"Abuse"? How About Torture
by Sidney Blumenthal
May 6, 2004 | It was "unacceptable" and "un-American," but was it torture? "My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday. "I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word." He confessed that he had still not read the March 9 report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba on the "abuse" at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Some highlights: "pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick."

The same day that Rumsfeld added his contribution to the history of Orwellian statements by high officials, the Senate Armed Services Committee was briefed behind closed doors for the first time not only about Abu Ghraib but also about military and CIA prisons in Afghanistan. The senators learned of the deaths of 25 prisoners and two murders in Iraq, that private contractors were at the center of these lethal incidents, and that no one had been charged. They were not given any details about the private contractors -- not even how many there are. The senators might as well have been fitted with hoods.

Many of the senators, Democratic and Republican alike, were infuriated that there was no accountability and no punishment and demanded a special investigation, but the Republican leadership quashed it. The senators have called Rumsfeld to testify before the committee on Friday.

The Bush administration was well aware of the Taguba report but was more concerned about its exposure than its contents. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was dispatched on a mission to CBS News to tell the network to suppress its story and the horrifying pictures. For two weeks, CBS's "60 Minutes II" complied, until it became known that the New Yorker would be publishing excerpts of the Taguba report in its May 10 issue. Myers was then sent on the Sunday morning news programs to explain, but under questioning he acknowledged that he had still not read the report he had tried to censor from the public for weeks.

President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other White House officials, unable to contain the controversy any longer, engaged in profuse apologies and scheduled appearances on Arab television. There were still no firings. One of their chief talking points was that the "abuse" was an aberration. They pleaded for belief in their virtuous intentions. But Abu Ghraib was a predictable consequence of the Bush administration's imperatives and policies. "This is the only [occasion on which] they took pictures," Tom Malinowski, Washington advocate for Human Rights Watch and a former staff member of the National Security Council, told me. "This was not considered a debatable topic until people had to stare at the pictures."

Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan, almost 700 in Guantánamo -- no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. The administration has argued before the Supreme Court in the case of Jose Padilla, the so-called al-Qaida dirty bomber, that anyone who is considered a threat to national security, even a U.S. citizen, can disappear forever, never be charged with any crime, and never receive any legal representation.

There has been nothing like this system since the adoption of the Geneva Conventions after World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. The U.S. military embraced the conventions because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped the military's argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants." Rumsfeld extended this system -- "a legal black hole," according to Human Rights Watch -- to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions.

Private contractors, according to the Taguba report, gave orders to U.S. soldiers to torture prisoners. Their presence in Iraq is a result of the Bush administration's strategy of invading with a relatively light force, itself a consequence of Bush's belief in the neoconservative fantasy that Iraq would be like France liberated from the Nazis. The gap in forces has been filled by private contractors, who provide not simply basic services like food but also military and intelligence functions. They are not subject to Iraqi law or the U.S. military code of justice. Now, there are an estimated 20,000 military contractors on the ground in Iraq, a larger force than the British Army. It is hardly surprising that recent events in Iraq revolve around these contractors such as the four killed at Fallujah and the interrogators at Abu Ghraib. One of the companies implicated at the Iraqi prison, CACI International, is today advertising on its Web site for interrogators for Iraqi prisons who will be "under minimal supervision."

Under the Bush legal doctrine, we must create a system beyond the law to defend the rule of law against terrorism; we must defend democracy by inhibiting democracy. The law is there to constrain others, "evildoers." Who can doubt that we love freedom? But the arrogance of virtuous certainty masks the egotism of power. It is the opposite of American pragmatism, which always understands that knowledge is contingent, tentative and imperfect. This is a conflict in the American mind between two claims on democracy -- one with a healthy sense of paradox, limits and debate, the other purporting to be omniscient, even Messianic, requiring no checks because of its purity, and contemptuous of accountability

http://www.thinkingpeace.com/pages/arts2/arts196.html

Dirty Warriors
How South African hit men, Serbian paramilitaries, and other human rights violators became guns for hire for military contractors in Iraq

Barry Yeoman
November/December 2004 Issue

WHEN THE BUSH administration turned over much of its Iraqi security operations to the private sector last year, one of the companies that stood to profit was the London-based Hart Group. Run by former British soldiers, the firm received a large contract through the Army Corps of Engineers to guard Iraqi energy facilities and protect engineers rebuilding the country's electricity network.

Hart Group needed to hire 170 English-speaking guards with military experience -- and it had to do it fast. "We had to recruit people in very, very short order," says Simon Falkner, the company's chief of operations. But Falkner knew exactly where to find many of his recruits: in South Africa, where soldiers trained under that country's apartheid regime now often find themselves unemployable. "They're good soldiers, the South Africans," says Falkner, a retired colonel. "They're tough people, and they're well-disciplined. And there are a lot of them who want to do the work. A lot of people have left the South African defense force since Nelson Mandela came in."

Hart's hiring practices might have passed entirely unnoticed had one of the company's employees not died in a firefight with Iraqi insurgents last spring. The victim was 55-year-old Gray Branfield, a former covert-operations specialist in South Africa's fight to preserve white minority rule. In the early 1980s, the apartheid government decided to assassinate the top 50 African National Congress (ANC) officials living beyond the country's borders, and Branfield was charged with tracking down apartheid opponents in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia. "We saw it as a battle in the global war to fight communism," he said in an interview shortly before his death.

In July 1981, Branfield's team was assigned to hunt down Joe Gqabi, the ANC's chief representative in Zimbabwe and the operations chief of its militant wing there. After two weeks searching for their quarry, Branfield's team located Gqabi at a house in a working-class suburb of Harare. With Uzis and Berettas beneath their coats, they climbed over a fence and waited until the anti-apartheid activist emerged from the house. Then the soldiers jumped from the bushes and pumped 19 bullets into Gqabi at close range.

Two decades later, Branfield joined the war on terror for "the second act of my career." But he didn't fully disclose his credentials. Falkner says he was unaware of Branfield's background when Hart Group hired him. "That would have been of great concern to us if he had been involved in illegal activity," says Falkner. "As far as I'm concerned, he was a bona fide individual and a very fine man. He died protecting his guys, which, frankly, if he was in the Army, would have won him a very high award."

How did a political assassin end up working for the U.S. government in Iraq? The answer illuminates an ominous aspect of what can happen when the business of war is handed over to the private sector.

To an unprecedented degree, the United States and its allies have turned to private companies to fill tens of thousands of jobs once performed only by soldiers, from prison interrogators to bodyguards for high-ranking officials. Several of these companies have even engaged in firefights as part of their work. To Iraqis, the corporate guards are often indistinguishable from U.S. troops, with whom they often cooperate. Yet there is one key difference between the contract soldiers and U.S. troops: With pressure to quickly fill thousands of jobs, many companies have recruited former police officers and soldiers who engaged in human rights violations -- including torture and illicit killings -- for regimes such as apartheid South Africa, Augusto Pinochet's Chile, and Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Some of these firms perform only cursory pre-employment screening, if any -- making it easy for those with questionable backgrounds to slip through unnoticed.

"There is no interest on the part of many firms to do background checks," says Marco Nicovic, an attorney in Serbia who serves as vice president of the International Bodyguard and Security Services Association. "For men who are wanted and have arrest warrants, Iraq is a way out. It's easier, safer for them to start clean there."

The Pentagon says it is not in the business of policing contractors' hiring practices -- and that concerns military watchdogs, who believe this creates a climate where human rights are seen as secondary. "The point is not lost on people working in the private security market that the United States has hired companies with cowboy reputations," says Deborah Avant, director of the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University. In one case, the Pentagon awarded a security contract worth more than $250 million to a British company whose CEO has flouted basic human rights principles from Northern Ireland to the South Pacific.

Richard Goldstone, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, said he was revolted when he learned that some apartheid-era veterans are now employed in Iraq under U.S. government contracts. "The mercenaries we're talking about worked for security forces that were synonymous with murder and torture," says Goldstone, who also served as chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. "My reaction was one of horror that that sort of person is employed in a situation where what should be encouraged is the introduction of democracy. These are not the people who should be employed in this sort of endeavor."



PENTAGON OFFICIALS say they can no longer fight a war without private contractors. The U.S. military has shrunk from 2.1 million to 1.4 million active troops since the end of the Cold War, creating a shortage of personnel during wartime. Yet even as the Iraq war was gearing up, observers warned that replacing soldiers with contractors could cause accountability problems. "We have individuals who are not obligated to follow orders or follow the Military Code of Conduct," Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, told Mother Jones last year. "Their main obligation is to their employer, not to their country."

Schakowsky's fears were realized at Abu Ghraib. Long before the infamous prison became a household name, the U.S. Justice Department awarded the research and engineering company SAIC a contract to help reconstruct the Iraqi prison system. SAIC in turn hired four former corrections officials from the United States who had been involved in prisoner-abuse cases. One of them, Gary DeLand, once ran a Utah jail where a mentally ill inmate arrested for nonviolent disorderly conduct was held naked and alone for 56 days without lights, recreation, windows, bedding, or a toilet -- and without a hearing. Both SAIC and officials at the Justice Department have declined to comment.

None of the four officials have been directly implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture allegations. But the military's investigations of Abu Ghraib did conclude that employees of two other private contractors, CACI International interrogator Steven Stefanowicz and Titan Corp. translator Adel Nakhla, had participated in the abuses. In particular, the report compiled by Maj. General Antonio Taguba noted that Stefanowicz ordered military police to use interrogation techniques that "equated to physical abuse." More recently, an Army investigation concluded that four CACI and Titan employees actively participated in detainee abuse, including assault and possibly rape. The employees received "little, if any, training on the Geneva Conventions," said the report. Both companies have repeatedly denied wrongdoing on the part of their workers.

While the soldiers accused of violations at Abu Ghraib were court-martialed within months after the scandal broke, the cogs of justice have cranked considerably more slowly for the CACI and Titan employees. The difference lies in how the law treats civilians compared to soldiers: While the government can prosecute some crimes committed by civilians overseas, those laws have never been successfully applied to contractors -- though in a case seen as a test, the government recently indicted a CIA contractor named David Passaro for allegedly beating a prisoner to death with a flashlight in Afghanistan. What's more, in a little-known order -- issued just before the handover of sovereignty to Iraq last June -- U.S. administrator Paul Bremer declared contractors "immune from the Iraqi legal process."

Critics -- including some within the military -- argue that the armed services are creating a shadow workforce that can't be held accountable. "The Pentagon is trying to cast a legal fog," says Scott Horton, who chairs the international law committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. In May 2003, senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps took the extraordinary step of requesting a secret meeting with Horton to warn him about the increase in private contracting. "They explained, ‘Look, these civilian contractors are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and they know they're not subject to it,'" Horton says. "This was creating an ambiguity that was ripe for abuse -- and abuse was going to happen."



AS DISTURBING as the prison scandal has been, it constitutes only a small piece of a potentially much larger human rights problem. According to U.S. authorities in Iraq and independent experts, the war has put an estimated 20,000 military jobs into the hands of the private sector. "Private military firms have literally exploded in size at an Internet-like pace, going from a few executives drumming up contracts to over 1,200 personnel in the field in a matter of months," says Peter W. Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The companies are pulling in people they have never even interviewed."

To find workers, the companies went to the deepest labor pools around -- in some cases, the unemployed former foot soldiers of repressive regimes. Take, for example, Erinys International, which contracts with the Pentagon to provide security services in Iraq. Until recently, one of Erinys' employees was a South African named Deon Gouws. During the 1980s, as a member of a police unit called the Northern Transvaal Security Branch, Gouws used arson, bombings, and assassinations to intimidate activists. In one case, Gouws and his fellow officers assembled nine young men in a house and mowed them down with AK-47s before setting their bodies ablaze. "They were essentially trying to create a sense of terror," says Nicky Rousseau, a former researcher for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During his testimony before that commission, Gouws echoed the words of war-crimes defendants throughout history: "I simply carried out my orders and got the job done."

Gouws left Iraq after he was injured by a suicide bomber at a Baghdad hotel; the same attack killed Frans Strydom, a former member of Koevoet ("Crowbar"), a South African counterinsurgency unit notorious for terrorizing and killing blacks. "We were basically automatons," one Koevoet operative told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997. "We would just kill. That's how we got our kicks."

There are no hard statistics on the numbers of South Africans now working in Iraq, though the figure most often quoted is 1,500. Soldiers associated with the apartheid regime's racist and antidemocratic security forces "have practically zero employment prospects" in today's South Africa, says Angela McIntyre, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. "They take what opportunities come along."

And South Africa is hardly the only source of private soldiers with problematic backgrounds. ArmorGroup, a British security firm, was embarrassed last winter when the Belfast Telegraph revealed that one of its Iraq employees, Derek Adgey, had served prison time for collaborating with the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland. When the news of Adgey's record broke, ArmorGroup fired him; company officials declined to comment.

An estimated 500 Serbs who served under the repressive Milosevic regime have also found jobs with private security firms in Iraq, according to sources in the country. "Everyone here knows that hundreds of men wanted for crimes against humanity have left the country to take jobs in Iraq," says one Italian diplomat. "They evaded justice by working for the Americans in Afghanistan, and now they are signing up for work in Iraq." The Chilean press has reported that veterans of that country's military from the Pinochet era have signed up with the security contractor Blackwater USA. And according to research by the Argentine journalist Mario Podestá, who was recently killed in a car accident en route to Baghdad, veterans of Argentina's Dirty War -- in which political dissidents were routinely tortured and killed -- have been deployed to Iraq on private security contracts.

Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood says the Defense Department could theoretically suspend the contracts of companies whose employees have questionable pasts; he doesn't know if it has ever done so. But, he adds, having confessed war criminals such as Branfield or Gouws on the payroll does not necessarily disqualify a firm from working in Iraq.



IT'S NOT JUST RANK-AND-FILE thugs who are being sent to serve in Iraq under the U.S. flag. Last May, the Pentagon handed out a $293 million contract to oversee all private security operations in Iraq to a company headed by controversial former British officer Tim Spicer. Aegis Defence Services Limited won the Pentagon contract, even though it was founded just two years ago and has no track record in Iraq.

Before starting Aegis, Spicer was the CEO of a private military firm called Sandline International, which specialized in helping governments put down rebellions. "It often takes a certain amount of coercion, or more often the threat of coercion, to bring the parties to the negotiating table," he wrote in his autobiography, An Unorthodox Soldier. In one deal that made international headlines, Sandline was hired in 1997 by the government of Papua New Guinea to crush a popular uprising on the tiny South Pacific island of Bougainville, where local residents had shut down a vast open-pit copper mine that they said was destroying the local ecosystem. Papua New Guinea, which derived considerable revenues from the mine, paid Spicer's firm $36 million to invade the island with a strike force equipped with helicopters and rocket launchers. Sandline's official battle plan called for soldiers to target rebel commanders, then focus on "mopping up the enemy." Spicer's plan was foiled when the contract was made public.

It wasn't Spicer's first brush with controversy. When he served in Northern Ireland as a British officer, two soldiers under his command chased down and killed an unarmed, 18-year-old Catholic, Peter McBride. Although he didn't know the men well, Spicer took up the soldiers' cause, saying McBride had "acted like a terrorist" by running away. Even after the courts found the men guilty of murder, Spicer remained the soldiers' advocate and worked tirelessly to get them reinstated in the military.

Aegis officials declined to comment on Spicer's background or the $293 million contract. Pentagon officials have said they knew very little about Spicer's history. "Whatever occurred in the past is in the past," Army Major Gary Tallman told the Washington Post last June, "and we wouldn't necessarily know about it."

But that, critics say, is exactly the problem: By ignoring contractors' human rights records, the government is skirting its responsibility to prevent future abuses. "At the end of the day, we're talking about companies and personnel that aren't in our military, but are part of our military operations," says the Brookings Institution's Singer. "Given the importance of these roles, you'd think the government would want to get it right. But the recruiting and vetting -- and the accountability and jurisdictional questions -- have been punted to the marketplace."

Even in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Singer adds, "we haven't seen any cleaning up of what's going on. Has anyone tried to reform the system?" To the contrary: Not only did Bremer grant contractors blanket immunity from Iraqi courts, but last spring the Coalition Provisional Authority issued the opinion that "disciplining contractor personnel is the contractor's responsibility" -- not, in other words, the government's.

In theory, there is a law designed to impose some accountability on military contractors. In 2000, Congress passed the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), which allows the government to prosecute anyone "employed by or accompanying the armed forces outside the United States" for significant crimes committed overseas. But the law has only been invoked once -- to prosecute an Air Force officer's spouse for murder. "For all the good it's done, MEJA may as well not exist," says Rep. David Price, a North Carolina Democrat. Price has introduced two bills that would strengthen MEJA and require the Pentagon to set minimum standards for civilian employees. But the measures won't do much, he acknowledges, until the Pentagon demands accountability from the companies it hires. So far, Price says, "it's been a very lax process. There's been a breakdown of accountability and transparency. The Pentagon should have taken responsibility all along -- but they didn't."

http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_a...1/11_200-2.html

Hey Noretreat,

I'm glad you got a little more aggressive about this post and this issue. I have been amazed at the way people throughout the country and especially on the progressive message boards, even as they complain about the way the Residential Regime is using the Schiavo case as a political "tool," join in the fray and fuel the flames by participating in the spectacle. The more WE (the people) focus on Schiavo, even when we do so from a critical perspective, the more we focus energy and attention on that issue--and the more we help them distract from some of the other major, major issues.

I doubt, though, that even this story will have the power to "bring these guys down." No one responds to anything anymore--no matter what these thugs do, they seem to have the power to manipulate the media and the minds of the public into letting them get off, distracting people with fluff and BS (think about how the cable news networks sat for hours at a time with their cameras panning the door of the prison the night Martha Stewart was released; but waiting four days to get the "scoop" at Red Lake was too much for them).

I don't quite get it. The election should have been enough to get this entire country outraged. The fact that the Pentagon decided not to try most of the murderers in this fiasco should have been enough to set off alarms. Think about the kind of "evidence" that's being introduced in all these major media events (Jackson, Schiavo, etc.): for god's sake, if we had as much "dirt" on ANYONE else for ANY crime whatsoever in this country as we have against the entire Bush crowd, they'd end up on death row. What about the Halliburton report revealing that the swindle involved not merely 60 million USD, but rather 108 million and the fact that the report was WITHHELD from the public until after the election? No one batted an eye over it.

Instead, what you see on TV is the bizarre spectacle of these whacko right to lifers out there using their CHILDREN (more recently, disabled people) to attract media attention by getting arrested. And most of us in the progressive community play right into their hands, allowing our collective attention to be sucked right down the tubes into the issues this regime deems newsworthy.

In the election fraud campaign, we kept saying..."yeah, but it took a long time for the Watergate thing to come out...." Well, in all of these cases, whether you're talking about election fraud, Gannongate or the torture scandal/s, the cat IS out of the bag. The information is there. The documentation is there. In some cases, it's even being reported in the MSM (as your articles on torture demonstrate). Still, the numbed and dazed public is simply NOT responding. In the Watergate era, two major things were different: A) the media still cared about the truth and so did the people.

The Thugs aren't just "acting like" they're above the law. They have managed to elevate themselves above the law by manipulating the media and the minds of the people. And that is the root of the problem. It's like the regime is testing the limits: how big a crime can we committ and get away with it? And the crimes just keep getting bigger and bigger. The public keeps getting dumber and dumber (dumb in the sense of "mute").

We are in deep doo-doo, that's all I can say. It's what I've been saying since Nov. 3, and every day it becomes clearer to me just how deep that doo-doo is.

The only way this story is going to go anywhere is if the international press and the international community "pumps up the volume" on it--I guess the good part about that is that there we at least have a chance. The international press could have cared less about the election fraud, could have cared less about Gannongate, but....well, Germany DID attempt to try Rumi for war crimes. They failed the first time, but maybe this time...

Dunno. Pretty scarey "expletive deleted" though if you ask me.

Oh, and one more point: I hate to sound like a broken record on the "race" issue, but I think part of the problem with all of these issues--whether it's the election, Red Lake, or the torture issue--it's more about "brown, red and black" people than it is about good ol white folk. It's really sad, but it feels to me like the deep, institutionalized and internalized racism of this country (not this country's gov, this country's PEOPLE) is percolating to the surface here. The perception of the election issue was such that people thought it was mostly people of color whose votes were trashed. Red Lake? Who cares about another ten dead Indians and who cares about the poverty that prevents them from preserving and pursuing their traditional communities? And here, who cares about torturing all these "Arabs"? They're all terrorists anyway, right? Unfortunately, I think America is now showing her TRUE COLORS.

Sorry to babble on about it...end of rant.

The "people" went to the polls in droves to vote against gay marriage. The "people" watch Michael Jackson footage, followed by the feeding tube whack-jobs still protesting.

The "people" ignore the serious problems of Torture-gate. I learned so much from all the posts on this particular thread. Oh what a wicked web we weave when first we practice to.....................

I don't believe the people went to the polls in droves to vote against gay marriage. I just don't believe it--it's what the repubs would have us believe as a way of detracting from the fact that there was NO ELECTION. It was rigged from start to finish. There was no "moral values" vote. It's the same ol trick they're using on the TS thing: a few right-wing fringe whackos are paraded before the press and the public to make it look like their numbers are bigger than they are (same trick Leni Riefenstahl used in the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will).

I think the Schiavo case was worth covering when the politicians started monkeying around. Their abuse of power was of concern to all of us. But I do understand your point about what people consider worth watching.

I expect the public to be slow to pay attention but I am amazed that on a political website that very few people are interested enough in this issue to post a comment. We are supposed to be politically astute yet we do not recognize the legs that this story continues to have. In this case the print media is doing their job but the politicos like us are not. If we don't take it seriously our politicians will not take it seriously. If we start jamming their email boxes and the TV media mailboxes expressing our outrage they will pay attention and so eventually will the public.

For crying out loud this adminstration had a policy that condoned & encouraged the commission of war crimes. You can not get much more heinous than that.

Hey, feel free to "babble" in this thread anytime you want!

I agree that there is an undercurrent of racism. There is also the carefully orchestrated effort to instill fear in the public. They are so afraid that they refuse to pay attention. They don't want anyone to know that they noticed this issue because deep down they bought the BS that torturing people is saving their A--.

We have to get the TV media on this. The print media is churning out stories continuously. It is the TV media that so far has dropped the ball. The only way to get them to focus on this is for policos like us to start hammering them on it. If we are unwilling to take a few minutes to send emails then you are right this story will get no traction. We have got to get the media to cover this enough that the public will be forced to start talking about it. If the media start getting thousands and thousands of emails dogging them for not covering this we might be able to move them on this. It sure in hell is worth trying.

We also need to be contacting our Congressional representatives. We need to make it uncomfortable for them to ignore this issue. So far, we are just as bad as the brain dead public.

The sad thing is in todays world anything is possible. nrns can tell you we had people here in the State of Kentucky that thought Bush was the second coming of Christ. There were people who went to the polls and voted for the craziest reasons but they voted.

Excellent, excellent rant.

I agree! Would anyone else care to rant? I'd sure like to hear it!

Does it feel like Stepford Wives?

Yes!

You could have had camera footage of Green Berets throwing Iraqi prisoners from a helicopter and the Democrats would still have been saddled with a candidate who couldn't articulate his own position about the war or bring a compelling vision to the voters about post 9/11 America.

Army’s Own Documents Acknowledge Evidence That Soldiers Used Torture

March 25, 2005




FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@aclu.org

Government is Manipulating Release of Torture Documents in an Attempt to Minimize Scandal, ACLU Charges

NEW YORK - The American Civil Liberties Union today charged that the government is attempting to bury the torture scandal involving the U.S. military by failing to comply with a court order requiring release of documents to the ACLU. The documents the government does release are being issued in advance to the media in ways calculated to minimize coverage and public access, the ACLU said.

The reason for the delay in delivering the more than 1,200 pages of documents was evident, the ACLU said, in the contents, which include reports of brutal beatings, "exercise until exhaustion" and sworn statements that soldiers were told to "beat the "expletive deleted" out of" detainees. One file cites evidence that Military Intelligence personnel in Iraq "tortured" detainees held in their custody.

"These documents provide further evidence that the torture of detainees was much more widespread than the government has acknowledged," said ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer. "At a minimum, the documents indicate a colossal failure of leadership."

The documents were supposed to have been turned over to the ACLU on March 21, but were not released to the ACLU until late on a Friday of what for many is a holiday weekend. Select reporters received a CD-ROM with the documents before they were given to the ACLU. The ACLU’s practice has been to analyze the documents it receives and post them on its website, thus ensuring easy access to the media and the public.

The documents -- along with more than 30,000 to date -- were released in response to a federal court order that directed the Defense Department and other government agencies to comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case. The documents received to date have been posted at www.aclu.org/torturefoia.

The documents released today include evidence of:

Abuse of a high school student detainee: Commander's report of inquiry into broken jaw of a high-school boy (such that the boy required his mouth to be wired shut and could eat only through a straw). The victim was told "to say that I've fallen down and no one beat me." The report concluded that the broken jaw was caused either as a result of a blow by a U.S. soldier or a collapse due to "complete muscle failure" from being excessively exercised. It found that "abuse of detainees in some form or other was an acceptable practice and was demonstrated to the inexperienced infantry guards almost as guidance" by 311th Battalion Military Intelligence personnel. Personnel "were striking the detainees," and evidence suggested that the 311th Military Intelligence personnel and/or translators "engaged in physical torture of the detainees." It was recommended that no punitive action be taken against the Commander of the Battalion. (See pp. 1173-1280)
Death of detainee with no history of medical problems: Abu Malik Kenami died while in detention in Mosul, Iraq. The investigation speculates that Kenami may have suffered a heart attack. On the day he died, Kenami had been "punished with ups and downs several times…and ha[d] his hands flex cuffed behind his back." He was also hooded, with "a sandbag placed over [his] head." "Ups and downs" are "a correctional technique of having a detainee stand up and then sit-down rapidly, always keeping them in constant motion." The file states that "[t]he cause of Abu Malik Kenami’s death will never be known because an autopsy was never performed on him." Kenami’s corpse was stored in a "reefer van" for five days before it was turned over to a local mortician. (See pp. 1281 - 1333)
Soldiers being told to "beat the "expletive deleted" out of detainees": Documents dated August 16, 2003, relating to an investigation into "alleged ROE and Geneva Convention violations" in Iraq include sworn statements relating to "Bulldog 6" telling soldiers to "take the detainee[s] out back and beat the "expletive deleted" out of them." (See pp. 1584-1613)
Perceptions of chain of command endorsement of "pay-back": An informal investigation into an incident of abuse by soldiers while they were dropping detainees off for further questioning by the "3BCT MIT team" in Iraq. The MIT team saw the soldiers kicking blindfolded and "zipcuffed" detainees several times in the sides while yelling profanities at them. The investigation concludes that at least three TF 2-70 did abuse the detainees and adds that "some of the TF 2-70 may perceive that the chain-of-command is endorsing ‘pay-back’ by allowing the units most affected by suspected detainee actions to play the greatest role in bringing those suspects to justice." (See pp. 1619-1755)
The page numbers noted above relate to PDF documents posted online at http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/032505/index.html.

Earlier this month the ACLU and Human Rights First filed a lawsuit charging Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with direct responsibility for the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody. The action was the first federal court lawsuit to name a top U.S. official in the ongoing torture scandal in Iraq and Afghanistan; many of the charges are based on documents obtained through the FOIA lawsuit. The ACLU has also filed separate lawsuits naming Brig. Gen. Karpinski, Col. Thomas Pappas and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. Details about the Rumsfeld lawsuit are online at www.aclu.org/rumsfeld.

The FOIA lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Jaffer, Amrit Singh, and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur N. Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky and Jeff Fogel of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFre...?ID=17835&c=206

You are correct there. I was extremely disappointed that Kerry & Edwards never talked about this issue. The press never asked a question about it during the debates either.

We can't change what happened during the election but we sure as hell can try to hold the Bush Administraiton accountable for what they did and may still be doing in OUR NAMES (the ACLU has government documents that show they continued the torture even after Abu Ghraib broke in the media).

It's obvious Kerry is not in the WH. Do you have an opinion as to whether or not the country is heading in the wrong direction? What do you have to say about media complacency? Who would you hold accountable for your hypothetical scenario---the Green Berets throwing Iraqis out of helicopters?

If they are not held accountable for what they did and may still be doing in our names, then all of us are guilty too. If we know it happened but we ignore it or believe the lies without asking any questions, then we are not innocent either.

Well, I think implementing the 09/11 commission's findings would be a good start. I don't see what Iraq has to do with 09/11, but it has a lot to do with genocide. You can like this war or not like it but you are pretty hard pressed to stop the brutal regime and thus the genocide from returning if you don't democratize Iraq. I don't like it and the Democrats don't like it; but it has to be done. Kerry knew that and so he did have that position. He just didn't want to articulate that position since it was an unpopular position. Although, I'm sure Kerry would have handled the war a tinge bit more responsibly, but there isn't that much of a difference otherwise.

Huh? You are not saying that if Kerry were President that he would have authorized torturing prisoners are you?

He inspired quite a few. and I wouldn't particularly concider the Democrates saddled. I defy you to articulate Bush's own position about the war or bring a compelling vision to the voters about post 9/11 America. The problem was a lot more complicated than Kerry was a bad candidate. I personaly think he was a great candidate.

You're not going to like this, but I'll agree 100% with this part of what you say.

Now here's what you're probably NOT going to like: my take on it (and I know a lot of people are going to consider me a complete nutcase for this) is: I think the US is currently committing genocide in Iraq (based on the way this crime is defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a convention that the US entered in 1988 when Reagan signed us on to it).

see here: http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm

One reason the Canadian and German efforts to indict Bush or Rummy was that they took recourse either to the Geneva Convention or their own internal national laws concerning war crimes, not to the UN Convention on Genocide.

The way I understand the UN Convention on Genocide, it would take only 5 member nations to "gang up" on the US and go after them for genocide.

Stepford Wives and sons and daughters and husbands: "Dummed Down Domestics," hey, but I managed to get my PLUMBER riled up about the election fraud while he was repairing my garbage disposal. Gave him some deception dollars and lots of good dirt--he's going to share it with his UNION buddies!

I would have to part company with you on this one. In reading the definitions I have not seen evidence of all of the points necessary for it to be considered genocide. That doesn't mean that it hasn't happened, I just have not seen the evidence. I would be interested, however, to see you post the elements and what evidence you think supports them.

Maybe you're reading it wrong: it says ANY of the following acts, not all; even just looking at the second article here, seems I shouldn't have to provide "evidence" that a, b, and c are the case here; d and e could probably also be demonstrated given enough time and persistence (I have neither at the moment)

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:


a- Killing members of the group;
b- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 

Thats what grass roots is all about. Hell the Republicans have been surviving on break rooms and bars for their talking points for years. You know somethings wrong when you have to convince a Union Man that Bush is wrong.

here is some water for the mill.....but not from the USA

WAITING FOR JUSTICE IN GUANTANAMO
For Murat Kurnaz, waiting for justice at Guantanmo Bay is a bit like Waiting for Godot. The German-born Turk just keeps waiting and waiting and waiting. Also: Richard Gere puts in his two cents on a divisive trans-Atlantic issue, and Germany's new best-selling beer.
Murat Kurnoz has been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2001.
A Failure of Justice
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/internatio...,348489,00.html

Within months of his arrest and deportation from Pakistan to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, German intelligence officials began saying the United States doesn't have a case against Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish man born and raised in Germany. Kurnaz was on a religious study trip to Pakistan in 2001 when he was identified as a possible al-Qaida or Taliban member. Like hundreds of others, he was flown to Guantanamo and denied any kind of legal hearing. When he finally did get his hearing after the US Supreme Court ordered that he and others get one, he was simply denied justice. In a report published this weekend, the Washington Post says that declassified papers show that the military panel ignored possibly exonerating information about Kurnaz. The papers quote a judge in a January ruling who criticized the military panel for "ignoring exculpatory information that dominates Kurnaz's file and for relying instead on a brief, unsupported memo filed shortly before Kurnaz's hearing by an unidentified government official." The documents also show that neither American nor German intelligence officials have any "definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with al-Qaida or making any specific threat against the US." (1:30 p.m. CET)

Thank You.

I am SICK of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS on the Hill.
I am SICK of SMOOTHING EGOS of politicians WHO ARE OUR EMPLOYEES. Either DO THE JOB OR GET OUT.

I am SICK of DEMOCRATS who DON'T act like DEMOCRATS.

I am SICK of MACHIAVELLIAN WANNABE BUSH FAMILY MONARCHIES HYPOCRITICALLY TOUTED AS A "DEMOCRACY" or even a REPUBLIC. We are now a FASCIST Government (Hence the EASE the Shiavo law was passed - NO REPRESENTATION OF THE CITIZENS-NONE)

I am SICK of watching JEB and GW and JEB and GW and JEB and GW and JEB and GW a THEY ARE FAT SLACKERS WHO'VE NEVER DONE AN HONEST DAY'S WORK IN THEIR PROTECTED LITTLE LIVES -

I am SICK of BARBARA BUSH PUSHING HER INADEQUATE SONS OF HER SEED TO TAKE OVER THE MAFIA FROM POPPY (CAUSE HE'S JUST WAAAAAAY TOO INTO HIS "DANCIN SLIPPERS" AND SLIIPPPIN' on the COMPANY end .....)

http://www.civilrights.org/issues/enforcem...ls.cfm?id=27967

Alberto Gonzales Confirmed as U.S. Attorney General

By civilrights.org staff
civilrights.org
February 3, 2005

The Senate today voted (60 to 36) to confirm Alberto Gonzales as U.S. Attorney General.

Unconvinced that Gonzales "would independently enforce the law, rather than continue to simply rationalize it, as he did while serving then-Governor and now President Bush," the nation's oldest, largest, and most diverse civil and human rights coalition had called on senators to oppose confirmation of Gonzales as U.S. Attorney General.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines (10 to 8) last week to endorse Gonzales' nomination.

Skeptical lawmakers and advocates had asked for another Committee hearing on the nominee, saying that some of Gonzales' answers to Committee members were not sufficient to allay doubts about his record on torture and human rights.

"LCCR cannot ignore Mr. Gonzales' questionable commitment to the rule of law, his refusal to answer key questions, and his failure during the confirmation process to clearly explain his positions on critical civil and human rights issues," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR).

Since November 2004, dozens of civil and human rights groups, including religious leaders, military veterans, lawyers, and former judges, had expressed their concerns over Gonzales' nomination, citing his role in setting the current administration's policy on detention, interrogation, and torture.

Several groups had outright opposed Gonzales' nomination, and then his confirmation.

"We want American service members who are captured to be protected from torture under international and U.S. laws," said Charles Sheehan Miles, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense. "Under the arguments put forth by Alberto Gonzales, our own servicemen and women would be subject to torture and we would have no recourse to the Geneva conventions."

Most troubling to some groups is Gonzales' record on torture.

"As a human rights organization committed to protecting the rule of law, we are compelled to take what is, for us, this unusual step. This is the second time in 27 years that Human Rights First has opposed a presidential nominee, and the first such action since 1981," Human Rights First stated. "But in a nation committed to observing the rule of law as it is, not as power finds it convenient to be, we cannot accept the President's decision here. We urge the Senate to reject Mr. Gonzales' nomination."

The civil rights community also addressed the importance of diversity in the President's administration.

"The Leadership Conference recognizes the historic significance of Mr. Gonzales' appointment as the first Hispanic American to serve as Attorney General," Henderson said.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund expressed concerns about Gonzales's record, while the National Council of La Raza endorsed the nomination.
------------------------


People sell out ...then the chickens come home to roost.
What will be the next violent video game?
Where will the next imbalenced student masacure his
classmates? Why do young gangsters believe they have
more honor than the government? Duuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh.

NoNo, I like your avatar, and I admire your passion and your energy, and I share your anger. But, as I have noted here and in the prior Kerry forum, the nation's need to focus is not centered on "Abu Ghraib" and everything that that phrase connotes or on any other single-focus issue. There are dozens of issues on which the Bush administration has been allowed to skate free and clear of accountability. A simple review of the threads here will give you a head-start on that list. You've been here a long time too, so I'm not trying to lecture to the choir. You are trying to find a "tipping point" for it all, and perhaps it's here in this issue.

But perhaps it's not...

Perhaps it's in the elections process...

Or perhaps it's in the manipulation of (and lack of integrity in) the media...

Or perhaps it's the fact that this nation has been purposefully misled on a range of major issues...

Or perhaps it's the fact that policy has been hijacked by a few zealots of various stripes...

Or perhaps it's one of a dozen other issues...

Or perhaps it's the whole enchilada...

And I think that's where our collective energy needs to be put... somehow, in some way... by looking at the entire picture of where we are now, and where we were five years ago, and what the next five years looks like.

Whether you talk about the deficit, or a lethargic economy, or rampant under-employment, or foreign trade, or rapidly-escalating national debt owned by countries that are not our allies, or the diminished standing of the US in Europe and elsewhere, or the prosecution of terrorism (or lack of it), or the huge boondoggle that is the Department of Homeland Security, or the ineffectiveness of our intelligence appartus, or our failed execution of strategy in Iraq, or huge costs for military expenditures and an over-stretched military personnel group, or the fact that our foreign policy seems to be heading headlong into several wars, or the failures in our educational policies and systems, or the out-of-control medical cost inflation, or the fact that we imprison a high percentage of black males, or the way this nation continues to rip off and dis-empower Native Americans, or the ways in which we have rolled back any progress on environmental issues (checked the change in weather patterns in your area lately?), or... well, dagnabbit, the list seems endless, doesn't it...

And all of it can be laid to the fact that this nation of ours no longer enjoys dialogue (except perhaps here at CGCS)... Dialogue being defined by Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her 2004 book called "Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End" as "a discussion of the undiscussable".

We do not have dialogue in the press or the TV media... Peter Senge in "The Fifth Discipline" says discussion is closely related to percussion, and percussion is what we have when we hit each other over the head with our point of view, an activity we can catch on most talk shows, Fox News, CNN, et al. We no longer have dialogue in Congress; most members show up only to vote.

Perhaps we should have a national day of silence... so that we can begin to listen more effectively.

But what we need more than anything is an accountability matrix... a list of issues and a scorecard so that we can see just how our Presidency, our Congress and our media are failing us by not having an accountability matrix.

These guys have been getting away with an awful lot for a long time... and there doesn't seem to be anyone, or any single issue, that's going to get the American people to wake up to it, and act on it.

I don't think Abu Ghraib and the torture issues are going to do it (though I wish you all good speed in pushing the issue forward).

On any given issue, there's a counter-move, a counter-strategy, a misdirection play, a coy response, or a quasi-legitimate argument that will hold a little water for a little time...

But I think that an accountability matrix, a look at the whole, can be something that, in the end, cannot be countered.

We've got to keep their feet to the fire on the fact that they are destroying the American way of republican democracy, the American economy, the American ability to thrive (he who is not busy thriving is busy dying), the American spirit, and the American sense of "we".

Abu Ghraib does not stem from these basic fundamental shared values and does not represent me or the nation I want for my children and their children.

But then neither does current policy on one hundred other fronts...

Oh no, I didn't have to convince him Bush was wrong--I just convinced him that bush didn't get elected!

I thought there was an investigation going on about the torture that was being conducted at GITMO of the Afghani prisoners.

I think it was today that I read 1 of them has never even been charged with any crime or allowed to see a lawyer.

This abuse of prisoners has been going on a long time and Kerry and Harkin and other vets like McCain and Hagel have to get this stopped NOW!

I just watched the Acting Assistant Sec. of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor hold a press briefing on Human Rights (C-span). I didn't get to see it from the beginning but there was a question about the torture issue. I was stunned by his answer. Unfortunately, they do not have a transcript on the State Dept. website yet. When they do I will post it on this website. What he basically said was that they thought "initially" that the Abu Ghraib photos would hurt the U.S. in the middle east. But, he said, they have come to discover that it has really only hurt us in other countries, not in the mid-east. He said that the people they have spoken to in the mid-east are not that upset with us. He said that they realize that we are "no different than other countries". He also explained the torture issue away by saying that "our system is working". Those that have committed these acts are being held accountable. He then went on to say that this somehow gives us a "credibility factor".

Watching this man was like living in the twilight zone. The gall of trying to say that what the government is doing with regards to this issue has made us credible in the middle east is patently absurd. We have not held people accountable. We have put on a dog and pony show.

I am just absolutely livid over this.

Sorry, but I can not rationalize allowing them to get away with war crimes because there may be other issues where I feel they are harming our country.

Your accountability matrix will be just as hard, perhaps more so, because you try to get consensus on too many issues. This approach will allow them to discredit your entire premise by poking holes in your weakest arguments.

I want to watch them try to justify torture and murder. I know that they will try to justify it because they have already done it. In principle most people would agree that torture and murder is wrong. What we have to counter is their use of fear mongering to justify their actions.

By the way, thanks for the compliment on my avatar.

The only independent investigation is through the ACLU court case. Congress has not moved to appoint an independent prosecutor.

Is America becoming tolerant of torture?

AFTER the Sept. 11 attacks, we were warned our world had changed. In all the ways we imagined the scope of change, we probably never thought we would condone torture.
But as revelations about the torture of detainees shipped overseas come to light, how else do we explain our strange lack of outrage. We seem to be pursuing a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.

The Abu Ghraib prison pictures were the first indication of a new tolerance for torture. Lawmakers and the public expressed shock and disbelief yet accepted the official explanation that these were aberrant acts of a handful of renegade soldiers. However, military brass had ignored previous warnings of abuse, including reports from the Red Cross. Further, the office of Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel at the time, had written memos advising President George Bush he did not have to abide by the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of detainees. Yet individual soldiers took the rap.

Government officials are doing a similar dodge in response to charges that detainees sent to other countries have been tortured. Bush and CIA director Porter J. Goss denied the United States uses torture in interrogation. Bush said when detainees are sent overseas, the U.S. is assured by the receiving country the prisoners will not be tortured.

Based on the stories of at least two detainees, the assurances were meaningless. According to news reports, Mamdouh Habib and Maher Arar say they were arrested by U.S. agents and sent to their countries of origin where they were tortured.

Habib said after he was arrested in Pakistan, he was forced to stand on an electrified metal drum while he was hanging from hooks. He was then taken to Egypt, where he was made to stand on tiptoe in a room filled with water up to his chin. Arar said he was detained at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on his way to his home in Canada and was sent to Syria. There his questioners beat him and kept him in an underground cell with no windows.

After the Washington Post published a story about Habib, then being detained at Guantanamo Bay, he was released to Australia, where he lives. A year after Arar was arrested, he was released to Canada. Neither man was charged with any crime. Arar is suing the U.S. government.

The two were shipped overseas in a secretive program called "rendering." Critics call it the outsourcing of torture. The U.S. sends detainees to countries known to use torture and receives an empty promise that torture won't be used. Government officials claim because they received the assurances, they are in compliance with United Nations and U.S. prohibitions against the use of torture on or off U.S. soil.

However, other government officials who visited prisons overseas said it was worse than "Don't ask, don't tell"; it was explicitly understood that torture would be used.

In a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Goss said "at this time" all interrogations are legal, raising questions about what went on during the period after Sept. 11, 2001. Even still, he defended "water-boarding", the technique that makes a person believe he will be drowned, as "an area of what I will call professional interrogation techniques."

Experts say torture is ineffective because the information it elicits is unreliable; detainees will say anything to stop the abuse. Further, it puts U.S. soldiers at risk to be tortured if they are captured. On a broader point, the protection against torture is one of the elements that distinguish our democracy. That democracy has already been compromised with the loss of civil liberties due to the fight against terrorism. Now it seems we're willing to compromise the very soul of the country.

Political observers point to the ease with which Alberto Gonzales was confirmed as Attorney General as proof the issue has died down. It never heated up. Where is our outrage?

Brenda Payton writes for ANG newspapers.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/oped/ci_2625330

Friday, March 25, 2005 · Last updated 3:38 a.m. PT

UK panel faults gov't position on torture

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON -- A House of Commons committee faulted Prime Minister Tony Blair's government Friday for not saying whether it uses information extracted through torture in other countries.

The Foreign Affairs panel also urged the government to make "strong representations" to the United States about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

British citizens who have been released from the Cuban base or who were detained in Afghanistan have alleged that they were tortured.

"We find it surprising and unsettling that the government has twice failed to answer our specific question on whether or not the U.K. receives or acts upon information extracted under torture by a third country," the committee said in its annual report.

"We recommend that the government give a clear answer to the question. The government should ensure that it is understood by other governments that the mistreatment of British nationals is unacceptable and will be met with appropriate action."

The Foreign Office said the government "condemns the use of torture and has worked with international partners to eradicate the practice."

"The government never uses torture or instigates others to use torture," the Foreign Office said.

The committee said there were compelling arguments for using information on impending terror attacks no matter what the source, but it said there should not be a general policy of using information obtained through torture.

Amnesty International said it shared the committee's concerns.

"It is difficult to avoid concluding that the Government is chillingly indifferent over the question of using blood-stained information," the international human rights group said.

"We have repeatedly emphasized that information extracted by torture is not only morally repugnant but also totally unreliable and effectively useless.

"The government should make it absolutely clear that it would not use information gained through torturing people," Amnesty International said.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/ape...itain%20Torture

As much as I hate to say it, there are perhaps more Americans than we care to admit who are secretly ( a few openly) thinking: yeah, get those ragheads. I couldn't believe it when I first heard that kind of sentiment in the wake of Abu G., but I did hear it.

Ever since the Reagan era, there has been an ongoing erosion of any sense of morality or human decency toward anyone but "me, myself, I"--in this case, "Me, myself, I" means U.S. There is a perception that "Arabs" violated us, therefore whatever befalls them is their own fault.

Of course, I'd like to hope that there are enough of us left who ARE outraged by this and are still capable of outrage. Considering the way the media works, I don't think anything WRITTEN in the print media will be capable of unleashing the outrage.

Face it: graphite is out, graphics are in. Our collective capacity for comprehending the magnitude of such events without graphic illustrations has been obliterated by this fast-paced, digital, steady-stream visual "culture" of ours.

We need images. Pictures. Video footage. (I recall having read that some of this evidence was found and destroyed). I think it's the only way we have any hope of unleashing outrage over this issue. It's too easy to shake your head and shrug your shoulders over a written account. Without gorey disgusting images we're up a creek on this issue.

I wonder: did the Italian journalist have such images? (I suppose if she had, we'd have seen them by now.)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC30Ak01.html

The Geneva Trap
Sonia Cardenas

March 29, 2005
Memo Shows U.S. Inmate Interrogation Plans in Iraq
By REUTERS

Filed at 8:37 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation tactics more harsh than accepted Army practice, including using guard dogs to exploit ``Arab fear of dogs,'' a memo made public on Tuesday showed.

The Sept. 14, 2003, memo by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the senior commander in Iraq, was released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained it from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

``The memo clearly establishes that Gen. Sanchez authorized unlawful interrogation techniques for use in Iraq, and in particular these techniques violate the Geneva Conventions and the Army's own field manual governing interrogations,'' ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in an interview.

The Abu Ghraib scandal, in which U.S. forces physically abused and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners at a jail on the outskirts of Baghdad, occurred on Sanchez's watch. Gen. George Casey replaced him as top commander in Iraq nine months ago.

In the memo, Sanchez laid out which interrogation techniques were permitted in Iraq, and said some required his prior approval. Some of the harshest techniques were disallowed the next month because of opposition from some military lawyers.

Singh said at least 12 of the techniques were beyond the scope of the Army field manual, whose interrogation rules are designed to adhere to the Geneva Conventions.

The memo also noted that the Geneva Conventions ``are applicable'' and that detainees must be treated humanely.

The fact that the Sanchez memo existed was previously known, but not its contents.

The memo allowed for military working dogs, or MWD, to be present during interrogations, saying the practice ``exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations. Dogs will be muzzled and under control of MWD handler at all times to prevent contract with detainee.''

OTHER TECHNIQUES

The memo permitted ``stress positions,'' in which a prisoner is placed in potentially painful bodily positions to try to get them to talk. It allowed for ``environmental manipulation'' such as making a room hot or cold or using an ``unpleasant smell,'' isolating a prisoner, and disrupting normal sleep patterns.

It allowed the ``false flag'' technique of ``convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.''

A defense official, who asked not to be named, said, ``It's important to note that Lt. Gen. Sanchez and his staff thoroughly reviewed the policy for compliance with Geneva Conventions prior to its approval.''

The official said a Pentagon investigation into detainee policies headed by Navy Vice Adm. Albert Church, released March 10, found that ``none of the techniques contained ininterrogation policy would have permitted abuses such as those at Abu Ghraib.''

The official said the Pentagon ``did not promulgate interrogation policies or guidance that directed, sanctioned or encouraged the torture or abuse of prisoners.''

The ACLU said the Pentagon initially refused to release the Sanchez memo on national-security grounds.

``It is apparent that the government has been holding this document not out of any genuine concern that it will compromise national security but to protect itself from embarrassment,'' Singh said.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld denied that as a motivation, telling a Pentagon briefing, ``If anyone can validate that allegation, I'd be happy to look into it, but I doubt that they can. It sounds like a political charge.''

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/internation...sa-sanchez.html

I don't know if we need images but this must be on TV in order for it to reach the masses. That is why I want political activists to pressure the TV media to start covering this story. They covered the intial photos but everything that has come out since, except for brief coverage about rendition, they have pretty much ignored. It is like the elephant in the room.

The Bush administration has done everything in their power to keep the documents from coming out. They have even gone so far as to consider giving detainees more rights in an effort to use it as a smokescreen so that they can poo poo this story. And we are letting them get away with it.

Since Viet Nam very few Americans have traveled abroad. If the truth were known. most people bge excist today within 100 mile radius of their homes. We have no idea of the world around us the only things that matter to us are what affects us on a daily basis. Most people have no opinion because they know very little about current events so they take the first halfway intelligent theory an stick with it till a better one comes along. It is this atmosphere that leads to the overzealous patriotism, the comments about rag heads, and the payback mentality that folks are in now. They feel we're due one , that what we are doing is payback, eye for an eye.
It's the Rasslin mentality, good old boy, blind justice thing. We've lost our moral compass and this is what happens. Remember years ago when the young girl was attacked in front of her apartment while her neighbors watched, and no one helped, no one wanted to get involved? We should have known then that this was coming, just a matter of time.

In this respect I want my country to be A Lot Different than other countries.

So much for BushCo's "a few bad apples" B.S.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?t...storyID=8029639