iraq or information about detainees....if it weren't for angry, frustrated or horrified leakers from within the military, the intelligence community and the federal bureaucracy generally, we might truly be plunged into informational darkness. The horrors really are your America, Mr. Bush
By Andrew Sullivan
"This is not America.” Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them....I believe him. But I do not believe that this president has ever acknowledged his own responsibility for the atrocities committed by Americans on his watch and under his command. He simply cannot process the fact that his own hand provided the signature that allowed torture to spread like a cancer through the military and CIA.July 16, 2006 -- Rabbis Against Torture
Invoking centuries of Jewish law, hundreds of American rabbis confront Bush
by Nat Hentoff
The drumbeat against the CIA's "renditions"—sending terrorism suspects to other countries to be tortured—and the CIA's secret prisons (both authorized by President Bush) is rising. Also mounting is the insistence that the Republican-controlled Congress at last conduct a brightly lit investigation not only of the CIA's, but of all the torture practices of this government....Among the clergy on the front lines, the most insistent are Jewish organizations. "The Geneva Conventions—which ban torture as a war crime—were drafted and adapted by the nations of the world in response to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. As Jews, we have a special sensitivity to the immorality and costs of torture." January 18, 2006 -- If torture is standard, we're in for it
By Jim Spencer, Jan 18, 2006 Denver Post
Every American should be forced to see the autopsy pictures of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush now on display at the trial of Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr. Theology, International Law, and Torture
A Conference on Human Rights and Religious Commitment
January 13 - 15, 2006 • Princeton, NJ
The goal of this conference is to launch a national religious campaign against torture. Resources for local communities and congregations are being developed and will be made available. November 11, 2005 -- The double standard that underlies our torture policies.
By David Cole, Slate "It's not about who they are. It's about who we are." So said Sen. John McCain, in defending his amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would bar U.S. officials from inflicting "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" on detainees in the war on terror....The coercive-interrogation policy is predicated on a double standard: According to the administration, we can do it to "them" because "they" are different from "us."....The Torture Convention is predicated on the principle that the conduct it prohibits is fundamentally incompatible with human dignity—and all human beings have equal dignity, regardless of their nationality, and regardless of where they are held. [David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism] A Statement on the Disavowal of Torture
National Council of Churches USA and Church World Service Based upon our longstanding policies defending human rights and our affirmation of human dignity as revealed in scripture, the General Assembly of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA and Church World Service meeting in Baltimore, MD, November 8 – 11, 2005, commends the United States Senate for its recent passage of the “Anti-Torture Provisions” which came as amendments to the Defense Appropriations Act of 2006. As that bill now comes before the House of Representatives for action (H. R. 2863), we are deeply disturbed that leaders within our nation’s government oppose legislation which publicly disavows our nation’s use of torture anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. Within the core of our religious tradition are Jesus’ call to love our enemies, his blessing of those who work for peace, and his instruction that we are to do unto others as we would have them do unto us (Mt. 7:12)--a teaching found in other faith traditions as well. Both United States and international law reflect this biblical mandate, a social ethic commonly known as the Golden Rule, by upholding as core principles the right of due process and the humane treatment of all prisoners, even in times of war. As delegates to the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches USA and Church World Service, we find any and all use of torture unacceptable and contrary to U.S. and international legal norms. We find it particularly abhorrent that our nation’s lawmakers would fail to approve the pending legislation disavowing the use of torture by any entity on behalf of the United States government. Torture, regardless of circumstance, humiliates and debases torturer and tortured alike. Torture turns its face against the biblical truth that all humans are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26, 27). It denies the preciousness of human life and the dignity of every human being by reducing its victims to the status of despised objects, no matter how noble the cause for which it is employed. We believe that any reluctance of this nation to publicly disavow torture under any circumstance not only erodes the peace of the world but even the possibility of peace, since it destroys the trust required for diplomacy and other non-violent means to seek peace. Thus, we call upon members of the U. S. House of Representatives to follow the lead of the Senate by approving the legislation before it banning the use of torture by any entity of our government. Furthermore, we urge the President of the U. S. and all members of his administration to support this legislation by affirming America’s long-standing commitment to refrain from the use of torture. Contact NCC News: Leslie Tune, 202-544-2350; Philip E. Jenks, 212-870-2252 E-mail news@ncccusa.org October 6, 2005 -- Senate Adds Ban on Torture to Bill By Joseph L. Galloway and James Kuhnhenn, Knight Ridder Newspapers, The Seattle-Times The Senate delivered a rebuke to the Bush administration last night, adding language banning U.S. torture of military prisoners to a $440 billion military-spending bill in defiance of a White House threat to veto the whole bill if the anti-torture language were attached....Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired Army general, joined 28 other retired senior military officers in endorsing the McCain-Graham amendment....Opposition ... was led by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the National Security Council staff and White House lobbyists. Frist ultimately voted for the amendment. August 2, 2005 -- Torturing Bodies and Language: Words Without Meaning By William A. Cook. CounterPunch. Bush has allowed for torture; he has encouraged it; he has abandoned all pretense to principles that place America at the forefront of nations that seek equity, respect and justice for all the world's peoples. He has done this knowing the consequences America seen throughout the world as a rapacious and racist state and, more frighteningly for our own people, he has granted license to anyone, anywhere to treat Americans in like manner thus undoing what this nation has fought for since the inauguration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention against Torture....It's the American people that are maligned; it's our values that are desecrated; it's our nation that has been placed under this horrific pall by an administration willing to subvert its most cherished ideals. But now truth has boiled to the surface, evidence accumulates daily, the people stir: "Wisdom cries aloud in the streets; in the market place she lifts her voice." July 15, 2005 -- Military Lawyers Fought Policy on Interrogations: JAGs Recount Objections To Definition of Torture By Josh White. Washington Post Staff Writer Three top military lawyers said yesterday that they lodged complaints about the Justice Department's definition of torture and how it would be applied to interrogations of enemy prisoners captured by U.S. forces, the first time they have publicly acknowledged that they objected to the policy as it was being developed in early 2003 July 15, 2005 -- Abu Ghraib Tactics Were First Used at Guantanamo By Josh White. Washington Post Staff Writer The report's findings are the strongest indication yet that the abusive practices seen in photographs at Abu Ghraib were not the invention of a small group of thrill-seeking military police officers. The report shows that they were used on Qahtani several months before the United States invaded Iraq....The investigation at Guantanamo Bay looked into 26 allegations by FBI personnel that military interrogators had mistreated detainees. It found that almost all the tactics were "authorized" interrogation methods and by definition [emphasis added] were not abusive. June 6, 2005 -- Pentagon says no plans to close Guantanamo prison WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Monday rejected a call to close the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects and declined to express regret over five cases of U.S. jailers "mishandling" the Koran there. June 2, 2005 -- Torture War By James O. Goldsborough. June2, 2005 Voice of San Diego Bush's war is stagnant....The one story that won't go away is torture.... It's time Americans came to grips with this fundamental question: Can Bush's war be reconciled with what our nation historically has stood for? The public may conveniently forget Bush's war fought on the cheap and the sly. History will not. June 2, 2005 -- Amnesty International Fallout Reality Check: Who to Believe on the Iraq War and US Treatment of Prisoners? by Kevin Zeese. Throughout history “truth has been the first casualty of war” and this continues to be the case in Iraq. The disconnect between realty and the statements of the administration so far seems to be failing to convince the U.S. public as support for getting out of Iraq is increasing and the popularity of President Bush's handling of the war is decreasing. From Bagram to Abu Ghraib By Emily Bazelon. Mother Jones. March/April 2005 For nearly three years, U.S. military authorities have been investigating evidence of torture at American prisons in Afghanistan. But instead of disciplining those involved, the Pentagon sent them to Iraq May 19, 2005 -- In Their Own Words: Detainees Tell of Degradation of Religious Beliefs at Guantanamo For Immediate Release: May 19, 2005. Contact: David Danzig (212) 845 5252 Detainees held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay told their U.S. lawyers about the use of tactics intended to degrade their religious beliefs in a series of interviews that were recently declassified by the U.S. Department of Defense and were published at Human Rights First today. May 18, 2005 -- Newsweek report is nothing new By Molly Ivins. May 18, 2005. The Charleston Gazette. I hate to tell you this, but the story about Americans abusing the Quran in order to enrage prisoners has been out there for quite some time. The first mention I found of it is March 17, 2004,....The reports kept coming: Dec. 30, 2004, “Released Moroccan Guantanamo Detainee Tells Islamist Paper of His Ordeal,” reported the Financial Times. “They watched you each time you went to the toilet; the American soldiers used to tear up copies of Quran and throw them in the toilet. ...” said the released prisoner....The New York Times reported on May 1 on the same investigation Newsweek was writing about and interviewed a released Kuwaiti, who spoke of three major hunger strikes, one of them touched off by “guards’ handling copies of the Quran, which had been tossed into a pile and stomped on. April 21, 2005 -- From the Top on Down Retired Military Leaders Seek Command Accountability for Torture Former military officials Rear Adm. John D. Hutson (Ret.) and Brig. Gen. James Cullen (Ret.) wrote in this week's Legal Times critiquing as inadequate the latest government report on military interrogation policy and demanding that senior command officials be held accountable for abuses of Afghans, Iraqis, and others held in U.S. custody. As Hutson and Cullen explain, under basic U.S. law, a commander is responsible for war crimes if he knows or should have known about crimes committed by those under his command and does not take necessary steps to ensure compliance with the law of war or to punish violators. Hutson and Cullen have advanced this argument as of counsel to Human Rights First in a lawsuit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of eight detainees who were abused by U.S. forces. The suit alleges that the Secretary personally approved a list of unlawful interrogation techniques; knew that prison guards and interrogators were being deployed without adequate training and yet placed intense pressure on the military to deliver intelligence; and had countless indications over a period of many months that prisoners were being abused and tortured, yet failed to take action to punish those responsible. March 18, 2005 -- CIA, White House Defend Transfers of Terror Suspects By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus. The Washington Post. The CIA and the White House yesterday defended the practice of secretly transferring suspected terrorists to other countries, including some with poor human rights records, and reiterated that proper safeguards exist to ensure detainees are not tortured....To abide by the law, the CIA obtains a verbal assurance of humane treatment from the intelligence service of another country before it transfers suspected terrorists, a practice called rendition. Many intelligence and counterterrorism experts, however, say such assurances are ineffective and virtually impossible to monitor. March 18, 2005 -- On torture, the buck stops in the lowest ranks By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY. Knight Ridder Newspapers Another official report on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq has come and gone. It was the ninth probe into the scandals that first erupted at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and so far all the Pentagon has managed to do is get to the bottom, the very bottom, of the problem. Those at the top, both civilians and military, again have been given a pass when it comes to assessing who was responsible. . . . March 1, 2005 -- ACLU and Human Rights First Sue Defense Secretary Rumsfeld Over U.S. Torture Policies Press Release. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Illinois on behalf of eight men who were subject to torture and abuse at the hands of U.S. forces under Secretary Rumsfeld’s command. The parties are seeking a court order declaring that Secretary Rumsfeld’s actions violated the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes and international law....The men represented in the lawsuit were incarcerated in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were subjected to torture and other cruel and degrading treatment, including severe and repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions, death threats, and restraint in contorted and excruciating positions. None of the men were ever charged with a crime....According to the complaint, Secretary Rumsfeld “authorized an abandonment of our nation’s inviolable and deep-rooted prohibition against torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees in U.S. military custody.” The complaint further charges that brutal and illegal interrogation techniques were personally approved by Secretary Rumsfeld in December 2002. Those techniques included the use of “stress positions,” 20-hour interrogations, the removal of clothing, the use of dogs, isolation, and sensory deprivation. March 1, 2005 -- US 'torture jet' flies from UK By Andrew Gilligan, Evening Standard. An aircraft used by the CIA to illegally abduct terrorist suspects has frequently operated from two British RAF bases. The Gulfstream jet has flown from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire at least twice and RAF Northolt at least six times since October 2002, according to Chris Yates, aviation security editor for the authoritative Jane's Information Group. February 28, 2005 -- It's Called 'Torture' By Bob Herbert. The New York Times. Feb 28, 2005 Mr. Arar was the victim of an American policy that is known as extraordinary rendition. That's a euphemism. What it means is that the United States seizes individuals, presumably terror suspects, and sends them off without even a nod in the direction of due process to countries known to practice torture....More important, it means that torture by proxy, close kin to contract murder, remains all right. Congressman Markey's bill is going nowhere. Extraordinary rendition lives. February 8, 2005 -- CIA prisoners 'tortured' in Arab jails By Stephen Grey. BBC Radio 4's File on 4. A former CIA official has confirmed suspicions that dozens of terror suspects have been flown to jails in Middle Eastern countries where torture is routinely practised, and without reference to courts of law. Michael Scheuer, who once headed the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and left the CIA last November after a 22-year career, said the practice, known as "extraordinary rendition", was seen by the US as a key tactic in its war on terror. January 25, 2005 -- Torture in Iraq Still Routine, Report Says: Detainees Beaten, Hung by Wrists, Shocked by Security Forces, Rights Group Finds By Doug Struck. Washington Post Foreign Service. Iraqi police, jailers and intelligence agents, many of them holding the same jobs they had under Hussein, are "committing systematic torture and other abuses" of detainees, Human Rights Watch said in a report to be released Tuesday....The report acknowledged that Iraq was "in the throes of a significant insurgency" in which 1,300 police officers and thousands of civilians were killed in the last four months of 2004. But it argued that "no government, not Saddam Hussein's, not the occupying powers and not the Iraqi Interim Government, can justify ill-treatment of persons in custody in the name of security." The report deals with the conduct of Iraqi authorities but not that of U.S. military forces at three U.S.-run detention facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. The three sites currently hold about 9,000 prisoners. January 19, 2005 -- Amnesty International to Bush: Human Rights Not Hollow Words [Detailed information on alleged U.S. actions and the adminsitration's justification for them.] The stock response of US officials during the "war on terror" to allegations of torture or ill-treatment – namely that all detainees in US custody are treated humanely and with respect for human dignity – can now be seen either to have been a stock falsehood or else an indication that your administration’s view of what constitutes humane treatment and respect for human dignity differs markedly from wider understandings of such terminology....Since 19 May 2004, Amnesty International has been calling for an impartial and independent commission of inquiry to be set up by the US Congress to conduct a thorough investigation into the USA’s "war on terror" detention policies and practices worldwide....Amnesty International believes that the USA’s detention and interrogation policies in the "war on terror" have flouted hard-won principles of human rights....Mr President, Amnesty International urges you to make the eradication of torture and ill-treatment by US agents, and the USA’s full compliance with international law and standards for the treatment and trial of detainees, a hallmark of your second term in office. January 4, 2005 -- An Open Letter to Alberto R. Gonzales Signed by over 225 religious leaders, including many from the Latino/a religious community, some of whom are evangelicals. Mr. Gonzales describes himself as an evangelical Christian. The letter will be released at a national press conference on January 4, just ahead of the confirmation hearings. See also What Kind of People Have We Become? Opening statements at the Press Conference of Religious Leaders express concerns about Alberto Gonzales. November 30, 2004 -- Rumsfeld Sued for Alleged War Crimes Alleging responsibility for war crimes and torture at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, a human rights group has filed a criminal complaint in Germany against US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials....They said they had chosen Germany because of its Code of Crimes Against International Law, introduced in 2002, which grants German courts universal jurisdiction in cases involving war crimes or crimes against humanity. It also makes military or civilian commanders who fail to prevent their subordinates from committing such acts liable. November 14, 2004 -- Gonzales’ Appointment is a Danger To Human Rights By Joel Wendland. As Bush prepares to send his nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General to the Senate for its "advice and consent," let’s recall who Mr. Gonzales is and what his enduring imprint on history may be. Gonzales authored the infamous August 2002 torture memo for the Bush administration that provided hair-brained arguments for discarding the Geneva Conventions. This appointment affirms Bush’s rejection of international oversight of human rights and signals a dramatic right wing shift. November 11, 2004 -- Bush attorney general pick is Alberto Gonzales WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Wednesday nominated his White House legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to be the next U.S. attorney general, replacing John Ashcroft. May 20, 2004 -- Orders to Torture Editorial. The Nation. The President has known for more than two years that his Administration has been pursuing policies that could qualify as war crimes under federal and international law. In a January 25, 2002, memo, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised the President of "the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," a federal statute. He advised Bush to invent a legal technicality--declaring detainees in the "war on terror" to be outside the Geneva Conventions--which, he said, "substantially reduces" the chance of prosecution. Gonzales went further, telling the President that the war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners"; he pooh-poohed concerns that abandoning the Geneva standards might endanger US troops. May 19, 2004 -- Alberto Gonzales Memo: Paving the Way for War Crimes? Gonzales rejects, without discussion, the concept that if armed people are not entitled to POW status they might still benefit from Geneva III, protecting civilians. Or might be subject to basic norms of decency and due process arising from the Constitution which creates the powers he and his boss exercise. Even stranger is the odd discussion of the War Crimes statute, 18 U.S.C § 2441. Read the full text of the Gonzales memo. August 26, 2004 -- CACI Says Not Involved in 'Horrendous' Iraq Abuse By Sue Pleming. WASHINGTON (Reuters). "Nothing in the Fay report can be construed as CACI employees directing, participating in or even observing anything close to what we have all seen in the dozens of horrendous photos," CACI chairman Jack London said in a company statement....Both CACI and Titan have provided interrogation and translation services to the military. The Army last month awarded CACI a $15 million extension of its work in Iraq supporting interrogations and other intelligence operations.
~ MORE ~ Ending Secret Detentions: A Report by Human Rights First Ending Secret Detentions, a recent report by Human Rights First, reveals a global network of secret U.S. detention facilities used to imprison detainees caught up in the war on terror. Such detentions violate basic human rights, ignore the principles upon which the United States was founded and establish a dangerous precedent of lawlessness. Introduction: ...there are detention facilities that multiple sources have reported are maintained by the United States in various officially undisclosed locations, including facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, on the British possession of Diego Garcia, and on U.S. war ships at sea. U.S. government officials have alluded to detention facilities in undisclosed locations, declining to deny their existence or refusing to comment on reports of their existence. The Plain Meaning of Torture? By Peter Brooks. Feb 9, 2005. Literary deconstruction and the Bush administration's legal reasoning.Has newly minted Attorney General Alberto Gonzales studied the opinion handed down by the Supreme Court last November in Leocal v. Ashcroft? There, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist issued a ringing reaffirmation of "plain meaning." "Our analysis begins with the language of the statute," Rehnquist wrote. "When interpreting a statute, we must give words their 'ordinary or natural' meaning." Bomb is ticking; do you OK torture? by Rob Elder. Opinion.Requiring presidential approval for physical abuse of a prisoner would, whatever the president decided, be a major improvement over the present situation, in which an attitude gets set at the top and just trickles down to the people at the action level, leaving the president and other big-wigs free to deny any responsibility....Wouldn't it be more ethical for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to say something like this: "We detest torture, but in wartime, extreme measures are sometimes necessary to protect American lives. The actions at Abu Ghurayb were a distortion of what we had in mind. Clearly things got out of hand there, and those in charge will be held to account. Even so, the ultimate responsibility is ours, and we accept it." Ethics and the Shadow of Torture by DAVID E. ANDERSON. Dec 3, 2004. Religion and Ethics Newsweekly On February 7, 2002, Bush, in what scholar and journalist Mark Danner has called the Original Sin of the administration's approval of torture, decided to withhold Geneva Convention protection from Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners....Quite clearly the Gonzales memorandum is in stark contradiction to the convention, but like so much else with the "war on terrorism," which has elided into the war against the sovereign nation of Iraq, there has been little or no public discussion of the ethical or moral implications of the decisions taken at the highest levels of the Bush administration Torture and accountability in the ‘war on terror’ A report based on Amnesty International’s 12-point Program for the Prevention of Torture by Agents of the State. Amnesty International. The struggle against torture and ill-treatment by agents of the state requires absolute commitment and constant vigilance. It requires stringent adherence to safeguards. It demands a policy of zero tolerance. The US government has manifestly failed in this regard. Every Human Heart: Abu Ghraib & America By Chris Seiple. May 25, 2004. I served in the Marine Corps for nine years, and there were two leadership rules that I learned and still live by. First, the leader is responsible for all his/her unit does, or fails to do — period. Second, leaders can't expect what they don't inspect. Abu Ghraib is, above all, a failure of leadership. Why are they smiling? By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor. May 26, 2004. The stresses of war can distort morality and draw out the worst in human nature, psychologists say, but sadistic behavior is not inevitable....Two main theories abound on such cruelty: One is that war can make good people callous, even sinister; the other is that everyone already is a bit cruel, and war just tends to bring out the worst of it. US accused of "torture flights" by Stephen Grey. Nov 14, 2004. LONDON: An executive jet is being used by US intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to countries that use torture in their prisons. The movements of the Gulfstream 5, leased by agents from the US Defence Department and the CIA, are detailed in confidential logs obtained by The Sunday Times which cover more than 300 flights... UN Report Slams Use of Torture to Beat Terror by Thalif Deen. Nov 12, 2004. UNITED NATIONS - No country can justify torture, the humiliation of prisoners, or violation of international conventions in the guise of fighting terrorism, says a UN report released here. How We Got to Abu Ghraib by Justin Raimondo. The reality is that it was a lone military policeman, Specialist Joseph M. Darby, who exposed the horrors of Abu Ghraib and without whom it would still be a giant sore festering in the darkness. It was Hersh who broke this story and first exposed the details - and origins - of what the government claims was an isolated incident. As Hersh shows [in Chain of Command], what happened at Abu Ghraib was part and parcel of a larger plan, the work of a secret army of assassins and torturers designed to break the back of the Iraqi insurgency. Abuse at Abu Ghraib, the Psychodynamics of Occupation, and the Responsibility of Us All by Stephen Soldz. May 1, 2004. If I, a single individual maintaining a web page in my spare time, was well aware of the abuses being reported in the US prisons in Iraq, the only way the top generals, Pentagon officials, senior Administration policy-makers such as the President and Vice-President, and U.S. reporters could be ignorant of them is if they willfully chose to be ignorant. Much more likely, they were aware but considered these abuses -- like the ones documented among detainees in Afghanistan, and those reported by the few released detainees from Guantanamo -- to be the inevitable costs of war and occupation, especially, as is the case in Iraq, when that occupation now is opposed by the majority of the occupied. See http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/ORR.htm. Moral High Ground Our actions speak louder than our words. We’ve been torturing folks we needed something from for ages, it would appear, to one degree or another, yet we make it sound like we own the moral high ground. Amnesty condemns U.S. for terror war torture Oct 27, 2004. LONDON, England (Reuters) -- The United States has failed to guard against torture and inhuman behavior since launching its "war on terror" after September 11, 2001, Amnesty International said on Wednesday in a report just days before the U.S. election....The report -- "Human dignity denied: Torture and accountability in the 'war on terror"' -- urged Bush and Kerry to commit to opening an independent inquiry into all U.S. interrogation and detention policies...."The human rights violations which the U.S. government has been so reluctant to call torture when committed by its own agents are annually described as such by the State Department when they occur in other countries," the report said. "Double standards have greatly undermined the credibility of the U.S.'s global discourse on human rights," it said. Soldiers of Fortune -- at What Price? Commentary by Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. LA Times, September 16, 2004 In all, there are about 20,000 military contractors currently working in Iraq for the U.S. government, according to the Washington Post; that's the equivalent of three army divisions of contractors. Soldiers-for-hire like Passaro are often employed (for as much as $200,000 a year) by former generals, who retired to run clandestine operations for profit and who have, in many cases, become millionaires from the secret budgets of the CIA and Defense Department. Bush & Co.: War Crimes and Cover-Up But evidence of war crimes by the Bush administration - notably Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush - continues to emerge. And in spite of Bush's renunciation of the International Criminal Court, many people around the world are clamoring for Bush and his deputies to be held accountable. In the words of Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman: "It is one thing to protect the armed forces from politicized justice; quite another, to make it a haven for suspected war criminals."The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib By Alfred W. McCoy. Despite torture’s appeal as a "lesser evil," a necessary expedient in dangerous times, those who favor it ignore its recent, problematic history in America. They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology that allows the practice of torture, once begun, to spread uncontrollably in crisis situations, destroying the legitimacy of the perpetrator nation....These photos, however, are snapshots not of simple brutality or even evidence of a breakdown in "military discipline." What they record are CIA torture techniques that have metastasized like an undetected cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half century. A survey of this history shows that the CIA was, in fact, the lead agency at Abu Ghraib, enlisting Army intelligence to support its mission.Veterans Against Torture Stop Bush Administration Coverup Declaring that "no one is above the law," a federal court judge on September 15 ordered the government to turn over or identify within 30 days all documents relating to the treatment of prisoners held by the United States at military bases and other detention facilities overseas, including Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib....A web feature about the case, including eight documents the government released on August 25, is online at http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia Three rogue U.S. jailers sentenced in Afghan abuse case Seattle Times news services. Three Americans accused of running a private jail and torturing Afghans were sentenced to up to 10 years in an Afghan prison yesterday, despite defense lawyers' claims that the trial was unfair. Seeking Method in the Madness of Abu Ghraib by Jim Lobe. "The American political system has never been as sick as it is today," says Belgian philosopher Lieven De Cauter, in a wide-ranging interview where he discusses his theories about the "state of exception" in the context of the Bush administration's "war on terror." It's never our fault these days By GEORGE J. BRYJAK Sep 10 National Catholic Reporter Who is responsible for the recent abuse of prisoners in Iraq? The individuals who inflicted the punishment? Their superiors? The secretary of defense? The president? All of the above? None of the above?.... Personal responsibility is a key ingredient of the glue that holds democratic societies together. Honor, trust and a sense of duty are predicated on a consensus that we are accountable for our behavior. The Faith that Supports U.S. Violence: Comparative Reflections on the Arrogance of Empires by Herbert P. Bix. Sep. 1, 2004. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki, My Lai and Abu Ghraib, did not dent, let alone shatter, the conquering Chosen People ideology, what chance is there that U.S. failure in Iraq will? As long as U.S. political and economic institutions elude thoroughgoing reform, and American officials at the highest level enjoy total immunity for their crimes, the historic cycle will recur. Another group of privileged elites will take charge of this imperial republic and, shielded by the U.S. system of political non-accountability, skillfully manipulate the national faith to justify perpetual war.American Lawyer Finds New Evidence of Recent Torture in Iraq Lisa Ashkenaz Croke, The NewStandard . Aug 30, 2004While the latest reports investigating the widely condemned events at Abu Ghraib prison attempt to close the book on the Pentagon's culpability with a somber critique, new evidence gathered for a class action lawsuit filed against two US-based private contractors could prove that the scandal at Abu Ghraib was far from an isolated series of incidents perpetrated by a few rowdy "bad apples" working the night shift during Ramadan. An attorney representing former detainees says his recent fact-finding mission to Baghdad uncovered dozens of cases of physical and psychological abuse, sexual humiliation, religious desecration and rape in ten US-run prisons throughout occupied Iraq....His team has documented abuse dating from July 2003 to as recently as last month, when an Iraqi boy just fifteen years old says his captors at an American facility raped him. "He was told to go on all fours naked and was sodomized from behind," Akeel conveyed the fifteen year-old's testimony. "He said they made him dance and he was crying." Defining and Redefining "Torture": by Noah Leavitt Aug. 24, 2004. During the scandal, the Bush administration issued a few terse statements claiming that the memos were only advisory; that the U.S. government was not making policy based on these analyses; and that its practices were not torture. But recent events suggest that's not so. To the contrary, narrowing the definition of "torture" in domestic litigation now appears to be an active part of the U.S. Department of Justice's strategy.Silence of the doctors Aug. 24, 2004. The Boston Globe. THE DAMAGE to the reputation of the United States done by the abuses and, in some cases, the killings of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq will take years to repair. Now allegations have surfaced that in addition to the soldiers who disgraced the uniform by their actions, health care personnel might have violated their own professional codes. Goodbye, Geneva By Phillip Carter. Aug. 24, 2004. This week, the Pentagon releases two new reports on detainee abuses by American troops.Together, the reports undercut the Bush administration's initial response that these acts were the work of a few rotten soldiers.These two reports will get all the publicity, but it's two lesser-known studies that should trouble Americans even more. Should the 20th-century laws of war change to reflect 21st-century methods of war? Probe sought of US memos on torture By Frank Davies, Knight Ridder. August 5, 2004. The Boston GlobeTwelve former judges, seven past presidents of the American Bar Association, a former FBI director, and more than 100 other legal specialists called yesterday for a thorough investigation of Bush administration memos that explored ways to skirt the laws against torture. The group also asked the administration to release all memos on the subject and urged Congress to probe how Bush officials decided to treat detainees captured in the war on terrorism.Nation's largest lawyer group to debate torture AP. August 5, 2004 WASHINGTON -- The American Bar Association opens its summer meeting in Atlanta today with a scathing rebuke of the Bush administration high on the agenda.Doctors and Torture by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. The New England Journal of Medicine. July 29, 2004There is increasing evidence that U.S. doctors, nurses, and medics have been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. Such medical complicity suggests still another disturbing dimension of this broadening scandal. ...American doctors at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have undoubtedly been aware of their medical responsibility to document injuries and raise questions about their possible source in abuse. But those doctors and other medical personnel were part of a command structure that permitted, encouraged, and sometimes orchestrated torture to a degree that it became the norm — with which they were expected to comply — in the immediate prison environment....The doctors thus brought a medical component to what I call an "atrocity-producing situation" — one so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people can readily engage in atrocities....The Nazis provided the most extreme example of doctors' becoming socialized to atrocity. CACI Defense Contracts Hazy on Civilian Authority By Ellen McCarthy. The Washington Post. July 29, 2004 The role played by CACI's civilian interrogators has been debated since one of them, Steven A. Stefanowicz, was implicated in an internal Army report on abuses at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. The report said Stefanowicz encouraged soldiers to set conditions for interrogations and "clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse." Stefanowicz's lawyer has said his client did nothing wrong. Teaching Torture By Doug Ireland. July 28, 2004 REMEMBER HOW congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle deplored the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as "un-American"? Last Thursday, the House of Representatives quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the United States' most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years.Has America Adopted Israel’s Legacy of Torture and Abuse? By Robert Fisk, Middle East corresondent for Britain’s Independent. The actual interrogators accused of encouraging U.S. troops to abuse Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail were working for at least one company with extensive military and commercial contacts with Israel. The head of an American company whose personnel are implicated in the Iraqi tortures, it now turns out, attended an “anti-terror” training camp in Israel and, earlier this year, was presented with an award by Shaul Mofaz, the right-wing Israeli defense minister. Victim blames U.S. for torture horrors By SHANNON McCAFFREY Knight Ridder Newspapers. Jul. 31, 2004 Canadian citizen Maher Arar was picked up by U.S. authorities at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, accused of being a terrorist and then shipped on Justice Department orders to Syria under a highly secret policy known as rendition. Arar's story reveals much about the Bush administration's hidden war on terror....In addition to going public with his story, he's filing a lawsuit against officials in the U.S. government — including Ashcroft, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and FBI Director Robert Mueller — over his detention, saying officials should have known that he would be tortured if he was sent to Syria....“My view is that it's entirely illegal,” said Georgetown University Law School professor David Cole, who's among the attorneys working on Arar's case. “The Convention Against Torture forbids sending a person to a country where there is reasonable belief he will be tortured.”Report Cites Lack of Training, Supervision in Prisoner Abuse Cases Interrogations at Abu Ghraib were conducted by a combination of military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors provided by CACI International Inc., a rapidly growing information technology company in greater Washington, D.C., whose board of directors has included several former military and government luminaries such as, from 1999 to 2001, current Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Richard L. ArmitageChildren tortured at Abu Ghraib by William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org. People's Weekly World Newspaper, July, 2004A German TV magazine called Report Mainz recently aired accusations from the International Red Cross, to the effect that over 100 children are imprisoned in U.S.-controlled detention centers, including Abu Ghraib.... Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American media has not yet shown. “The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking,” said Hersh. “And this is your government at war.” Abu Ghraib abuse part of larger pattern by Peg Morton. People's Weekly World Newspaper, July, 2004The torture of Iraqi detainees held at the Abu Ghraib military prison is part of a larger pattern of abuse and torture at the hands of U.S. soldiers, U.S.-trained soldiers, independent contractors and intelligence agents around the world. In fact, U.S. Army intelligence manuals advocating torture techniques and describing how to circumvent laws on due process, arrest and detention were used for at least a decade to train Latin American soldiers at the School of the Americas.Why are they smiling? The Christian Science Monitor. May 26, 2004 By G. Jeffrey MacDonald. The stresses of war can distort morality and draw out the worst in human nature, psychologists say, but sadistic behavior is not inevitable....Psychologists, theologians, and a journalist who researched war for years hold that, under certain conditions, otherwise ordinary people can be susceptible to adopting a warped mentality in which they take pleasure in another's suffering - also known as sadism.The Road to Abu Ghraib June, 2004.In fact, the only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed. Detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan have testified that they experienced treatment similar to what happened in Abu Ghraib -- from beatings to prolonged sleep and sensory deprivation to being held naked -- as early as 2002. Comparable -- and, indeed, more extreme -- cases of torture and inhuman treatment have been extensively documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross and by journalists at numerous locations in Iraq outside Abu Ghraib.Prisoner Abuse: How Different are U.S. Prisons? By Jamie Fellner, Esq. The sadistic abuse and sexual humiliation by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison has shocked most Americans—but not those of us familiar with U.S. jails and prisons. In American prisons today, wanton staff brutality and degrading treatment of inmates occur across the country with distressing frequency....When the news about Abu Ghraib broke, the Bush administration tried to suggest it was the work of a few rogue officers. But in over two decades of monitoring prisons in the United States and around the world, Human Rights Watch has learned that abusive officers do not operate in a vacuum. More typically, a culture of brutality has developed in which correctional officers know they can get away with excessive, unnecessary, or even purely malicious violence. In such prisons, senior officials have failed to communicate unequivocally—through training, staff supervision, investigations, and discipline—that abuse will not be tolerated. Military contractors -- Above the law? by P. W. Singer. May, 2004. That private contractors are interrogators in U.S. prison camps in Iraq should be stunning enough. This is incredibly sensitive work and takes our experiment with the boundaries of military outsourcing to levels never anticipated. But even more outrageous is the fact that gaps in the law may have given them a free pass so that it could be impossible to prosecute them for alleged criminal behavior. | |
