QUOTE(Pie @ May 31 2005, 11:50 AM)
BTW- Amnesty International is very well respected, as veritas has kindly pointed out.
And this proves it.
[/color]
And this proves it.
[/color]
Ah... they be a bit credible, eh?
Full Version: Prisoner Abuse News, Commentary & Discussion
Ah... they be a bit credible, eh?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050531/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush
Bush Calls Human Rights Report 'Absurd' By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
20 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday dismissed a human rights report as "absurd" for its harsh criticism of U.S. treatment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the allegations were made by prisoners "who hate America."
"It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," Bush said of the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.
In a Rose Garden news conference, Bush defiantly stood by his domestic policy agenda while defending his actions abroad. He repeatedly pledged to press ahead — "The president has got to push, he's got to keep leading" — despite mounting criticism.
With the death toll climbing daily in Iraq, he said that nation's fledging government is "plenty capable" of defeating insurgents whose attacks on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers have intensified.
Bush spoke after separate air crashes killed four American and four Italian troops in Iraq. The governor of Anbar province, taken hostage three weeks ago, was killed during clashes between U.S. forces and the insurgents who abducted him.
Standing in the sun, sweat beading on his forehead, Bush said the job of the U.S. forces in Iraq is to help train the nation's own forces to defeat insurgents.
"I think the Iraqi people dealt the insurgents a serious blow when we had the elections," Bush said. "In other words, what the insurgents fear is democracy because democracy is the opposition of their vision."
On another foreign policy issue, Bush shot back at critics who suggest his diplomatic approach to North Korea is allowing the communist regime to expand its nuclear program. "If diplomacy is the wrong approach, I guess that means military. That's how I view it as either diplomacy or military. I am for the diplomacy approach," he said. "And for those who say we ought to be using our military to stop a problem, I would say that while all options are on the table, we've still got a ways to go to solve this diplomatically."
Bush said he expressed concerns with Russian President Vladimir Putin about legal proceedings against former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Once the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky was convicted Tuesday of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison following a trail widely denounced as politically motivated.
"Here, you're innocent until proven guilty and it appeared to us, at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial," Bush said. "We're watching the ongoing case."
The president said he has questioned whether the case shows a backsliding away from the rule of law and democracy in Russia and said it will "be interesting to see" how Khodorkovsky's expected appeal is handled by the government.
He said it was a "reasonable decision" to allow Iran to apply for WTO membership as a way to advance diplomatic discussions with Europe on Iran's nuclear program.
On the Amnesty International report, Bush said, "It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of the allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America."
The president opened the news conference by urging Congress to pass his stalled energy legislation, restrain the growth of government spending, approve the Central American Free Trade Agreement and overhaul Social Security with a partial privatization plan.
Despite democratic opposition and Republican skittishness about his plans for Social Security, he said he would push forward. "It's like water cutting through a rock. I'm going to keep working and working and working," he said.
"...The people are watching Washington and nothing is happening. Except you've got a president who's talking about the issue and a president who's going to keep talking about the issue until we get people to the table."
He declared that the economy is strong, with 3.5 million jobs in two years and an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent. "Obviously, these are hopeful signs, but Congress can make sure the signs remain hopeful," he said in a five-minute opening statement in the Rose Garden.
After a bruising week on Capitol Hill, Bush urged both political parties to "set aside partisan differences" and work together.
Bush did not challenge the premise of a question about the Supreme Court — that he will soon have a vacancy to fill on the aging court. He did pledge to consult with Congress about his nominee or nominees at "an appropriate time," though he didn't say how early in the process those talks would come.
Turning to the controversial issue of embryonic stem cell research, Bush said that the extra embryos created during fertility treatments — estimated to now number around 400,000 — should be adopted.
"There's an alternative to the destruction of life," he said. "But the stem cell issue is really one of federal funding, that's the issue before us, and that is whether or not we use taxpayers' money to destroy life. ... I don't believe we should."
Though he did not mention tax cuts in his opening argument, Bush said he still wants Congress to make his first-term cuts permanent. He also pledged not to give up on Social Security reform, despite intense opposition on Capitol Hill. "The easy path is to say, `Oh, we don't have a problem. Let's ignore it -- yet again'."
On a lighter note, Bush said he was comfortable with the decision by his staff and Secret Service not to notify him when the White House and Congress were evacuated in May because of an errant airplane.
Noting that his wife, Laura, has said he should have been told of the potential threat, the president joked, "She often disagrees with me."
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Bush Calls Human Rights Report 'Absurd' By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
20 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday dismissed a human rights report as "absurd" for its harsh criticism of U.S. treatment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the allegations were made by prisoners "who hate America."
"It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," Bush said of the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.
In a Rose Garden news conference, Bush defiantly stood by his domestic policy agenda while defending his actions abroad. He repeatedly pledged to press ahead — "The president has got to push, he's got to keep leading" — despite mounting criticism.
With the death toll climbing daily in Iraq, he said that nation's fledging government is "plenty capable" of defeating insurgents whose attacks on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers have intensified.
Bush spoke after separate air crashes killed four American and four Italian troops in Iraq. The governor of Anbar province, taken hostage three weeks ago, was killed during clashes between U.S. forces and the insurgents who abducted him.
Standing in the sun, sweat beading on his forehead, Bush said the job of the U.S. forces in Iraq is to help train the nation's own forces to defeat insurgents.
"I think the Iraqi people dealt the insurgents a serious blow when we had the elections," Bush said. "In other words, what the insurgents fear is democracy because democracy is the opposition of their vision."
On another foreign policy issue, Bush shot back at critics who suggest his diplomatic approach to North Korea is allowing the communist regime to expand its nuclear program. "If diplomacy is the wrong approach, I guess that means military. That's how I view it as either diplomacy or military. I am for the diplomacy approach," he said. "And for those who say we ought to be using our military to stop a problem, I would say that while all options are on the table, we've still got a ways to go to solve this diplomatically."
Bush said he expressed concerns with Russian President Vladimir Putin about legal proceedings against former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Once the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky was convicted Tuesday of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison following a trail widely denounced as politically motivated.
"Here, you're innocent until proven guilty and it appeared to us, at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial," Bush said. "We're watching the ongoing case."
The president said he has questioned whether the case shows a backsliding away from the rule of law and democracy in Russia and said it will "be interesting to see" how Khodorkovsky's expected appeal is handled by the government.
He said it was a "reasonable decision" to allow Iran to apply for WTO membership as a way to advance diplomatic discussions with Europe on Iran's nuclear program.
On the Amnesty International report, Bush said, "It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of the allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America."
The president opened the news conference by urging Congress to pass his stalled energy legislation, restrain the growth of government spending, approve the Central American Free Trade Agreement and overhaul Social Security with a partial privatization plan.
Despite democratic opposition and Republican skittishness about his plans for Social Security, he said he would push forward. "It's like water cutting through a rock. I'm going to keep working and working and working," he said.
"...The people are watching Washington and nothing is happening. Except you've got a president who's talking about the issue and a president who's going to keep talking about the issue until we get people to the table."
He declared that the economy is strong, with 3.5 million jobs in two years and an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent. "Obviously, these are hopeful signs, but Congress can make sure the signs remain hopeful," he said in a five-minute opening statement in the Rose Garden.
After a bruising week on Capitol Hill, Bush urged both political parties to "set aside partisan differences" and work together.
Bush did not challenge the premise of a question about the Supreme Court — that he will soon have a vacancy to fill on the aging court. He did pledge to consult with Congress about his nominee or nominees at "an appropriate time," though he didn't say how early in the process those talks would come.
Turning to the controversial issue of embryonic stem cell research, Bush said that the extra embryos created during fertility treatments — estimated to now number around 400,000 — should be adopted.
"There's an alternative to the destruction of life," he said. "But the stem cell issue is really one of federal funding, that's the issue before us, and that is whether or not we use taxpayers' money to destroy life. ... I don't believe we should."
Though he did not mention tax cuts in his opening argument, Bush said he still wants Congress to make his first-term cuts permanent. He also pledged not to give up on Social Security reform, despite intense opposition on Capitol Hill. "The easy path is to say, `Oh, we don't have a problem. Let's ignore it -- yet again'."
On a lighter note, Bush said he was comfortable with the decision by his staff and Secret Service not to notify him when the White House and Congress were evacuated in May because of an errant airplane.
Noting that his wife, Laura, has said he should have been told of the potential threat, the president joked, "She often disagrees with me."
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Amnesty International is respected for promoting human rights as a cause in itself as opposed to exploiting the issue for political reasons. But is it likely that any country where Bush Administration figures are likely to go would arrest them? Are there any experts in international law here?
Jesus said i wad doing da righd ding by invading da country and beating the piss out of dem dam towel heads!
i swear jesusu toled me to!
jesus told me to have a crusade and kill all dem towel heads!
see the prolem here is this,
A) our frealess leader is a freaking morn!
51% of all americans think that he is doing a dam good job!C) that 51% also agree that yah we should kill all dem towel heads!
This is the biggest load of double-speak I've ever seen. I wouldn't even know where to start criticizing it -- everything said was garbage.
"The president has got to push, he's got to keep leading" — despite mounting criticism and our right proof that he is a freaking moron!
"Ide be a moron! Ide be plenty smart! my mom told me id plenty smart to be president!"
"Ide be a moron! Ide be plenty smart! my mom told me id plenty smart to be president!"
Failing a good argument he attacks the sources of the report as "America haters". (This is the same Amnesty International which detailed how horrible Saddam was. So did they go to "Iraq haters" whom we can easily dismiss.) The sad thing is this line will probably play well to the 40% of the country that seems (for the moment, anyway) to be squarely in Bush's corner.
Of course they are wrong and OJs innocent, there was no spot on the blue dress, and pigs fly.
Cheney offended by Amnesty criticism
Rights group accuses U.S. of violations at Guantanamo Bay
Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Posted: 5:13 AM EDT (0913 GMT)
Vice President Cheney: "I think these people have been well treated, treated humanely and decently."
Image:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday he was offended by Amnesty International's condemnation of the United States for what it called "serious human rights violations" at Guantanamo Bay.
"For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously," he said in an interview that aired Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live."
Amnesty International was scathing last week in its criticism of the way the United States has run the detention center at its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"We have documented that the U.S. government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of the odious human rights violation," William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said Wednesday.
On its Web site, the London, England-based human rights group says: "As evidence of torture and widespread cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment mounts, it is more urgent than ever that the U.S. government bring the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and any other facilities it is operating outside the USA into full compliance with international law and standards. The only alternative is to close them down."
The vice president said the United States has freed millions of people from oppression.
"I think the fact of the matter is, the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world," he said.
"Just in this administration, we've liberated 50 million people from the Taliban in Afghanistan and from Saddam Hussein in Iraq, two terribly repressive regimes that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their own people."
Cheney denied American wrongdoing at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, which Amnesty International compared to a "gulag."
"Guantanamo's been operated, I think, in a very sane and sound fashion by the U.S. military. ... I think these people have been well treated, treated humanely and decently," Cheney said. "Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment.
"But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released ... to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated."
Schulz responded to Cheney's comments: "It doesn't matter whether he takes Amnesty International seriously.
"He doesn't take torture seriously; he doesn't take the Geneva Convention seriously; he doesn't take due process rights seriously; and he doesn't take international law seriously.
"And that is more important than whether he takes Amnesty International seriously."
On Thursday, the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention center said an investigation had identified five incidents in which the Quran appears to have been mishandled by his personnel.
But Brig. Gen. Jay Hood said he has found "no credible evidence" that personnel at the military prison flushed a Quran in a toilet. (Full story)
On the issue of Iraq, Cheney told King that he believes the insurgency there is "in the last throes." He also predicted the fighting would end before the Bush administration leaves office. (Full story)
Cheney offended by Amnesty criticism
Rights group accuses U.S. of violations at Guantanamo Bay
Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Posted: 5:13 AM EDT (0913 GMT)
Vice President Cheney: "I think these people have been well treated, treated humanely and decently."
Image:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday he was offended by Amnesty International's condemnation of the United States for what it called "serious human rights violations" at Guantanamo Bay.
"For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously," he said in an interview that aired Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live."
Amnesty International was scathing last week in its criticism of the way the United States has run the detention center at its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"We have documented that the U.S. government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of the odious human rights violation," William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said Wednesday.
On its Web site, the London, England-based human rights group says: "As evidence of torture and widespread cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment mounts, it is more urgent than ever that the U.S. government bring the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and any other facilities it is operating outside the USA into full compliance with international law and standards. The only alternative is to close them down."
The vice president said the United States has freed millions of people from oppression.
"I think the fact of the matter is, the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world," he said.
"Just in this administration, we've liberated 50 million people from the Taliban in Afghanistan and from Saddam Hussein in Iraq, two terribly repressive regimes that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their own people."
Cheney denied American wrongdoing at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, which Amnesty International compared to a "gulag."
"Guantanamo's been operated, I think, in a very sane and sound fashion by the U.S. military. ... I think these people have been well treated, treated humanely and decently," Cheney said. "Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment.
"But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released ... to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated."
Schulz responded to Cheney's comments: "It doesn't matter whether he takes Amnesty International seriously.
"He doesn't take torture seriously; he doesn't take the Geneva Convention seriously; he doesn't take due process rights seriously; and he doesn't take international law seriously.
"And that is more important than whether he takes Amnesty International seriously."
On Thursday, the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention center said an investigation had identified five incidents in which the Quran appears to have been mishandled by his personnel.
But Brig. Gen. Jay Hood said he has found "no credible evidence" that personnel at the military prison flushed a Quran in a toilet. (Full story)
On the issue of Iraq, Cheney told King that he believes the insurgency there is "in the last throes." He also predicted the fighting would end before the Bush administration leaves office. (Full story)
Joe Red Neck
"Amnesty international! arenty dey a bunch of commy terrorist faggots!
dem towel loving faggots! those no good commy doo gooders!"
ah the 51% who love our frearless leader!
looking good america looking good!
"Amnesty international! arenty dey a bunch of commy terrorist faggots!
dem towel loving faggots! those no good commy doo gooders!"
ah the 51% who love our frearless leader!
looking good america looking good!
QUOTE
President Bush on Tuesday dismissed a human rights report as "absurd" for its harsh criticism of U.S. treatment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the allegations were made by prisoners "who hate America."
If they didn't hate America before, they surely do after a stint in Gitmo.
QUOTE
On the issue of Iraq, Cheney told King that he believes the insurgency there is "in the last throes." He also predicted the fighting would end before the Bush administration leaves office. (Full story)
Gen. Westmoreland, on the Viet Nam War "There is a light at the end of the tunnel"
QUOTE
Turning to the controversial issue of embryonic stem cell research, Bush said that the extra embryos created during fertility treatments — estimated to now number around 400,000 — should be adopted.
I hope every good Religious Right-winger adopts one. Let them pay $200,000 for each child till the're 18.
That would cost $ 80,000,000,000 or $ 4,444,444,444 /Yr. (Not including inflation)
This is to just to age 18 (not including college).
C'mon you Religious Right-ers Adopt away. Step Up Boys and Girls get your children from frozen invetro banks.
Bush - GET REAL!
Hey maybe we could get a Tax Break for Raising Invetro Eggs instead of having our own children ... what a concept!
Hey Georgie Boy...
Can you spell...
D - E - L - U - S - I - O - N - A - L
Somebody get the megalomaniac to Psych for testing.... he's living in an alternate universe.
Can you spell...
D - E - L - U - S - I - O - N - A - L
Somebody get the megalomaniac to Psych for testing.... he's living in an alternate universe.
Bush's mind is more warped than we'd possibly be able to give him credit to. He can't hide the horrendous photos. Imagine the cover-ups his administration would be doing if he's in total and absolute control of the media.
Bush lies; the faith of America dies! Bush is an incompetent President whos schemes, over and over again, to cover up his lies! America will no longer accept his deception. His policies and tactics are destroying America's dignity, honor, truth, pride and liberty. America must only support the truth! That's the American Justice we salute to!
Bush lies; the faith of America dies! Bush is an incompetent President whos schemes, over and over again, to cover up his lies! America will no longer accept his deception. His policies and tactics are destroying America's dignity, honor, truth, pride and liberty. America must only support the truth! That's the American Justice we salute to!
I can see it now ... The invetro popsicle bank visiting every Southern State's baptist churches ...
This weeks Specials:
Frozen Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld eggs. A Master Race Apears ... LOL ...
SICK
This weeks Specials:
Frozen Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld eggs. A Master Race Apears ... LOL ...
SICK
http://www.alternet.org/rights/22118/
When Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last year, he was asked whether he "ordered or approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise, and inducing fear as an interrogation method for a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison."
Sanchez, who was head of the Pentagon's Combined Joint Task Force-7 in Iraq, swore the answer was no. Under oath, he told the Senators he "never approved any of those measures to be used."
But a document the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) obtained from the Pentagon flat out contradicts Sanchez's testimony. It's a memorandum entitled "CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy," dated September 14, 2003. In it, Sanchez approved several methods designed for "significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee." These included "sleep management"; "yelling, loud music, and light control: used to create fear, disorient detainee, and prolong capture shock"; and "presence of military working dogs: exploits Arab fear of dogs."
On March 30, the ACLU wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, urging him "to open an investigation into whether General Ricardo A. Sanchez committed perjury in his sworn testimony."
The problem is, Gonzales may himself have committed perjury in his Congressional testimony this January. According to a March 6 article in The New York Times, Gonzales submitted written testimony that said: "The policy of the United States is not to transfer individuals to countries where we believe they likely will be tortured, whether those individuals are being transferred from inside or outside the United States." He added that he was "not aware of anyone in the executive branch authorizing any transfer of a detainee in violation of that policy."
"That's a clear, absolute lie," says Michael Ratner, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is suing Administration officials for their involvement in the torture scandal. "The Administration has a policy of sending people to countries where there is a likelihood that they will be tortured."
The New York Times article backs up Ratner's claim. It says "a still-classified directive signed by President Bush within days of the September 11 attacks" gave the CIA broad authority to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogations. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International estimate that the United States has transferred between 100 and 150 detainees to countries notorious for torture.
So Gonzales may not be the best person to evaluate the allegation of perjury against Sanchez.
But going after Sanchez or Gonzales for perjury is the least of it. Sanchez may be personally culpable for war crimes and torture, according to Human Rights Watch. And Gonzales himself was one of the legal architects of the torture policies. As such, he may have been involved in "a conspiracy to immunize U.S. agents from criminal liability for torture and war crimes under U.S. law," according to Amnesty International's recent report: "Guantánamo and Beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power."As White House Counsel, Gonzales advised President Bush to not apply Geneva Convention protections to detainees captured in Afghanistan, in part because this "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote in his January 25, 2002, memo to the President.
Gonzales's press office refused to provide comment after several requests from The Progressive. In his Senate confirmation testimony, Gonzales said, "I want to make very clear that I am deeply committed to the rule of law. I have a deep and abiding commitment to the fundamental American principle that we are a nation of laws, and not of men."
Pentagon spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel John Skinner says the ACLU's suggestion that Sanchez committed perjury is "absolutely ridiculous." In addition, Skinner pointed to a recent Army inspector general report that looked into Sanchez's role. "Every senior-officer allegation was formally investigated," the Army said in a May 5 summary. Sanchez was investigated, it said, for "dereliction in the performance of duties pertaining to detention and interrogation operations" and for "improperly communicating interrogation policies." The inspector general "found each of the allegations unsubstantiated."
The Bush Administration's legal troubles don't end with Sanchez or Gonzales. They go right to the top: to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush himself. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA say there is "prima facie" evidence against Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture. And Amnesty International USA says there is also "prima facie" evidence against Bush for war crimes and torture. (According to Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, "prima facie evidence" is "evidence sufficient to establish a fact or to raise a presumption of fact unless rebutted.")
Amnesty International USA has even taken the extraordinary step of calling on officials in other countries to apprehend Bush and Rumsfeld and other high-ranking members of the Administration who have played a part in the torture scandal.
Foreign governments should "uphold their obligations under international law by investigating U.S. officials implicated in the development or implementation of interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment," the group said in a May 25 statement. William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, added, "If the United States permits the architects of torture policy to get off scot-free, then other nations will be compelled" to take action.
The Geneva Conventions and the torture treaty "place a legally binding obligation on states that have ratified them to exercise universal jurisdiction over persons accused of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions," Amnesty International USA said. "If anyone suspected of involvement in the U.S. torture scandal visits or transits through foreign territories, governments could take legal steps to ensure that such individuals are investigated and charged with applicable crimes."
When these two leading human rights organizations make such bold claims about the President and the Secretary of Defense, we need to take the question of executive criminality seriously.
And we have to ask ourselves, where is the accountability? Who has the authority to ascertain whether these high officials committed war crimes and torture, and if they did, to bring them to justice?
The independent counsel law is no longer on the books, so that can't be relied on. Attorney General Gonzales is not about to investigate himself, Rumsfeld, or his boss. And Republicans who control Congress have shown no interest in pursuing the torture scandal, much less drawing up bills of impeachment.
Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, the American Bar Association, and Human Rights First (formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) have joined in a call for a special prosecutor. But that decision is up to Gonzales and ultimately Bush.
"It's a complete joke" to expect Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor, concedes Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
John Sifton, Afghanistan specialist and military affairs researcher for Human Rights Watch, is not so sure. "Do I think this would happen right now? No," he says. "But in the middle of the Watergate scandal, very few people thought the President would resign." If more information comes out, and if the American public demands an investigation, and if there is a change in the control of the Senate, Sifton believes Gonzales may end up with little choice.
Human Rights Watch and other groups are also calling for Congress to appoint an independent commission, similar to the 9/11 one, to investigate the torture scandal.
"Unless a special counsel or an independent commission are named, and those who designed or authorized the illegal policies are held to account, all the protestations of 'disgust' at the Abu Ghraib photos by President George W. Bush and others will be meaningless," concludes Human Rights Watch's April report "Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees."
But even as it denounces the "substantial impunity that has prevailed until now," Human Rights Watch is not sanguine about the likelihood of such inquiries. "There are obviously steep political obstacles in the way of investigating a sitting Defense Secretary," it notes in its report.
By not pursuing senior officials who may have been involved in ordering war crimes or torture, the United States may be further violating international law, according to Human Rights Watch. "Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, whenever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction," says the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The Geneva Conventions have a similar requirement.
Stymied by the obstacles along the customary routes of accountability, the ACLU and Human Rights First are suing Rumsfeld in civil court on behalf of plaintiffs who have been victims of torture. The Center for Constitutional Rights is suing on behalf of a separate group of clients. The center also filed a criminal complaint in Germany against Rumsfeld and Gonzales, along with nine others. The center argued that Germany was "a court of last resort," since "the U.S. government is not willing to open an investigation into these allegations against these officials." The case was dismissed.
Amnesty International's call for foreign countries to nab Rumsfeld and Bush also seems unlikely to be heeded any time soon. How, physically, could another country arrest Bush, for instance? And which country would want to face the wrath of Washington for doing so?
But that we have come this far--where the only option for justice available seems to be to rely on officials of other governments to apprehend our own--is a damning indictment in and of itself.
The case against Rumsfeld may be the most substantial of all. While "expressing no opinion about the ultimate guilt or innocence" of Rumsfeld, Human Rights Watch is urging his prosecution under the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Anti-Torture Act of 1996. Under these statutes, a "war crime" is any "grave breach" of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment," as well as torture and murder. A "grave breach," according to U.S. law, includes "willful killing, torture, or inhuman treatment of prisoners of war and of other 'protected persons,' " Human Rights Watch explains in "Getting Away with Torture?"
Rumsfeld faces jeopardy for being head of the Defense Department when those directly under him committed grave offenses. And he may be liable for actions he himself undertook.
"Secretary Rumsfeld may bear legal liability for war crimes and torture by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo under the doctrine of 'command responsibility'--the legal principle that holds a superior responsible for crimes committed by his subordinates when he knew or should have known that they were being committed but fails to take reasonable measures to stop them," Human Rights Watch says in its report.
But Rumsfeld's potential liability may be more direct than simply being the guy in charge who didn't stop the torture and mistreatment once he learned about it.
First of all, when the initial reports of prisoner mistreatment came in, he mocked the concerns of human rights groups as "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation." He also asserted that "unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention," even though, as Human Rights Watch argues, "the Geneva Conventions provide explicit protections to all persons captured in an international armed conflict, even if they are not entitled to POW status."
Secondly, he himself issued a list of permissible interrogation techniques in a December 2, 2002, directive that likely violated the Geneva Conventions, according to Human Rights Watch. Among those techniques: "The use of stress positions (like standing) for a maximum of four hours." On the directive, Rumsfeld, incidentally, added in his own handwriting next to this technique: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" He also included the following techniques: "removal of all comfort items (including religious items)," "deprivation of light and auditory stimuli," "isolation up to 30 days," and "using detainees' individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress."
On January 15, 2003, Rumsfeld rescinded this directive after the Navy registered its adamant objections. If, during the six weeks that Rumsfeld's techniques were official Pentagon policy at Guantánamo, soldiers mistreated or tortured prisoners using his approved techniques, then "Rumsfeld could potentially bear direct criminal responsibility, as opposed to command responsibility," says Human Rights Watch.
Rumsfeld may also bear direct responsibility for the torture or abuse of two other prisoners, says Human Rights Watch, citing the Church Report. (This report, one of Rumsfeld's many internal investigations, was conducted by the Navy Inspector General Vice Admiral Albert Church.) "The Secretary of Defense approved specific interrogation plans for two 'high-value detainees' " at Guantánamo, the Church Report noted. Those plans, it added, "employed several of the counter resistance techniques found in the December 2, 2002, [policy]. . . . These interrogations were sufficiently aggressive that they highlighted the difficult question of precisely defining the boundaries of humane treatment of detainees."
And Rumsfeld may be in legal trouble for hiding detainees from the Red Cross. "Secretary Rumsfeld has publicly admitted that . . . he ordered an Iraqi national held in Camp Cropper, a high security detention center in Iraq, to be kept off the prison's rolls and not presented to the International Committee of the Red Cross," Human Rights Watch notes. This prisoner, according to The New York Times, was kept off the books for at least seven months.
The Geneva Conventions require countries to grant access to the Red Cross to all detainees, wherever they are being held. As Human Rights Watch explains, "Visits may only be prohibited for'reasons of imperative military necessity' and then only as'an exceptional and temporary measure.'"
The last potential legal problem for Rumsfeld is his alleged involvement in creating a "secret access program," or SAP. According to reporter Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld "authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate 'high value' targets in the war on terror." Human Rights Watch says that "if Secretary Rumsfeld did, in fact, approve such a program, he would bear direct liability, as opposed to command responsibility, for war crimes and torture committed by the SAP."
The Pentagon vehemently denies the allegation that Rumsfeld may have committed war crimes. "It's absurd," says Pentagon spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Skinner. "The facts speak for themselves. We have aggressively investigated all allegations of detainee mistreatment. We have had ten major investigations on everything from A to Z. We've also had more than 350 criminal investigations looking into detainee abuse. More than 103 individuals have been held accountable for actions related to detainee mistreatment. Our policy has always been, and will always remain, the humane treatment of detainees."
What about Bush? If Donald Rumsfeld can be charged for war crimes because of his command responsibility and his personal involvement in giving orders, why can't the commander in chief? Hina Shansi, senior counsel at Human Rights First, believes the case against Bush is much more difficult to document. And Sifton of Human Rights Watch says that since Bush is known as "a major delegator," it may be hard to pin down "what he's briefed on and what role he plays in the decision-making process."
Amnesty International USA, however, believes that Bush, by his own involvement in formulating policy on torture, may have committed war crimes. "It's the memos, the meetings, the public statements," says Alistair Hodgett, media director of Amnesty International USA.
There is "prima facie evidence that senior members of the U.S. Administration, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, have authorized human rights violations, including 'disappearances and torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment,' " Amnesty states in "Guantánamo and Beyond."
The first solid piece of evidence against Bush is his September 17, 2001, "Memorandum of Notification" that unleashed the CIA. According to Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, that memo "authorized the CIA to operate freely and fully in Afghanistan with its own paramilitary teams" and to go after Al Qaeda "on a worldwide scale, using lethal covert action to keep the role of the United States hidden."
Two days before at Camp David, then-CIA Director George Tenet had outlined some of the additional powers he wanted, Woodward writes. These included the power to " 'buy' key intelligence services. . . . Several intelligence services were listed: Egypt, Jordan, Algeria. Acting as surrogates for the United States, these services could triple or quadruple the CIA's resources." According to Woodward, Tenet was upfront with Bush about the risks entailed: "It would put the United States in league with questionable intelligence services, some of them with dreadful human rights records. Some had reputations for ruthlessness and using torture to obtain confessions. Tenet acknowledged that these were not people you were likely to be sitting next to in church on Sunday. Look, I don't control these guys all the time, he said. Bush said he understood the risks."
That this was Administration policy is clear from comments Vice President Dick Cheney made on Meet the Press the very next day.
"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will," Cheney told Tim Russert. "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."
If, as The New York Times reported, Bush authorized the transfer of detainees to countries where torture is routine, he appears to be in grave breach of international law.
Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture explicitly prohibits this: "No State Party shall expel, return, or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions is also clear: "Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive."
On February 7, 2002, Bush issued another self-incriminating memorandum. This one was to the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Director of the CIA, the National Security Adviser, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was entitled "Humane Treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees." In it, Bush asserted that "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world." He also declared, "I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan," though he declined to do so. And he said that "common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either Al Qaeda or Taliban."
This memo "set the stage for the tragic abuse of detainees," says William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Bush failed to recognize that the Geneva Conventions provide universal protections. "The Conventions and customary law still provide explicit protections to all persons held in an armed conflict," Human Rights Watch says in its report, citing the "fundamental guarantees" in Article 75 of Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions. That article prohibits "torture of all kinds, whether physical or mental," "corporal punishment," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."
In the February 7, 2002, memo, Bush tried to give himself cover by stating that "our values as a Nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not entitled to such treatment." He added that the United States, "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity," would abide by the principles of the Geneva Conventions.
But this only made matters worse. His assertion that there are some detainees who are not entitled to be treated humanely is an affront to international law, as is his claim that the Geneva Conventions can be made subordinate to military necessity.
The Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention Against Torture all prohibit the torture and abuse that the United States has been inflicting on detainees. Article 2 of the Convention Against Torture states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
Article VI of the Constitution makes treaties "the supreme law of the land," and the President swears an oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed.
As more information comes out, the case against Bush could get even stronger, says Sifton of Human Rights Watch. If, for instance, Bush said at Camp David on September 15, 2001, or at another meeting, "Take the gloves off," or something to that effect, he would be even more implicated. "Obviously, if he did make such an explicit order, his complicity would be shown," says Sifton. Somehow, that message was conveyed down the line. "There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," Cofer Black, who was director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, told Congress in 2002. "After 9/11, the gloves came off."
The White House press office refused to return five phone calls from The Progressive seeking comment about the allegations against Bush. At his daily press briefing on May 25, the President's Press Secretary Scott McClellan was not asked specifically about Bush's culpability but about Amnesty International's general charge that the United States is a chief offender of human rights.
"The allegations are ridiculous and unsupported by the facts," McClellan said. "The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity. We have liberated fifty million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . . We're also leading the way when it comes to spreading compassion."
Amnesty International USA does not intend to back off. "Our call is for the United States to step up to its responsibilities and investigate these matters first," Executive Director Schulz says. "And if that doesn't happen, then indeed, we are calling upon foreign governments to take on their responsibility and to investigate the apparent architects of torture."
Inquiries to the embassies of Belgium, Chile, France, Germany, South Africa, and Venezuela, as well as to the government of Canada, while met with some amusement, did not reveal any inclination to heed Amnesty's call.
Schulz is not deterred. Acknowledging that the possibility of a foreign government seizing Rumsfeld or Bush might not be "an immediate reality," Schulz takes the long view: "Let's keep in mind, there are no statutes of limitations here."
When Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last year, he was asked whether he "ordered or approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise, and inducing fear as an interrogation method for a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison."
Sanchez, who was head of the Pentagon's Combined Joint Task Force-7 in Iraq, swore the answer was no. Under oath, he told the Senators he "never approved any of those measures to be used."
But a document the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) obtained from the Pentagon flat out contradicts Sanchez's testimony. It's a memorandum entitled "CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy," dated September 14, 2003. In it, Sanchez approved several methods designed for "significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee." These included "sleep management"; "yelling, loud music, and light control: used to create fear, disorient detainee, and prolong capture shock"; and "presence of military working dogs: exploits Arab fear of dogs."
On March 30, the ACLU wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, urging him "to open an investigation into whether General Ricardo A. Sanchez committed perjury in his sworn testimony."
The problem is, Gonzales may himself have committed perjury in his Congressional testimony this January. According to a March 6 article in The New York Times, Gonzales submitted written testimony that said: "The policy of the United States is not to transfer individuals to countries where we believe they likely will be tortured, whether those individuals are being transferred from inside or outside the United States." He added that he was "not aware of anyone in the executive branch authorizing any transfer of a detainee in violation of that policy."
"That's a clear, absolute lie," says Michael Ratner, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is suing Administration officials for their involvement in the torture scandal. "The Administration has a policy of sending people to countries where there is a likelihood that they will be tortured."
The New York Times article backs up Ratner's claim. It says "a still-classified directive signed by President Bush within days of the September 11 attacks" gave the CIA broad authority to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogations. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International estimate that the United States has transferred between 100 and 150 detainees to countries notorious for torture.
So Gonzales may not be the best person to evaluate the allegation of perjury against Sanchez.
But going after Sanchez or Gonzales for perjury is the least of it. Sanchez may be personally culpable for war crimes and torture, according to Human Rights Watch. And Gonzales himself was one of the legal architects of the torture policies. As such, he may have been involved in "a conspiracy to immunize U.S. agents from criminal liability for torture and war crimes under U.S. law," according to Amnesty International's recent report: "Guantánamo and Beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power."As White House Counsel, Gonzales advised President Bush to not apply Geneva Convention protections to detainees captured in Afghanistan, in part because this "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote in his January 25, 2002, memo to the President.
Gonzales's press office refused to provide comment after several requests from The Progressive. In his Senate confirmation testimony, Gonzales said, "I want to make very clear that I am deeply committed to the rule of law. I have a deep and abiding commitment to the fundamental American principle that we are a nation of laws, and not of men."
Pentagon spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel John Skinner says the ACLU's suggestion that Sanchez committed perjury is "absolutely ridiculous." In addition, Skinner pointed to a recent Army inspector general report that looked into Sanchez's role. "Every senior-officer allegation was formally investigated," the Army said in a May 5 summary. Sanchez was investigated, it said, for "dereliction in the performance of duties pertaining to detention and interrogation operations" and for "improperly communicating interrogation policies." The inspector general "found each of the allegations unsubstantiated."
The Bush Administration's legal troubles don't end with Sanchez or Gonzales. They go right to the top: to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush himself. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA say there is "prima facie" evidence against Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture. And Amnesty International USA says there is also "prima facie" evidence against Bush for war crimes and torture. (According to Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, "prima facie evidence" is "evidence sufficient to establish a fact or to raise a presumption of fact unless rebutted.")
Amnesty International USA has even taken the extraordinary step of calling on officials in other countries to apprehend Bush and Rumsfeld and other high-ranking members of the Administration who have played a part in the torture scandal.
Foreign governments should "uphold their obligations under international law by investigating U.S. officials implicated in the development or implementation of interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment," the group said in a May 25 statement. William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, added, "If the United States permits the architects of torture policy to get off scot-free, then other nations will be compelled" to take action.
The Geneva Conventions and the torture treaty "place a legally binding obligation on states that have ratified them to exercise universal jurisdiction over persons accused of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions," Amnesty International USA said. "If anyone suspected of involvement in the U.S. torture scandal visits or transits through foreign territories, governments could take legal steps to ensure that such individuals are investigated and charged with applicable crimes."
When these two leading human rights organizations make such bold claims about the President and the Secretary of Defense, we need to take the question of executive criminality seriously.
And we have to ask ourselves, where is the accountability? Who has the authority to ascertain whether these high officials committed war crimes and torture, and if they did, to bring them to justice?
The independent counsel law is no longer on the books, so that can't be relied on. Attorney General Gonzales is not about to investigate himself, Rumsfeld, or his boss. And Republicans who control Congress have shown no interest in pursuing the torture scandal, much less drawing up bills of impeachment.
Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, the American Bar Association, and Human Rights First (formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) have joined in a call for a special prosecutor. But that decision is up to Gonzales and ultimately Bush.
"It's a complete joke" to expect Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor, concedes Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
John Sifton, Afghanistan specialist and military affairs researcher for Human Rights Watch, is not so sure. "Do I think this would happen right now? No," he says. "But in the middle of the Watergate scandal, very few people thought the President would resign." If more information comes out, and if the American public demands an investigation, and if there is a change in the control of the Senate, Sifton believes Gonzales may end up with little choice.
Human Rights Watch and other groups are also calling for Congress to appoint an independent commission, similar to the 9/11 one, to investigate the torture scandal.
"Unless a special counsel or an independent commission are named, and those who designed or authorized the illegal policies are held to account, all the protestations of 'disgust' at the Abu Ghraib photos by President George W. Bush and others will be meaningless," concludes Human Rights Watch's April report "Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees."
But even as it denounces the "substantial impunity that has prevailed until now," Human Rights Watch is not sanguine about the likelihood of such inquiries. "There are obviously steep political obstacles in the way of investigating a sitting Defense Secretary," it notes in its report.
By not pursuing senior officials who may have been involved in ordering war crimes or torture, the United States may be further violating international law, according to Human Rights Watch. "Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, whenever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction," says the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The Geneva Conventions have a similar requirement.
Stymied by the obstacles along the customary routes of accountability, the ACLU and Human Rights First are suing Rumsfeld in civil court on behalf of plaintiffs who have been victims of torture. The Center for Constitutional Rights is suing on behalf of a separate group of clients. The center also filed a criminal complaint in Germany against Rumsfeld and Gonzales, along with nine others. The center argued that Germany was "a court of last resort," since "the U.S. government is not willing to open an investigation into these allegations against these officials." The case was dismissed.
Amnesty International's call for foreign countries to nab Rumsfeld and Bush also seems unlikely to be heeded any time soon. How, physically, could another country arrest Bush, for instance? And which country would want to face the wrath of Washington for doing so?
But that we have come this far--where the only option for justice available seems to be to rely on officials of other governments to apprehend our own--is a damning indictment in and of itself.
The case against Rumsfeld may be the most substantial of all. While "expressing no opinion about the ultimate guilt or innocence" of Rumsfeld, Human Rights Watch is urging his prosecution under the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Anti-Torture Act of 1996. Under these statutes, a "war crime" is any "grave breach" of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment," as well as torture and murder. A "grave breach," according to U.S. law, includes "willful killing, torture, or inhuman treatment of prisoners of war and of other 'protected persons,' " Human Rights Watch explains in "Getting Away with Torture?"
Rumsfeld faces jeopardy for being head of the Defense Department when those directly under him committed grave offenses. And he may be liable for actions he himself undertook.
"Secretary Rumsfeld may bear legal liability for war crimes and torture by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo under the doctrine of 'command responsibility'--the legal principle that holds a superior responsible for crimes committed by his subordinates when he knew or should have known that they were being committed but fails to take reasonable measures to stop them," Human Rights Watch says in its report.
But Rumsfeld's potential liability may be more direct than simply being the guy in charge who didn't stop the torture and mistreatment once he learned about it.
First of all, when the initial reports of prisoner mistreatment came in, he mocked the concerns of human rights groups as "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation." He also asserted that "unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention," even though, as Human Rights Watch argues, "the Geneva Conventions provide explicit protections to all persons captured in an international armed conflict, even if they are not entitled to POW status."
Secondly, he himself issued a list of permissible interrogation techniques in a December 2, 2002, directive that likely violated the Geneva Conventions, according to Human Rights Watch. Among those techniques: "The use of stress positions (like standing) for a maximum of four hours." On the directive, Rumsfeld, incidentally, added in his own handwriting next to this technique: "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" He also included the following techniques: "removal of all comfort items (including religious items)," "deprivation of light and auditory stimuli," "isolation up to 30 days," and "using detainees' individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress."
On January 15, 2003, Rumsfeld rescinded this directive after the Navy registered its adamant objections. If, during the six weeks that Rumsfeld's techniques were official Pentagon policy at Guantánamo, soldiers mistreated or tortured prisoners using his approved techniques, then "Rumsfeld could potentially bear direct criminal responsibility, as opposed to command responsibility," says Human Rights Watch.
Rumsfeld may also bear direct responsibility for the torture or abuse of two other prisoners, says Human Rights Watch, citing the Church Report. (This report, one of Rumsfeld's many internal investigations, was conducted by the Navy Inspector General Vice Admiral Albert Church.) "The Secretary of Defense approved specific interrogation plans for two 'high-value detainees' " at Guantánamo, the Church Report noted. Those plans, it added, "employed several of the counter resistance techniques found in the December 2, 2002, [policy]. . . . These interrogations were sufficiently aggressive that they highlighted the difficult question of precisely defining the boundaries of humane treatment of detainees."
And Rumsfeld may be in legal trouble for hiding detainees from the Red Cross. "Secretary Rumsfeld has publicly admitted that . . . he ordered an Iraqi national held in Camp Cropper, a high security detention center in Iraq, to be kept off the prison's rolls and not presented to the International Committee of the Red Cross," Human Rights Watch notes. This prisoner, according to The New York Times, was kept off the books for at least seven months.
The Geneva Conventions require countries to grant access to the Red Cross to all detainees, wherever they are being held. As Human Rights Watch explains, "Visits may only be prohibited for'reasons of imperative military necessity' and then only as'an exceptional and temporary measure.'"
The last potential legal problem for Rumsfeld is his alleged involvement in creating a "secret access program," or SAP. According to reporter Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld "authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate 'high value' targets in the war on terror." Human Rights Watch says that "if Secretary Rumsfeld did, in fact, approve such a program, he would bear direct liability, as opposed to command responsibility, for war crimes and torture committed by the SAP."
The Pentagon vehemently denies the allegation that Rumsfeld may have committed war crimes. "It's absurd," says Pentagon spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Skinner. "The facts speak for themselves. We have aggressively investigated all allegations of detainee mistreatment. We have had ten major investigations on everything from A to Z. We've also had more than 350 criminal investigations looking into detainee abuse. More than 103 individuals have been held accountable for actions related to detainee mistreatment. Our policy has always been, and will always remain, the humane treatment of detainees."
What about Bush? If Donald Rumsfeld can be charged for war crimes because of his command responsibility and his personal involvement in giving orders, why can't the commander in chief? Hina Shansi, senior counsel at Human Rights First, believes the case against Bush is much more difficult to document. And Sifton of Human Rights Watch says that since Bush is known as "a major delegator," it may be hard to pin down "what he's briefed on and what role he plays in the decision-making process."
Amnesty International USA, however, believes that Bush, by his own involvement in formulating policy on torture, may have committed war crimes. "It's the memos, the meetings, the public statements," says Alistair Hodgett, media director of Amnesty International USA.
There is "prima facie evidence that senior members of the U.S. Administration, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, have authorized human rights violations, including 'disappearances and torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment,' " Amnesty states in "Guantánamo and Beyond."
The first solid piece of evidence against Bush is his September 17, 2001, "Memorandum of Notification" that unleashed the CIA. According to Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, that memo "authorized the CIA to operate freely and fully in Afghanistan with its own paramilitary teams" and to go after Al Qaeda "on a worldwide scale, using lethal covert action to keep the role of the United States hidden."
Two days before at Camp David, then-CIA Director George Tenet had outlined some of the additional powers he wanted, Woodward writes. These included the power to " 'buy' key intelligence services. . . . Several intelligence services were listed: Egypt, Jordan, Algeria. Acting as surrogates for the United States, these services could triple or quadruple the CIA's resources." According to Woodward, Tenet was upfront with Bush about the risks entailed: "It would put the United States in league with questionable intelligence services, some of them with dreadful human rights records. Some had reputations for ruthlessness and using torture to obtain confessions. Tenet acknowledged that these were not people you were likely to be sitting next to in church on Sunday. Look, I don't control these guys all the time, he said. Bush said he understood the risks."
That this was Administration policy is clear from comments Vice President Dick Cheney made on Meet the Press the very next day.
"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will," Cheney told Tim Russert. "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."
If, as The New York Times reported, Bush authorized the transfer of detainees to countries where torture is routine, he appears to be in grave breach of international law.
Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture explicitly prohibits this: "No State Party shall expel, return, or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions is also clear: "Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive."
On February 7, 2002, Bush issued another self-incriminating memorandum. This one was to the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Director of the CIA, the National Security Adviser, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was entitled "Humane Treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees." In it, Bush asserted that "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world." He also declared, "I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan," though he declined to do so. And he said that "common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either Al Qaeda or Taliban."
This memo "set the stage for the tragic abuse of detainees," says William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Bush failed to recognize that the Geneva Conventions provide universal protections. "The Conventions and customary law still provide explicit protections to all persons held in an armed conflict," Human Rights Watch says in its report, citing the "fundamental guarantees" in Article 75 of Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions. That article prohibits "torture of all kinds, whether physical or mental," "corporal punishment," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."
In the February 7, 2002, memo, Bush tried to give himself cover by stating that "our values as a Nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not entitled to such treatment." He added that the United States, "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity," would abide by the principles of the Geneva Conventions.
But this only made matters worse. His assertion that there are some detainees who are not entitled to be treated humanely is an affront to international law, as is his claim that the Geneva Conventions can be made subordinate to military necessity.
The Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention Against Torture all prohibit the torture and abuse that the United States has been inflicting on detainees. Article 2 of the Convention Against Torture states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
Article VI of the Constitution makes treaties "the supreme law of the land," and the President swears an oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed.
As more information comes out, the case against Bush could get even stronger, says Sifton of Human Rights Watch. If, for instance, Bush said at Camp David on September 15, 2001, or at another meeting, "Take the gloves off," or something to that effect, he would be even more implicated. "Obviously, if he did make such an explicit order, his complicity would be shown," says Sifton. Somehow, that message was conveyed down the line. "There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," Cofer Black, who was director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, told Congress in 2002. "After 9/11, the gloves came off."
The White House press office refused to return five phone calls from The Progressive seeking comment about the allegations against Bush. At his daily press briefing on May 25, the President's Press Secretary Scott McClellan was not asked specifically about Bush's culpability but about Amnesty International's general charge that the United States is a chief offender of human rights.
"The allegations are ridiculous and unsupported by the facts," McClellan said. "The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity. We have liberated fifty million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . . We're also leading the way when it comes to spreading compassion."
Amnesty International USA does not intend to back off. "Our call is for the United States to step up to its responsibilities and investigate these matters first," Executive Director Schulz says. "And if that doesn't happen, then indeed, we are calling upon foreign governments to take on their responsibility and to investigate the apparent architects of torture."
Inquiries to the embassies of Belgium, Chile, France, Germany, South Africa, and Venezuela, as well as to the government of Canada, while met with some amusement, did not reveal any inclination to heed Amnesty's call.
Schulz is not deterred. Acknowledging that the possibility of a foreign government seizing Rumsfeld or Bush might not be "an immediate reality," Schulz takes the long view: "Let's keep in mind, there are no statutes of limitations here."
Gooood Post!
QUOTE(veritas @ May 31 2005, 11:38 AM)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050531/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush
Bush Calls Human Rights Report 'Absurd' By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
16 minutes ago
...and said Tuesday the allegations were made by "people who hate America."
Bush Calls Human Rights Report 'Absurd' By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
16 minutes ago
...and said Tuesday the allegations were made by "people who hate America."
Without changing the link, the original article by Terence Hunt was removed and another article substituted (Bush Shrugs Off Setbacks, Vows Agenda Push By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer Tue May 31, 7:37 PM ET).
This second article deletes the reference to 'people who hate America' and broadcast media throughout the day clarified that the truncated quote was NOT aimed at Amnesty International, William Schultz, or Amnesty International supporters worldwide. That's fortunate, because AI isn't the only group calling for an independent investigative commission - certainly the members of THE CONSTUTUTION PROJECT fall into the same category.
http://www.constitutionproject.org/ls/ltr_...lease_final.doc
Press Release
May 25, 2005 Contact: Pedro Ribeiro
202-721-5623
DISTINGUISHED BIPARTISAN GROUP CALLS FOR
INDEPENDENT COMMISSION ON ABUSE OF TERRORIST SUSPECTS
Barr, Keene, Podesta, and Sessions Among Those Calling for Independent Commission
A distinguished bipartisan group today called on President Bush and Congress to immediately establish an independent commission to investigate allegations of abuse of terrorism suspects detained in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere. Members of the Constitution Project’s bipartisan blue-ribbon Liberty and Security Initiative released a statement seeking a bipartisan, independent commission, modeled after the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the abuse allegations, and make recommendations to guide U.S. officials in the future. The committee -- the first bipartisan group to speak on this issue -- will continue to press for creation of the commission through activities such as meetings with policymakers, op-eds and other public statements.
The committee also stated that:
• Ongoing or recently completed investigations are insufficient because they are not government-wide, nor designed to produce specific recommendations to prevent future abuses;
• The 9/11 Commission is the appropriate model, both for the credibility of its investigation and for the comprehensive and detailed list of recommendations it provided.
According to Liberty and Security Initiative member John W. Whitehead, President of the Rutherford Institute, "By establishing an independent bipartisan commission to fully investigate the issue of abuse of terrorist suspects, Congress and the President have a unique opportunity to send a message to the rest of the world that the United States is committed to respecting the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings, whether they are U.S. citizens or prisoners of war."
Statement signatories include the Initiative’s co-chairs, David Keene, Chairman, American Conservative Union, and David Cole, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center; and members Bob Barr, former Member of Congress (R-GA); Walter Cronkite, former Managing Editor, CBS Evening News; Mickey Edwards, former Member of Congress (R-OK); Morton H. Halperin, Director of U.S. Advocacy, Open Society Institute; Robert A. Levy, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute; Thomas R. Pickering, former United States Ambassador and Representative to the United Nations; John Podesta, White House Chief of Staff, Clinton administration; and William S. Sessions, former Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation. In addition, the National Institute of Military Justice (NIMJ) endorsed the Constitution Project’s statement, as did a dozen military law experts and retired high-ranking military officials. A full list of signatories, along with the committee’s full statement, is available at www.constitutionproject.org.*
The Constitution Project seeks to formulate bipartisan solutions to contemporary constitutional and legal issues by combining high-level scholarship and public education. It is based at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
*organizational affiliations are listed for identification purposes only
Bush says Amnesty's criticism is 'absurd' San Diego Union Tribune
Bush says Amnesty's criticism is 'absurd' San Diego Union Tribune
"up yours you good for nothing commy faggots! my party is for ever! for ever i tell ya! we have been given a mandate by Jesus Christ him self! to kill all the commy faggot terrorsits onthis planet! and to give all the land in the middle east to Isreal!
sure they are Jews but at least they know how to kiss republican ass, just look at Red Joe Liberman! now thats one good ass kisser!"
QUOTE(Arneoker @ May 31 2005, 02:03 PM)
Amnesty International is respected for promoting human rights as a cause in itself as opposed to exploiting the issue for political reasons. But is it likely that any country where Bush Administration figures are likely to go would arrest them? Are there any experts in international law here?
I don't know if they have tacky enough FLY PAPER to hold them, even if they were to arrest them.
I think a Bug Zapper would be more appropriate...
look pleas don't get your hopes up!
if i have learned nothing over the past 4+ years its been this.
the rich will get richer!
the poor will die!
the middle class will vanish!
and all those involved in this war will get great fortune 500 jobs!
just look at that Marine who killed two wounded Iraqies and hung a sign around their necks! the guys got a job waiting for him as soon as he comes home.
ooooohhh how nice!
would you like to work with a guy who put 60 rounds into two wounded priosoners and then hung a sign around thier necks! just immagine if some one forgot to refill the cofee pot in the office!
you could be next on his hit list!
oooohhh how nice!
get over it!
no really! get over it!
a number of Isralie prime ministers have been on this list you speak of for killing untold numbers of arabs and last i checked not a single one has ever walked before a judge to explain their actions!
so don't get your hopes up for the shurb to be pulled infornt of a judge!
if i have learned nothing over the past 4+ years its been this.
the rich will get richer!
the poor will die!
the middle class will vanish!
and all those involved in this war will get great fortune 500 jobs!
just look at that Marine who killed two wounded Iraqies and hung a sign around their necks! the guys got a job waiting for him as soon as he comes home.
ooooohhh how nice!
would you like to work with a guy who put 60 rounds into two wounded priosoners and then hung a sign around thier necks! just immagine if some one forgot to refill the cofee pot in the office!
you could be next on his hit list!
oooohhh how nice!
get over it!
no really! get over it!
a number of Isralie prime ministers have been on this list you speak of for killing untold numbers of arabs and last i checked not a single one has ever walked before a judge to explain their actions!
so don't get your hopes up for the shurb to be pulled infornt of a judge!
QUOTE(shah269 @ Jun 1 2005, 09:09 AM)
look pleas don't get your hopes up!
Press Release
May 25, 2005 Contact: Pedro Ribeiro
202-721-5623
DISTINGUISHED BIPARTISAN GROUP CALLS FOR
INDEPENDENT COMMISSION ON ABUSE OF TERRORIST SUSPECTS
Barr, Keene, Podesta, and Sessions Among Those Calling for Independent Commission
"By establishing an independent bipartisan commission to fully investigate the issue of abuse of terrorist suspects, Congress and the President have a unique opportunity to send a message to the rest of the world that the United States is committed to respecting the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings, whether they are U.S. citizens or prisoners of war."
Statement signatories include the Initiative’s co-chairs,
David Keene, Chairman, American Conservative Union,
and
David Cole, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center;
and members
Bob Barr, former Member of Congress (R-GA);
Walter Cronkite, former Managing Editor, CBS Evening News;
Mickey Edwards, former Member of Congress (R-OK);
Morton H. Halperin, Director of U.S. Advocacy, Open Society Institute;
Robert A. Levy, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute;
Thomas R. Pickering, former United States Ambassador and Representative to the United Nations;
John Podesta, White House Chief of Staff, Clinton administration;
and William S. Sessions, former Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In addition, the National Institute of Military Justice (NIMJ) endorsed the Constitution Project’s statement,
as did a dozen military law experts and retired high-ranking military officials.
A full list of signatories, along with the committee’s full statement, is available at www.constitutionproject.org.*
INCITE HOPE
ok now i'm getting my hopes up! but not too high!
I'll start breathing easy when i see this no my nightly news
NBC, CBS or ABC
till then...ok sure
I'll start breathing easy when i see this no my nightly news
NBC, CBS or ABC
till then...ok sure
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050601/ap_on_...umsfeld_prisons
Rumsfeld Defends Treatment of Prisoners By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
2 minutes ago
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended the military's handling of detained terror suspects Wednesday while acknowledging that some have been mistreated, "sometimes grievously."
At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld criticized Amnesty International, the human rights group, for calling the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our time." The group has urged the United States to close the prison, where about 540 men are held on suspicion of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban or the al-Qaida terror network. Some have been there for more than three years without charges.
Rumsfeld said the U.S. military has done more than any other force to liberate oppressed people and has gone to great lengths to ensure that detainees are free to practice their religion.
"Indeed, that's why the recent allegation that the U.S. military is running a gulag at Guantanamo Bay is so reprehensible," he said.
The executive director of Amnesty International, William F. Schulz, issued a statement in response, saying that Rumsfeld and other officials "continue to ignore the very real plight of men detained without charge or trial."
On another war topic, Rumsfeld issued a veiled warning to Syria, saying that none of Iraq's neighbors should give haven to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader in Iraq who reportedly was wounded recently near the Syrian border.
"Were a neighboring country to take him in and provide medical assistance or haven for him, they obviously would be associating themselves with a major linkage in the al-Qaida network and a person who has a great deal of blood on his hands," Rumsfeld said. He did not threaten any retaliation but said "people would take note of" any such support for al-Zarqawi.
Appearing alongside Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military doesn't know where al-Zarqawi is. "Our assessment is that he has been wounded. The severity, I don't know that we know that," he said.
Rumsfeld said that likening the Guantanamo Bay prison to forced labor camps operated by the former Soviet Union, where millions perished in what became known as the gulag system, is inaccurate and "cannot be excused."
He accused the news media of focusing too much on prisoner abuse allegations and too little on "U.S. policy guidance to treat detainees humanely."
"To try to equate the military's record on detainee treatment to some of the worst atrocities of the past century is a disservice to those who have sacrificed so much to bring freedom to others," he said.
There has been widespread criticism of the Guantanamo Bay operation, which began in January 2002 with the arrival of prisoners captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Thus far four men have been charged; their military trials have been stalled because of appeals in U.S. courts.
After Newsweek magazine reported last month that U.S. officials had confirmed that U.S. guards at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Muslim holy book down a toilet, the commander of the detention center undertook an inquiry that concluded there was no such incident. He did conclude that there had been five instances of Quran mishandling, although he refused to provide any details.
Newsweek has retracted its story.
Rumsfeld twice offered his resignation to President Bush after revelations in April 2004 about mistreatment of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. Photographs taken by U.S. military personnel and published around the world depicted scenes of sexual humiliation and physical abuse.
"Yes, there have been instances where detainees have been mistreated while in U.S. custody, sometimes grievously, but consider these facts," Rumsfeld said Wednesday. "To date there have been approximately 370 criminal investigations into the charges of misconduct involving detainees" since Sept. 11, 2001. He did not mention it, but about 130 military personnel have been punished as a result of those investigations.
Rumsfeld Defends Treatment of Prisoners By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
2 minutes ago
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended the military's handling of detained terror suspects Wednesday while acknowledging that some have been mistreated, "sometimes grievously."
At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld criticized Amnesty International, the human rights group, for calling the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our time." The group has urged the United States to close the prison, where about 540 men are held on suspicion of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban or the al-Qaida terror network. Some have been there for more than three years without charges.
Rumsfeld said the U.S. military has done more than any other force to liberate oppressed people and has gone to great lengths to ensure that detainees are free to practice their religion.
"Indeed, that's why the recent allegation that the U.S. military is running a gulag at Guantanamo Bay is so reprehensible," he said.
The executive director of Amnesty International, William F. Schulz, issued a statement in response, saying that Rumsfeld and other officials "continue to ignore the very real plight of men detained without charge or trial."
On another war topic, Rumsfeld issued a veiled warning to Syria, saying that none of Iraq's neighbors should give haven to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader in Iraq who reportedly was wounded recently near the Syrian border.
"Were a neighboring country to take him in and provide medical assistance or haven for him, they obviously would be associating themselves with a major linkage in the al-Qaida network and a person who has a great deal of blood on his hands," Rumsfeld said. He did not threaten any retaliation but said "people would take note of" any such support for al-Zarqawi.
Appearing alongside Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military doesn't know where al-Zarqawi is. "Our assessment is that he has been wounded. The severity, I don't know that we know that," he said.
Rumsfeld said that likening the Guantanamo Bay prison to forced labor camps operated by the former Soviet Union, where millions perished in what became known as the gulag system, is inaccurate and "cannot be excused."
He accused the news media of focusing too much on prisoner abuse allegations and too little on "U.S. policy guidance to treat detainees humanely."
"To try to equate the military's record on detainee treatment to some of the worst atrocities of the past century is a disservice to those who have sacrificed so much to bring freedom to others," he said.
There has been widespread criticism of the Guantanamo Bay operation, which began in January 2002 with the arrival of prisoners captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Thus far four men have been charged; their military trials have been stalled because of appeals in U.S. courts.
After Newsweek magazine reported last month that U.S. officials had confirmed that U.S. guards at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Muslim holy book down a toilet, the commander of the detention center undertook an inquiry that concluded there was no such incident. He did conclude that there had been five instances of Quran mishandling, although he refused to provide any details.
Newsweek has retracted its story.
Rumsfeld twice offered his resignation to President Bush after revelations in April 2004 about mistreatment of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. Photographs taken by U.S. military personnel and published around the world depicted scenes of sexual humiliation and physical abuse.
"Yes, there have been instances where detainees have been mistreated while in U.S. custody, sometimes grievously, but consider these facts," Rumsfeld said Wednesday. "To date there have been approximately 370 criminal investigations into the charges of misconduct involving detainees" since Sept. 11, 2001. He did not mention it, but about 130 military personnel have been punished as a result of those investigations.
QUOTE
Pentagon confirms U.S. soldier kicked Koran at prison
By Robert Burns, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Koran and was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior."
In other confirmed incidents, water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Korans to get wet; a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Koran; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Koran.
The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening, are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba, that was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report — later retracted — that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee's Koran down a toilet.
The story stirred worldwide controversy and the Bush administration blamed it for deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan.
Hood said in a written statement released Friday evening, along with the new details, that his investigation "revealed a consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Koran dating back almost 2 1/2 years."
Hood said that of nine mishandling cases that were studied in detail, five were confirmed to have happened. He could not determine conclusively whether the four others took place.
He also said they found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Korans. "These included using a Koran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Koran, attempting to flush a Koran down the toilet and urinating on the Koran," Hood's report said. It offered no possible explanation for the detainees' motives.
Last week, Hood disclosed that he had confirmed five cases of mishandling of the Koran, but he refused to provide details. Allegations of Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay have led to anti-American passions in many Muslim nations, although Pentagon officials have insisted that the problems were relatively minor and that U.S. commanders have gone to great lengths to enable detainees to practice their religion in captivity.
Hood said last week that he found no credible evidence that a Koran was ever flushed down a toilet. He said a prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Koran in the toilet has since told Hood's investigators that he never witnessed any form of Koran desecration.
Other prisoners who were returned to their home countries after serving time at Guantanamo Bay as terror suspects have alleged Koran desecration by U.S. guards, and some have said a Koran was placed in a toilet.
There are about 540 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been there more than three years without being charged with a crime. Most were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and were sent to Guantanamo Bay in hope of extracting useful intelligence about the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
By Robert Burns, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Koran and was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior."
In other confirmed incidents, water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Korans to get wet; a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Koran; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Koran.
The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening, are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba, that was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report — later retracted — that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee's Koran down a toilet.
The story stirred worldwide controversy and the Bush administration blamed it for deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan.
Hood said in a written statement released Friday evening, along with the new details, that his investigation "revealed a consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Koran dating back almost 2 1/2 years."
Hood said that of nine mishandling cases that were studied in detail, five were confirmed to have happened. He could not determine conclusively whether the four others took place.
He also said they found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Korans. "These included using a Koran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Koran, attempting to flush a Koran down the toilet and urinating on the Koran," Hood's report said. It offered no possible explanation for the detainees' motives.
Last week, Hood disclosed that he had confirmed five cases of mishandling of the Koran, but he refused to provide details. Allegations of Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay have led to anti-American passions in many Muslim nations, although Pentagon officials have insisted that the problems were relatively minor and that U.S. commanders have gone to great lengths to enable detainees to practice their religion in captivity.
Hood said last week that he found no credible evidence that a Koran was ever flushed down a toilet. He said a prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Koran in the toilet has since told Hood's investigators that he never witnessed any form of Koran desecration.
Other prisoners who were returned to their home countries after serving time at Guantanamo Bay as terror suspects have alleged Koran desecration by U.S. guards, and some have said a Koran was placed in a toilet.
There are about 540 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been there more than three years without being charged with a crime. Most were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and were sent to Guantanamo Bay in hope of extracting useful intelligence about the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
Everytime they deny something, it is true
They release this late Friday when the news cycles are over for the week.
Hope someone is still talking about it come Monday.
They release this late Friday when the news cycles are over for the week.
Hope someone is still talking about it come Monday.
As much as I hate to admit it, * does have a point. 90% of the detainees at Gitmo are terrorists or supporters of UBL. They know that they can inflame the media and the Arab street by claiming denigration of the Koran, and are using it to their advantage.
There's enough blame to go around on this. Did the soldiers at Gitmo disrespect the Koran? I'm sure that some did, knowing how intolerant of other religions a lot of military folks are. Not to mention that these people ATTACKED US AND MURDERED OVER 3,000 PEOPLE. More than just a bunch of ignorant idiots that wanted to "get back" at the detainees for 9/11, there were probably a lot of cultural issues. To a Moslem, even handling the Koran with an ungloved hand is an affront. And the terrorists at Gitmo would certainly use an incident like that to their own advantage.
Besides, a suicide bomber just blew up a mosque in Pakistan and killed women and children. Why aren't people in the streets of Islamabad and Karachi protesting THAT?
There's enough blame to go around on this. Did the soldiers at Gitmo disrespect the Koran? I'm sure that some did, knowing how intolerant of other religions a lot of military folks are. Not to mention that these people ATTACKED US AND MURDERED OVER 3,000 PEOPLE. More than just a bunch of ignorant idiots that wanted to "get back" at the detainees for 9/11, there were probably a lot of cultural issues. To a Moslem, even handling the Koran with an ungloved hand is an affront. And the terrorists at Gitmo would certainly use an incident like that to their own advantage.
Besides, a suicide bomber just blew up a mosque in Pakistan and killed women and children. Why aren't people in the streets of Islamabad and Karachi protesting THAT?
QUOTE(Big Blue State Bitch @ Jun 3 2005, 08:34 PM)
As much as I hate to admit it, * does have a point. 90% of the detainees at Gitmo are terrorists or supporters of UBL. They know that they can inflame the media and the Arab street by claiming denigration of the Koran, and are using it to their advantage.
There's enough blame to go around on this. Did the soldiers at Gitmo disrespect the Koran? I'm sure that some did, knowing how intolerant of other religions a lot of military folks are. Not to mention that these people ATTACKED US AND MURDERED OVER 3,000 PEOPLE. More than just a bunch of ignorant idiots that wanted to "get back" at the detainees for 9/11, there were probably a lot of cultural issues. To a Moslem, even handling the Koran with an ungloved hand is an affront. And the terrorists at Gitmo would certainly use an incident like that to their own advantage.
Besides, a suicide bomber just blew up a mosque in Pakistan and killed women and children. Why aren't people in the streets of Islamabad and Karachi protesting THAT?
There's enough blame to go around on this. Did the soldiers at Gitmo disrespect the Koran? I'm sure that some did, knowing how intolerant of other religions a lot of military folks are. Not to mention that these people ATTACKED US AND MURDERED OVER 3,000 PEOPLE. More than just a bunch of ignorant idiots that wanted to "get back" at the detainees for 9/11, there were probably a lot of cultural issues. To a Moslem, even handling the Koran with an ungloved hand is an affront. And the terrorists at Gitmo would certainly use an incident like that to their own advantage.
Besides, a suicide bomber just blew up a mosque in Pakistan and killed women and children. Why aren't people in the streets of Islamabad and Karachi protesting THAT?
Since very, very few of the Gitmo prisoners have even been publicly accused (much less charged) of any crime, the above reasoning isn't sound. And even if the prisoners are affiliated with bin Laden or other terrorist groups, two wrongs don't make a right, as my old Grampa used to say.
The neocon reasoning that maltreatment of captives is OK to gain 'intelligence' is just out and out wrong. It's against fundamental values held for decades by ordinary citizens of this country and by our government. (Lip service, perhaps, but still adhered to in public.) The difference between the years of the Bush administration and all the years of this nation prior to 2001 is that the Bushies do anything and everything they want and then frame it to excuse themselves. Which only goes to show that they KNOW what they're doing is wrong or they wouldn't have to play semantic games.
The Bush administration is very like an abusive husband. An abuser doesn't have the intelligence, education and/or the common sense to persuade his wife and kids to his point of view, so he uses his physical strength to force them to do so.
Military Details Koran Incidents at Base in Cuba
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 3 - A military inquiry has found that guards or interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba kicked, stepped on and splashed urine on the Koran, in some cases intentionally but in others by accident, the Pentagon said on Friday.
The splashing of urine was among the cases described as inadvertent. It was said to have occurred when a guard urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into a detainee's cell. The detainee was given a fresh uniform and a new Koran, and the guard was reprimanded and assigned to guard duty that kept him from contact with detainees for the remainder of his time at Guantánamo, according to the military inquiry.
The investigation into allegations that the Koran had been mishandled also found that in one instance detainees' Korans were wet because guards on the night shift had thrown water balloons on the cellblock.
In another case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Koran, but investigators could not determine whether a guard or detainee had written it.
Last week, the head of the investigation, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commander of the Guantánamo Joint Task Force, announced at the Pentagon that his preliminary findings had uncovered five cases in which the Koran was mishandled at the prison, but he refused to provide details.
In releasing those details in a final report on Friday, General Hood emphasized that any abuse of the Koran was unusual and that the military had gone to great lengths to be sensitive to the detainees' religious faiths, including issuing more than 1,600 Korans at the detention center.
"Mishandling a Koran at Guantánamo Bay is a rare occurrence," General Hood said in a statement released by the military's Southern Command. "Mishandling of a Koran here is never condoned."
The investigation was started about three weeks ago after Newsweek magazine published an article asserting that a separate inquiry by the military was expected to find that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the detention center. The magazine later retracted the article, but the assertion led to violence in the Muslim world that left at least 17 people dead.
General Hood said last week that there was no credible evidence to substantiate the claim that a Koran had ever been flushed down a toilet at the prison.
The final report released on Friday said that four of the five incidents took place after January 2003, after written procedures governing the handling of the Koran had been put in place. That contradicted an account provided last Thursday by General Hood, who was asked directly whether all five of the incidents had taken place before January 2003, and replied: "Not all of them. One of them occurred since then."
A spokesman for the task force, Capt. Jeffrey Weir, said in a telephone interview that he could not explain General Hood's comments last week. "Maybe he misspoke," Captain Weir said. "I'm not sure why he would have put it that way."
The military released the findings of the investigation about 7:15 p.m., Eastern time, well after the broadcasts of the network television evening news programs. A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, denied that the military was trying to bury bad news late on a Friday night, a tactic often used by government agencies. "It was completed and we try not to hold these things after their reviews are completed," Mr. Whitman said in a telephone interview.
Military policy acknowledges that some Muslims consider a non-Muslim touching the Koran as a desecration.
"The Southern Command policy of Koran handling is serious, respectful and appropriate," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, who was traveling with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at a security conference in Singapore. "The Hood inquiry would appear to affirm that policy."
The report said investigators had examined nine alleged incidents in which the Koran was mishandled, either intentionally or unintentionally, and confirmed five of them. Four involved guards at the detention center; one involved an interrogator.
According to the military's statement on Friday, this is what happened in the five confirmed incidents of Koran abuse.
In February 2002, a detainee complained during an interrogation that guards at Camp X-Ray had kicked the Koran of a detainee in a neighboring cell four or five days earlier, the inquiry's report said. The interrogator reported the complaint on Feb. 27, and confirmed that the guards were aware of the complaint.
The report said there was no evidence of any investigation into the incident, and investigators did not say why they believed it was credible or who might have been responsible.
On July 25, 2003, a contract interrogator apologized to a detainee for stepping on the detainee's Koran in an earlier interrogation. The detainee accepted the apology and agreed to tell other detainees and ask them to stop disruptive behavior caused by the incident.
The interrogator was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior, an inability to follow direct guidance and poor leadership," the military statement said.
On Aug. 15, 2003, two detainees complained to one set of guards that their Korans were wet because guards on the night shift had tossed water balloons on the cellblock. The complaints were recorded in the cellblock's log, but there was no indication that the incident was ever investigated. Investigators described the guards' conduct as "clearly inappropriate" but said it did not cause any disturbance among detainees.
Less than a week later, on Aug. 21, a detainee who spoke conversational English complained that someone had written a two-word obscenity in English in his English-version Koran. The complaint was recorded in an electronic log. "It is possible," the military's statement said, "that a guard committed this act; it is equally possible that the detainee wrote in his own Koran."
On March 25, 2005, a detainee complained to the guards that urine had come through an air vent in his cellblock, and splashed him and his Koran as he lay near the vent. A guard who had left his observation post to urinate outside acknowledged that he was to blame. He had urinated near the vent, and the wind blew it into the vent, from which it splashed into the cell.
The senior guard on duty immediately relieved the guard, and ordered that the detainee receive a fresh uniform and a new Koran. The guard was reprimanded and assigned to duty where he had no contact with detainees for the remainder of his assignment at the detention center.
General Hood's report found 10 other alleged incidents, 7 involving guards and 3 involving interrogators, where the military personnel accidentally touched the Koran, touched a Koran within the scope of their regular duties or did not touch the Koran at all.
The inquiry concluded that none of these events involved mishandling of the Koran, but that some were clearly alarming to detainees, including a case in late 2002 in which an unidentified marine, during an interrogation, was said to have squatted down in front of a detainee "in an aggressive manner."
In the process, the report said, the marine "unintentionally squatted down over the detainee's Koran," and "this provoked a visible reaction from the detainee."
The report also found 15 incidents in which detainees had mishandled the Koran.
The military's statement said the investigation had examined 31,000 documents, both on paper and electronically; classified and unclassified computer drives used by task force personnel; and legal documents and news articles for any mention of possible abuses of the Koran.
General Hood concluded that the current policy regarding the handling of the Koran was appropriate, but the military statement said that some additional minor changes, which it did not describe, were under review.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/politics...agewanted=print
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 3 - A military inquiry has found that guards or interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba kicked, stepped on and splashed urine on the Koran, in some cases intentionally but in others by accident, the Pentagon said on Friday.
The splashing of urine was among the cases described as inadvertent. It was said to have occurred when a guard urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into a detainee's cell. The detainee was given a fresh uniform and a new Koran, and the guard was reprimanded and assigned to guard duty that kept him from contact with detainees for the remainder of his time at Guantánamo, according to the military inquiry.
The investigation into allegations that the Koran had been mishandled also found that in one instance detainees' Korans were wet because guards on the night shift had thrown water balloons on the cellblock.
In another case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Koran, but investigators could not determine whether a guard or detainee had written it.
Last week, the head of the investigation, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commander of the Guantánamo Joint Task Force, announced at the Pentagon that his preliminary findings had uncovered five cases in which the Koran was mishandled at the prison, but he refused to provide details.
In releasing those details in a final report on Friday, General Hood emphasized that any abuse of the Koran was unusual and that the military had gone to great lengths to be sensitive to the detainees' religious faiths, including issuing more than 1,600 Korans at the detention center.
"Mishandling a Koran at Guantánamo Bay is a rare occurrence," General Hood said in a statement released by the military's Southern Command. "Mishandling of a Koran here is never condoned."
The investigation was started about three weeks ago after Newsweek magazine published an article asserting that a separate inquiry by the military was expected to find that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the detention center. The magazine later retracted the article, but the assertion led to violence in the Muslim world that left at least 17 people dead.
General Hood said last week that there was no credible evidence to substantiate the claim that a Koran had ever been flushed down a toilet at the prison.
The final report released on Friday said that four of the five incidents took place after January 2003, after written procedures governing the handling of the Koran had been put in place. That contradicted an account provided last Thursday by General Hood, who was asked directly whether all five of the incidents had taken place before January 2003, and replied: "Not all of them. One of them occurred since then."
A spokesman for the task force, Capt. Jeffrey Weir, said in a telephone interview that he could not explain General Hood's comments last week. "Maybe he misspoke," Captain Weir said. "I'm not sure why he would have put it that way."
The military released the findings of the investigation about 7:15 p.m., Eastern time, well after the broadcasts of the network television evening news programs. A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, denied that the military was trying to bury bad news late on a Friday night, a tactic often used by government agencies. "It was completed and we try not to hold these things after their reviews are completed," Mr. Whitman said in a telephone interview.
Military policy acknowledges that some Muslims consider a non-Muslim touching the Koran as a desecration.
"The Southern Command policy of Koran handling is serious, respectful and appropriate," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, who was traveling with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at a security conference in Singapore. "The Hood inquiry would appear to affirm that policy."
The report said investigators had examined nine alleged incidents in which the Koran was mishandled, either intentionally or unintentionally, and confirmed five of them. Four involved guards at the detention center; one involved an interrogator.
According to the military's statement on Friday, this is what happened in the five confirmed incidents of Koran abuse.
In February 2002, a detainee complained during an interrogation that guards at Camp X-Ray had kicked the Koran of a detainee in a neighboring cell four or five days earlier, the inquiry's report said. The interrogator reported the complaint on Feb. 27, and confirmed that the guards were aware of the complaint.
The report said there was no evidence of any investigation into the incident, and investigators did not say why they believed it was credible or who might have been responsible.
On July 25, 2003, a contract interrogator apologized to a detainee for stepping on the detainee's Koran in an earlier interrogation. The detainee accepted the apology and agreed to tell other detainees and ask them to stop disruptive behavior caused by the incident.
The interrogator was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior, an inability to follow direct guidance and poor leadership," the military statement said.
On Aug. 15, 2003, two detainees complained to one set of guards that their Korans were wet because guards on the night shift had tossed water balloons on the cellblock. The complaints were recorded in the cellblock's log, but there was no indication that the incident was ever investigated. Investigators described the guards' conduct as "clearly inappropriate" but said it did not cause any disturbance among detainees.
Less than a week later, on Aug. 21, a detainee who spoke conversational English complained that someone had written a two-word obscenity in English in his English-version Koran. The complaint was recorded in an electronic log. "It is possible," the military's statement said, "that a guard committed this act; it is equally possible that the detainee wrote in his own Koran."
On March 25, 2005, a detainee complained to the guards that urine had come through an air vent in his cellblock, and splashed him and his Koran as he lay near the vent. A guard who had left his observation post to urinate outside acknowledged that he was to blame. He had urinated near the vent, and the wind blew it into the vent, from which it splashed into the cell.
The senior guard on duty immediately relieved the guard, and ordered that the detainee receive a fresh uniform and a new Koran. The guard was reprimanded and assigned to duty where he had no contact with detainees for the remainder of his assignment at the detention center.
General Hood's report found 10 other alleged incidents, 7 involving guards and 3 involving interrogators, where the military personnel accidentally touched the Koran, touched a Koran within the scope of their regular duties or did not touch the Koran at all.
The inquiry concluded that none of these events involved mishandling of the Koran, but that some were clearly alarming to detainees, including a case in late 2002 in which an unidentified marine, during an interrogation, was said to have squatted down in front of a detainee "in an aggressive manner."
In the process, the report said, the marine "unintentionally squatted down over the detainee's Koran," and "this provoked a visible reaction from the detainee."
The report also found 15 incidents in which detainees had mishandled the Koran.
The military's statement said the investigation had examined 31,000 documents, both on paper and electronically; classified and unclassified computer drives used by task force personnel; and legal documents and news articles for any mention of possible abuses of the Koran.
General Hood concluded that the current policy regarding the handling of the Koran was appropriate, but the military statement said that some additional minor changes, which it did not describe, were under review.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/politics...agewanted=print
I think that now it's obvious for all that this Administration has deceived the American people, and that it's made of liars and crooks
Moreover I think Newsweek should legally challenge White House to have a compensation for the damages occured to the image of this magazine
Moreover I think Newsweek should legally challenge White House to have a compensation for the damages occured to the image of this magazine
Rights Group Defends Chastising of U.S.
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
LONDON, June 3 - An official of Amnesty International said Friday that the term gulag in its annual report to describe the United States prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was chosen deliberately, and she shrugged off harsh criticism of the report by the Bush administration.
The official, Kate Gilmore, the group's executive deputy secretary general, said the administration's response was "typical of a government on the defensive," and she drew parallels to the reactions of the former Soviet Union, Libya and Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, when those governments were accused of human rights abuses.
The report, released May 25, placed the United States at the heart of its list of human rights offenders, citing indefinite detentions of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and secret renditions of prisoners to countries that practice torture. But it is the use of the word gulag, a reference to the complex of labor camps where Stalin sent thousands of dissidents, that has drawn the most attention.
President Bush called the report "absurd" several times, and said it was the product of people who "hate America." Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN that he was "offended" by the use of the term and that he did not take the organization "seriously." And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called the comparison "reprehensible."
Amnesty has fired right back, pointing out that the administration often cites its reports when that suits its purposes. "If our reports are so 'absurd,' why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war?" wrote William F. Schultz, executive director of the group's United States branch, in a letter to the editor being published Saturday in The New York Times. "Why does it welcome our criticisms of Cuba, China and North Korea? And why does it cite our research in its own annual human rights reports?"
In a telephone interview on Friday, Ms. Gilmore, the second-ranking official in Amnesty, said "gulag" was not meant as a literal description of Guantánamo but was emblematic of the sense of injustice and lack of due process surrounding the prison.
"The issue of the gulag is about policies and practices," she said. "You put people beyond the reach of law, you locate them in facilities where families can't access them, you deny them access to legal representation, you attempt to prevent judicial review."
She added, "This creates the likelihood that the people who are there have nothing to do with criminal conduct or that it is a breach of the Geneva Convention."
In its 308-page human rights report, Amnesty International pointed to an "impunity and accountability deficit," and called on Congress to conduct "a full and independent investigation of the use of torture and other human rights abuses by U.S. officials" as a starting point in "restoring confidence that true justice has no double standards."
Long used to biting criticism, the group said this was the first time one of its reports had drawn the public wrath of the United States president and vice president, its secretary of defense, its secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ms. Gilmore said the response was telling. "When we see a government at this level engaging in rhetorical attacks and avoiding dealing with the details or the facts," she said, "we interpret that as being a sign that we are starting to have an impact."
Ms. Gilmore said Amnesty International has been working on terrorism-related human rights violations for more than two years. It was a natural progression and a predictable course of action, she said, to place the United States, a defender of democracy and human rights, at the forefront of the annual report of human rights violations.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the F.B.I. and United States courts have criticized the detention policies at Guantánamo Bay, she said. In addition, Ms. Gilmore said, the detention policy has been expanded to apply to jails in countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The creation of an archipelago of detention centers, she said, was another factor in the choice of the term gulag.
There has been no internal discussion about the wisdom of having used the term and certainly no sense of regret, Ms. Gilmore said, although the group has found the unrelenting focus on the word, and not the contents of the report, irritating. "On the other hand," she added, "we're getting more airing of our message than we would have otherwise."
So far, Washington's reaction has galvanized support for Amnesty International, she said. In the past week, the United States branch of the group has reported an increase in memberships, donations and volunteers.
The fact that the United States was prominent on the list came as little surprise internationally, she said.
"I think it's a dangerous game the U.S. administration is playing, to attack civil society in this manner," Ms. Gilmore said. "Civil society is essential to a robust democratic society. For the Bush administration to think that it's a legitimate political strategy to attack a nongovernmental organization of Amnesty's standing signals a ruthlessness that is deeply troubling."
While the substance of the report was defended by human rights organizations and others, several said Amnesty International had erred in using the word gulag, if only because it allowed the Bush administration to change the conversation.
"I think it was a rather serious misjudgment to use the term gulag," said Sir Nigel Rodley, a professor of law at the University of Essex and chairman of the Human Rights Center there. "The basic criticism of some of the problems are very real and it has given the administration the opportunity to divert from the substance of the concern."
Sir Nigel, who said that having been Amnesty International's legal adviser from 1973 to 1990 he represents the old guard, also said that the organization should have avoided using an inflammatory term that did not precisely apply. He also said the "lapse" lent credence to a growing chorus of concerns that Amnesty, which was founded in 1961 to lobby for political prisoners and has since expanded into the areas of poverty, domestic violence and AIDS, had overextended itself and lost focus.
Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch in New York, said he thought the Bush administration had taken cover behind semantics. "We're concerned that the debate over the label is obscuring the real issue," he said. "That the United States is locking people up without due process possibly for the rest of their lives."
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/internat...agewanted=print
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
LONDON, June 3 - An official of Amnesty International said Friday that the term gulag in its annual report to describe the United States prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was chosen deliberately, and she shrugged off harsh criticism of the report by the Bush administration.
The official, Kate Gilmore, the group's executive deputy secretary general, said the administration's response was "typical of a government on the defensive," and she drew parallels to the reactions of the former Soviet Union, Libya and Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, when those governments were accused of human rights abuses.
The report, released May 25, placed the United States at the heart of its list of human rights offenders, citing indefinite detentions of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and secret renditions of prisoners to countries that practice torture. But it is the use of the word gulag, a reference to the complex of labor camps where Stalin sent thousands of dissidents, that has drawn the most attention.
President Bush called the report "absurd" several times, and said it was the product of people who "hate America." Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN that he was "offended" by the use of the term and that he did not take the organization "seriously." And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called the comparison "reprehensible."
Amnesty has fired right back, pointing out that the administration often cites its reports when that suits its purposes. "If our reports are so 'absurd,' why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war?" wrote William F. Schultz, executive director of the group's United States branch, in a letter to the editor being published Saturday in The New York Times. "Why does it welcome our criticisms of Cuba, China and North Korea? And why does it cite our research in its own annual human rights reports?"
In a telephone interview on Friday, Ms. Gilmore, the second-ranking official in Amnesty, said "gulag" was not meant as a literal description of Guantánamo but was emblematic of the sense of injustice and lack of due process surrounding the prison.
"The issue of the gulag is about policies and practices," she said. "You put people beyond the reach of law, you locate them in facilities where families can't access them, you deny them access to legal representation, you attempt to prevent judicial review."
She added, "This creates the likelihood that the people who are there have nothing to do with criminal conduct or that it is a breach of the Geneva Convention."
In its 308-page human rights report, Amnesty International pointed to an "impunity and accountability deficit," and called on Congress to conduct "a full and independent investigation of the use of torture and other human rights abuses by U.S. officials" as a starting point in "restoring confidence that true justice has no double standards."
Long used to biting criticism, the group said this was the first time one of its reports had drawn the public wrath of the United States president and vice president, its secretary of defense, its secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ms. Gilmore said the response was telling. "When we see a government at this level engaging in rhetorical attacks and avoiding dealing with the details or the facts," she said, "we interpret that as being a sign that we are starting to have an impact."
Ms. Gilmore said Amnesty International has been working on terrorism-related human rights violations for more than two years. It was a natural progression and a predictable course of action, she said, to place the United States, a defender of democracy and human rights, at the forefront of the annual report of human rights violations.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the F.B.I. and United States courts have criticized the detention policies at Guantánamo Bay, she said. In addition, Ms. Gilmore said, the detention policy has been expanded to apply to jails in countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The creation of an archipelago of detention centers, she said, was another factor in the choice of the term gulag.
There has been no internal discussion about the wisdom of having used the term and certainly no sense of regret, Ms. Gilmore said, although the group has found the unrelenting focus on the word, and not the contents of the report, irritating. "On the other hand," she added, "we're getting more airing of our message than we would have otherwise."
So far, Washington's reaction has galvanized support for Amnesty International, she said. In the past week, the United States branch of the group has reported an increase in memberships, donations and volunteers.
The fact that the United States was prominent on the list came as little surprise internationally, she said.
"I think it's a dangerous game the U.S. administration is playing, to attack civil society in this manner," Ms. Gilmore said. "Civil society is essential to a robust democratic society. For the Bush administration to think that it's a legitimate political strategy to attack a nongovernmental organization of Amnesty's standing signals a ruthlessness that is deeply troubling."
While the substance of the report was defended by human rights organizations and others, several said Amnesty International had erred in using the word gulag, if only because it allowed the Bush administration to change the conversation.
"I think it was a rather serious misjudgment to use the term gulag," said Sir Nigel Rodley, a professor of law at the University of Essex and chairman of the Human Rights Center there. "The basic criticism of some of the problems are very real and it has given the administration the opportunity to divert from the substance of the concern."
Sir Nigel, who said that having been Amnesty International's legal adviser from 1973 to 1990 he represents the old guard, also said that the organization should have avoided using an inflammatory term that did not precisely apply. He also said the "lapse" lent credence to a growing chorus of concerns that Amnesty, which was founded in 1961 to lobby for political prisoners and has since expanded into the areas of poverty, domestic violence and AIDS, had overextended itself and lost focus.
Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch in New York, said he thought the Bush administration had taken cover behind semantics. "We're concerned that the debate over the label is obscuring the real issue," he said. "That the United States is locking people up without due process possibly for the rest of their lives."
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/internat...agewanted=print
VISIT THESE SITES, COMPARE AND CONTRAST...
http://www.aclu.org/
http://www.amnestyusa.org/
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charles...k20050603.shtml
Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already
Charles Krauthammer
June 3, 2005
The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down.
A terrible idea. One does not run and hide simply because allegations have been made. If the charges are unverified, as they overwhelmingly are in this case, then they need to be challenged. The United States ought to say what it has and has not done, and not simply surrender to rumor.
Moreover, shutting down Guantanamo will solve nothing. We will capture more terrorists, and we will have to interrogate them, if not at Guantanamo then somewhere else. There will then be reports from that somewhere else that will precisely mirror the charges coming out of Guantanamo. What will we do then? Keep shutting down one detention center after another?
The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside.
In March the Navy inspector general reported that, out of about 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo, there were seven confirmed cases of abuse, "all of which were relatively minor." In the eyes of history, compared to any other camp in any other war, this is an astonishingly small number. Two of the documented offenses involved "female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner." Not exactly the gulag.
The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) -- all these breathless "scoops" come from the U.S. government's own investigations of itself -- that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental.
Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.
On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01.
Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.
Why this abjectness on our part? On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations.
Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.
Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.
Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare.
Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves
http://www.aclu.org/
http://www.amnestyusa.org/
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charles...k20050603.shtml
Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already
Charles Krauthammer
June 3, 2005
The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down.
A terrible idea. One does not run and hide simply because allegations have been made. If the charges are unverified, as they overwhelmingly are in this case, then they need to be challenged. The United States ought to say what it has and has not done, and not simply surrender to rumor.
Moreover, shutting down Guantanamo will solve nothing. We will capture more terrorists, and we will have to interrogate them, if not at Guantanamo then somewhere else. There will then be reports from that somewhere else that will precisely mirror the charges coming out of Guantanamo. What will we do then? Keep shutting down one detention center after another?
The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside.
In March the Navy inspector general reported that, out of about 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo, there were seven confirmed cases of abuse, "all of which were relatively minor." In the eyes of history, compared to any other camp in any other war, this is an astonishingly small number. Two of the documented offenses involved "female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner." Not exactly the gulag.
The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) -- all these breathless "scoops" come from the U.S. government's own investigations of itself -- that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental.
Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.
On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01.
Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.
Why this abjectness on our part? On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations.
Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.
Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.
Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare.
Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves
Maybe they should start flushing Bibles down the toilet. That seems to be the only thing that would upset the people who voted for Bush.
QUOTE(Big Blue State Bitch @ Jun 3 2005, 09:34 PM)
As much as I hate to admit it, * does have a point. 90% of the detainees at Gitmo are terrorists or supporters of UBL.
Proof ?
References ?
The Era of the Nixon Conspiracy is getting repeated again. Not surprising since Bush is being heavily supported by the Nixon Criminals who are strengthening their fort with media intimidation, howls of 'patriotic' movement of the Hitler and Mao credentials, Homeland Security spying tactics, etc. etc. The unfinished GOP job of the Nixon Era is being re-established in this era. Perhaps, Felt's coming forward with his Deep Throat identity is a blessing in diguise for all Americans. We can compare and watch the GOPs' criminal intentions getting repeated.
QUOTE(veritas @ Jun 4 2005, 10:21 AM)
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charles...k20050603.shtml
Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already
Charles Krauthammer
June 3, 2005
The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down.
A terrible idea. One does not run and hide simply because allegations have been made. If the charges are unverified, as they overwhelmingly are in this case, then they need to be challenged. The United States ought to say what it has and has not done, and not simply surrender to rumor.
Moreover, shutting down Guantanamo will solve nothing. We will capture more terrorists, and we will have to interrogate them, if not at Guantanamo then somewhere else. There will then be reports from that somewhere else that will precisely mirror the charges coming out of Guantanamo. What will we do then? Keep shutting down one detention center after another?
The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside.
In March the Navy inspector general reported that, out of about 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo, there were seven confirmed cases of abuse, "all of which were relatively minor." In the eyes of history, compared to any other camp in any other war, this is an astonishingly small number. Two of the documented offenses involved "female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner." Not exactly the gulag.
The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) -- all these breathless "scoops" come from the U.S. government's own investigations of itself -- that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental.
Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.
On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01.
Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.
Why this abjectness on our part? On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations.
Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.
Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.
Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare.
Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves
Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already
Charles Krauthammer
June 3, 2005
The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down.
A terrible idea. One does not run and hide simply because allegations have been made. If the charges are unverified, as they overwhelmingly are in this case, then they need to be challenged. The United States ought to say what it has and has not done, and not simply surrender to rumor.
Moreover, shutting down Guantanamo will solve nothing. We will capture more terrorists, and we will have to interrogate them, if not at Guantanamo then somewhere else. There will then be reports from that somewhere else that will precisely mirror the charges coming out of Guantanamo. What will we do then? Keep shutting down one detention center after another?
The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside.
In March the Navy inspector general reported that, out of about 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo, there were seven confirmed cases of abuse, "all of which were relatively minor." In the eyes of history, compared to any other camp in any other war, this is an astonishingly small number. Two of the documented offenses involved "female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner." Not exactly the gulag.
The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) -- all these breathless "scoops" come from the U.S. government's own investigations of itself -- that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental.
Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.
On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01.
Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.
Why this abjectness on our part? On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations.
Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.
Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.
Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare.
Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...anda_techniques
Propaganda techniques
From SourceWatch
Propagandists use a variety of propaganda techniques to influence opinions and to avoid the truth. Often these techniques rely on some element of censorship or manipulation, either omitting significant information or distorting it. They are indistinguishable except in degree from the persuasion techniques employed in social, religious and commercial affairs. Recently persuasion technology has come into common use, in all styles from digital image alteration to persuasive presentation and persistent telemarketing based on repetition, making these techniques impossible to avoid.
Table of contents GREAT LINKS
1 Rhetorical techniques
2 Other techniques/terms
3 Logical Fallacies
3.1 References on Logical Fallacies
4 Persuasion technology arms races
5 Recommended Books
6 External links
[edit]Rhetorical techniques
During the period between World Wars I and II, the now-defunct Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) developed a list of common rhetorical techniques used for propaganda purposes. Their list included the following:
bandwagon
doublespeak
euphemisms
fear
glittering generalities
name-calling
plain folks
testimonial
transfer
[edit]Other techniques/terms
ad hominem
adjectives and adverbs
agent provocateur
alliteration
anger
anonymous sources
apologise
association
astroturf
attack ad
augmentation
background information
backgrounder
bad science
bait and switch
big lie
BIMBO comment
buzz
buzzwords
caricature and stereotyping
censorship
codewords
comic books
confusopoly
contrivance
controlling the noise
create tension between target groups
demonizing the opposition
disinformation
distraction
distort risk
divide and conquer
doublespeak
echo chamber
empty rhetoric
environmental scares
extreme metaphor
flak
front group
fundamental attribution error
greenwashing
guerrilla marketing
Historical engineering with novels
inane blather
inference
junk science and false accusations of junk science
knuckleball
limiting the choices
manipulate memes
manufacture of consent
misinformation
motherhood term
mud slinging
narrowcasting
neurolinguistic programming
omission
one-time charge
orwellize
outing
passive voice
pedantry
photographic manipulation
policy laundering
politics of personal destruction
press conference
product placement
prophecies
providing pictures
pseudo-journalist
pseudo-science
Public Service Announcments
push poll
quoting out of context
raising standard of evidence
red herring
reinforcement
release of forged documents
repetition
rephrase an opponent's arguments
replacing credible with sensational claims
resonance
ritual defamation
sanitizing the facts
satire
scapegoating
scholarly appearance
shifting burden of proof
smear
softballing
sources said
spamvertising
speaking on background
sponsored survey
strategic ambiguity
straw man
swarming youths
unwarranted extrapolation
using celebrities
talking points
unnamed sources
vagueness
video news releases
viral marketing (word of mouth)
white papers
[edit]Logical Fallacies
In order to understand what a fallacy is, one must understand what an argument is. Very briefly, an argument consists of one or more premises and one conclusion. ... A fallacy is, very generally, an error in reasoning. [1] (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/)
AMD MORE...
QUOTE(veritas @ Jun 4 2005, 09:21 AM)
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/charles...k20050603.shtml
Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already
Charles Krauthammer
June 3, 2005
The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down.
A terrible idea. One does not run and hide simply because allegations have been made. If the charges are unverified, as they overwhelmingly are in this case, then they need to be challenged. The United States ought to say what it has and has not done, and not simply surrender to rumor.
...
Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already
Charles Krauthammer
June 3, 2005
The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down.
A terrible idea. One does not run and hide simply because allegations have been made. If the charges are unverified, as they overwhelmingly are in this case, then they need to be challenged. The United States ought to say what it has and has not done, and not simply surrender to rumor.
...
Any mention or hint to the word or to the notion of ... LAW ?
QUOTE(veritas @ Jun 4 2005, 10:20 AM)
Hitler and Mao fought accusations and condemned them as propaganda. There are enough pictures floating around the world to justify that we are not at all holy Christian saints in the eyes of our Almighty God. Any torture or inhumane act, especially by us, can't be justified. Why? Because we always tend to boast to the world that be are the Best Leader, raising up our hands and strike out at other nations if the criminal acts are procured by other nations. It's becoming a motto for us: We preach but we don't practise what we preach. And that's the worst and dishonorable criteria for any leadership. And that tantamounts to nothing by a dictatorial control of human beings. America's decency and honor are worth fighting for... not a patriotism that's smeared with hate and sh*t. Otherwise, the word "Democracy" becomes meaningless and a farce.
Picadilly, I like your question about "Law". It does question the Bush Regime's motives when they quickly attempt to exclude us from the laws of International Justice.
Time and time again, nation after nation has declared that they don't hate Americans. They only hate Bush! It's time, if Bush is a true Christian, he should rethink and confess his sins - and start denouncing the acts of his appointees instead of covering up for them. What is victory when it's bloodied with the acts of sins and lies?
QUOTE(Big Blue State Bitch @ Jun 3 2005, 09:34 PM)
To a Moslem, even handling the Koran with an ungloved hand is an affront. And the terrorists at Gitmo would certainly use an incident like that to their own advantage.
Would anyone scream murder if the Torah is showered with urine? A sacred material is a sacred material to anyone who deems it sacred by their religious laws. It does not matter what religion it is.
I would even personally claw out the eyes of anyone who dares pee on my mother's photo!
We have forgotten that it was Bin Laden and his gang of mostly Saudi Beasts and Demons who destroyed the Twin Towers and those more than 3000 lives. Many we took to prison and mistreat were innocent human beings. Don't give me crap by raising up 9/11 as an excuse. We even quickly gathered up the Saudis and arranged for their quick departure from our nation before they could be interrogated. We slapped the faces of the world's nations who stood by us to fight the 9/11 terrorists straight after 9/11 and concocted disgusting lies after lies and side track our greatest and genuine defense. Killing all Muslims might help the Coniving Fundamentalist Zionists of Israel but does not clear our conscience when it comes to ultimately facing God's Justice. Bin Laden and the real culprits-in-command of the 9/11 attacks are still on the loose. And we have created more darkness to the world that's affecting the lives and safety of every American! We can hide everything here within our nation, but the same lies will always be exposed by other true Freedom and Democratic Fighters of other nations. Good trumps over Evil in the end. We don't want to be classified as the Evil that finally gets defeated in disgrace.
The Bushies are a disgrace to America for doing the un-American acts. It's time honorable and justice-loving Americans vote them all out in 2006 and 2008 and save the Integrity and Honor of America. We can then send all their sons and daughters to Iraq to bring true Democracy to Iraq where their parents had failed!
QUOTE(Salute_Liberty @ Jun 4 2005, 01:17 PM)
The Bushies are a disgrace to America for doing the un-American acts. It's time honorable and justice-loving Americans vote them all out in 2006 and 2008 and save the Integrity and Honor of America. We can then send all their sons and daughters to Iraq to bring true Democracy to Iraq where their parents had failed!
Yes, they are a shame on America. Lies and more lies to cover lies.
QUOTE(Salute_Liberty @ Jun 4 2005, 10:47 AM)
Picadilly, I like your question about "Law". It does question the Bush Regime's motives when they quickly attempt to exclude us from the laws of International Justice.
I was suggesting the legitimacy of Gitmo itself as well as the "performance" of official US government workers over there, by US law.
QUOTE(Big Blue State Bitch @ Jun 3 2005, 10:34 PM)
As much as I hate to admit it, * does have a point. 90% of the detainees at Gitmo are terrorists or supporters of UBL. They know that they can inflame the media and the Arab street by claiming denigration of the Koran, and are using it to their advantage.
There's enough blame to go around on this. Did the soldiers at Gitmo disrespect the Koran? I'm sure that some did, knowing how intolerant of other religions a lot of military folks are. Not to mention that these people ATTACKED US AND MURDERED OVER 3,000 PEOPLE. More than just a bunch of ignorant idiots that wanted to "get back" at the detainees for 9/11, there were probably a lot of cultural issues. To a Moslem, even handling the Koran with an ungloved hand is an affront. And the terrorists at Gitmo would certainly use an incident like that to their own advantage.
Besides, a suicide bomber just blew up a mosque in Pakistan and killed women and children. Why aren't people in the streets of Islamabad and Karachi protesting THAT?
There's enough blame to go around on this. Did the soldiers at Gitmo disrespect the Koran? I'm sure that some did, knowing how intolerant of other religions a lot of military folks are. Not to mention that these people ATTACKED US AND MURDERED OVER 3,000 PEOPLE. More than just a bunch of ignorant idiots that wanted to "get back" at the detainees for 9/11, there were probably a lot of cultural issues. To a Moslem, even handling the Koran with an ungloved hand is an affront. And the terrorists at Gitmo would certainly use an incident like that to their own advantage.
Besides, a suicide bomber just blew up a mosque in Pakistan and killed women and children. Why aren't people in the streets of Islamabad and Karachi protesting THAT?
last I heard, In America, if you are arrested, you are brought to trial, and your guilt or innocence is decided.
That is how it is done.
Who has Bush arrested?
John Walker Lindh.
Who else?
Who knows. We have no idea who is there.
It is wrong. Try em or free em.
And the press is so manipulated, who knows who did what was done. It could all be fixed.
QUOTE(picadilly @ Jun 4 2005, 02:02 PM)
I was suggesting the legitimacy of Gitmo itself as well as the "performance" of official US government workers over there, by US law.
Hhhmh, rather the Bush Law – based on the premise of protecting lies and criminal acts? Or is it the “Sharonization of U.S. Policy”? Or are we merely imitating the Law of Victorian Imperialists?
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/leavitt/20050314.html
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/AOPof911p06.html
http://presentdanger.irc-online.org/papers...worldcourt.html
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099751/
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/bush-m18.shtml
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issue.../0225guilty.htm
http://www.transnational.org/features/2002...r%20Policy.html
http://www.law.nyu.edu/newscalendars/2004_2005/sands/
Should we assume that America is the chosen Kingdom of God?
http://www.wslfweb.org/warandlaw.htm
And should Bush be above the Law?
http://www.crisispapers.org/topics/above-law.htm
If America continues to develop “isolation” from the world community, will that eventually have a direct effect on our international standing and our economic and trade interests around the world?
http://www.eccmei.net/E/E027.html
QUOTE(Salute_Liberty @ Jun 4 2005, 11:47 AM)
...propaganda. ..
We share a common view - the link goes to a site that spells out more than anyone probably ever wants to know about why perception gets so mixed up.
Someone with enough time could read through that essay and identify the specific tools used on any unsuspecting readers.
Sorry for the original messy post - in a rush/unable to edit/links failed to transfer.
QUOTE(veritas @ Jun 4 2005, 06:03 PM)
We share a common view - the link goes to a site that spells out more than anyone probably ever wants to know about why perception gets so mixed up.
Someone with enough time could read through that essay and identify the specific tools used on any unsuspecting readers.
Sorry for the original messy post - in a rush/unable to edit/links failed to transfer.
Someone with enough time could read through that essay and identify the specific tools used on any unsuspecting readers.
Sorry for the original messy post - in a rush/unable to edit/links failed to transfer.
Just like the common thought: Those who cling only dearly to Fox News' opinion tend to have their brains stiflfed with the Fox Propaganda. Narrow minds travel along narrow paths... Why? Because they've been brainwashed to believe that their opinions are the only Gospel Truth.
Same Rights Groups that believe Nixon to be their Presidential Saint! 
QUOTE(grammydidi @ Jun 4 2005, 06:16 AM)
Since very, very few of the Gitmo prisoners have even been publicly accused (much less charged) of any crime, the above reasoning isn't sound.
Exactly! We haven't a clue who these people are, and I stopped believing my government without question since ........ um ............. *thinks* Nixon. So while I agree that our government says that these are terrorists, I don't know if that is true because (1) the Bush whitehouse can and will lie to achieve it's goal and (2) from what I hear a high number of prisoners are turning out NOT to be terrorists as thought.
We should not and cannot hold people in secret!!!
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