Thursday, April 30, 2009

America's War Crimes and its Crimes Against Humanity Are A Global Issue and Not As Obama Thinks A Private Affair

UPDATE: 12:21,April 30, 2009



POWS - Detainees Abused & tortured
C.I.A & others Granted Immunity
The Victims Need Justice



America's Shame- But 51% of Americans Defend Torture as Necessary



Victims Abused & discarded by Bush and Obama
American hypocrisy

Even Bush was against War Crimes until He became the Perpetrator-

"War Crimes Will Be Prosecuted" Bush

"It Will Be No Defense To Say, I Was Just Following Orders" Says Bush



Sky News With US Torturer Tony Lagouranis( author of the book FEAR UP HARSH) Exposed
U.S. Military treated all Iraqis as if they were guilty or Knew who the insurgents were.
Torture just added to the anger of Iraqis against the U.S. Occupation





" The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A."


From article by Seymour Hersh on U.S. use of torture:"The Gray Zone:How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib." by Seymour M. Hersh at The New Yorker,May 24,2004

Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis, picked up at random by US troops and incarcerated by underqualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the jail told the Guardian.

He claimed many of the detainees are "innocent of any acts against the coalition".

"One case in point is a detainee whom I recommended for release and months later was still sitting in the same tent with no change in his status."

Mr Nelson said that the same systemic problems were also responsible for large numbers of Afghans being mistakenly swept into Guantánamo Bay. He estimated that a third or more of the inmates at the controversial prison camp had no connection to terrorism.

From:Photos of US Torture of Iraqi Prisoners At The Abu Ghraib Prison In Iraq, April 30, 2004

Note: the reporting of widespread abuses and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan of prisoners held by the U.S. and the U.K. go back as far as 2004 and so this news has been known for over five years. The information released in the last month or so just adds more evidence to these allegations. Yet the American people for the most part couldn't care less. As quoted above 51% of Americans approve of the use of torture not so much to get information but to punish anyone involved in 9/11 .
Obama and Eric Holder are more concerned with their political careers and fear upsetting conservative Americans and the Republican party to actually insist on pursuing truth and justice. One wonders if they fear that the military and C.I.A. would stage a coup against them or just make life extremely difficult for them ?
Do they fear that America could not survive a full blown investigation accompanied by indictments of those who ordered that these crimes be committed and those who wrote the legal memos to add a legal veneer to these Crimes and those who did the actual torturing .

As I have argued before most of these people were not acting in GOOD FAITH- they knew torture did not work; they knew these enhanced interrogation techniques were in fact torture; they knew that much of the information the Bush/Cheney Regime hoped to get was in fact bogus i.e, there was no connection between Al Qaeda & Saddam & 9/11, they had been informed again and again that Saddam had no WMDS or WMDS program and after a decade of sanctions Iraq was not an imminent threat to its neighbors or to the United States- but these are just mere facts and so have little weight for the average American who were sold these lies as if they were FACTS-

Even President Obama is uninterested in the Victims of America's Torture Policy- Obama may be able to forget what happened to the hundreds if not thousands of prisoners who were abused and or tortured by U.S. Personnel but the Victims will never forget . The peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan and of other countries who were captured and abused by the Americans or the British deserve to know the truth and they deserve justice.

Those who abused, humiliated, degraded and tortured "detainees " must be held accountable if not by the U.S. government then by other governments and international bodies.

This issue is not merely a domestic problem for the United States but is a global issue.Obama may want to forget this whole dark era but the victims of America's War Crimes will not forget . And these victims and their fellow citizens in Iraq or Afghanistan and other countries now know that America does not believe in justice or accountability not when it comes to its own War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.

The excuse the Americans use for their War Crimes is that they were attacked on 9/11 and so are to be given carte blanche in their actions whether it is the unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq or the abuse of thousands of prisoners. So for how long is America going to use this excuse to terrorize the rest of the world.

Obama is wrong about the issue of detainee abuse it is not just an American issue. The brutal and barbaric treatment of thousands of prisoners by the United States or by any of its allies is an international issue. Odd that one who claims to be an expert on international law appears like many Americans to be dismissive of international laws such as The Geneva Conventions or the International Convention on the ban on torture & other cruel and inhumane or degrading treatment.

A large percentage of the thousands of these so called detainees captured in Iraq or Afghanistan were in fact not guilty or had little usable intel to give to their sadistic revenge-seeking captors . Over and over again we are reminded that because of the Bush Propaganda Machine the average American soldier believed that many of those captured were in some way or other involved or knew about the 9/11 attack . Otherwise the belief was that all Iraqis and Afghans had important information about the Taliban, Al Qaeda or other terrorist organization or knew about the insurgency or knew where Saddam was hiding his mythical WMDS and his Atomic Weapons .

But mainly the average soldier had been told that they were permitted to treat Iraqis and Afghan prisoners and citizens in any fashion they wished since all were guilty of crimes to a lesser or greater extent against the United States in the eyes of the Bush Administration and the American people .

We now know that the Bush Regime in its use of abusive interrogation techniques more commonly know outside America as torture was used in a fishing expedition one to get intel on the connection between Al Qaeda , Saddam and 9/11 which early on the Americans and the C.I.A. knew did not exist. So the Bush torturers were to get false confessions if necessary from those captured to help justify the Bush invasion of Iraq. They were also pressuring the C.I.A. , the U.S. military and private contractors to produce one way or another as much fabricated evidence as possible about Saddam's Non-existent WMDs or at least WMD programs which the White House had been informed before invading Iraq did not exist.

Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis, picked up at random by US troops and incarcerated by underqualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the jail told the Guardian.

...

When it comes to America's War Crimes & Crimes Against Humanity Obama is sort of Dr. Feelgood who wants to look to the future . But he is in good company it appears since a recent poll reports that 51% of Americans approve of the use of torture on any Al Qaeda suspects or insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan. America wanted to exact revenge and it has done so and continues to do so in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan .

Obama like most Americans is uninterested in justice. Justice would mean he fears digging up the past & going through some rather negative emotions. And who wants to have to deal with Negative Emotions when it is better to just look away or just walk on by who cares those abused and tortured after all are not Americans they are not even Christians so who cares? So why bother since justice is more or less meaningless. But Obama like most Americans doesn't really care about those tortured , abused, degraded , humiliated by U.S. personnel in order supposedly to get information but it appears mainly to make all those people who are considered by Americans as not being human to pay for 9/11 attacks and for each and every American soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
FREEDOMAIN RADIO
True News 35: Bush, Obama and the Torture of Morality
Believe it or not, this is what we call 'progress.' http://www.freedomainradio....




"Report vindicates soldiers prosecuted over Abu Ghraib abuses, lawyers say" by Daniel Nasaw, guardian.co.uk,April22,2009

• Lawyer for Charles Graner to seek presidential pardon
• Report a 'great opportunity,' says Lynndie England's attorney
• Senator Carl Levin says abuse was systematic


A newly unclassified Senate report on the US government's treatment of terrorism suspects vindicates enlisted soldiers prosecuted for the abuse of inmates of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, lawyers for two of the soldiers and a US senator said today.

Texas-based lawyer Guy Womack, who defended specialist Charles Graner, said he plans to seek a presidential pardon for his client. Graner was in 2005 sentenced to 10 years in a military prison on charges of conspiracy, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees and other counts.

Interrogation techniques such as the use of dogs and "stress positions" were "a direct cause of detainee abuse and influenced interrogation policies at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq", states the 232-page Senate armed services committee report, the most detailed investigation into abuse of terrorism suspects and war prisoners yet.

"If the government had admitted that at the time, then they would have been obligated to dismiss the case against Graner because he was following orders, just as we had said at that time," Womack said.

"They perpetrated a fraud on the court by successfully concealing that this was government policy and it was approved by higher government authorities than those poor MPs on the ground at Abu Ghraib."

In finding Graner guilty, the military panel rejected Womack's arguments that the practices, which included stripping prisoners naked and threatening them with dogs, had been sanctioned higher up on the chain of command. Critics of George Bush have long claimed the soldiers who were punished in connection with the detainee abuses were just following orders.



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on Outsourcing & privatizing Torture see: "US: Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture" by Joshua Holland, Alternet September 14th, 2006

Abu Ghraib was a perfect storm, destined to result in torture and murder. The Department of Justice was redefining torture to be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure," 90 percent of U.S. troops believed they were in Iraq for "retaliation for Saddam's role in 9/11" and, according to the Army, brigade leaders "failed to supervise or provide direct oversight, to properly discipline their soldiers ... and to provide continued mission-specific training." The results were those all-too-familiar images of grinning soldiers posed next to brutalized corpses on ice, stacks of naked prisoners, hooded prisoners in "stress positions" trussed in electrical cords and all the rest. The only winners -- beside Al Qaeda recruiters -- were CACI's shareholders -- its invoices were duly processed.

Amnesty notes that contractors "neither fall under the Military Code of Justice, nor are they answerable to Iraqi law, having been specifically excluded under a decree issued by Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S.-run administration in Iraq." Theoretically, a recent law, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, could be used to prosecute contractors, but the administration has not tried it out yet. According to the Legal Times, it's "narrowly crafted and ... may not cover some of the abuses -- and abusers -- involved in the torture of Iraqi detainees at U.S.-run prisons." It doesn't cover intelligence contractors working for the CIA.

That may be the whole point; critics have argued that one reason the United States has employed so many contractors to handle prisoners is to shield members of the military high command and their civilian leadership from culpability for war crimes or other violations of international and domestic laws.

--

and:
UK forces taught torture methods" by David Leigh, The Guardian, May 8, 2004

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.

The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands.

"There is a reservoir of knowledge about these interrogation techniques which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq. Contractors are bringing in their old friends"

...The spectrum of R2I techniques also includes keeping prisoners naked most of the time. This is what the Abu Ghraib photographs show, along with inmates being forced to crawl on a leash; forced to masturbate in front of a female soldier; mimic oral sex with other male prisoners; and form piles of naked, hooded men.

The full battery of methods includes hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners not only of dignity, but of fundamental human needs, such as warmth, water and food.

The US commander in charge of military jails in Iraq, Major General Geoffrey Miller, has confirmed that a battery of 50-odd special "coercive techniques" can be used against enemy detainees. The general, who previously ran the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, said his main role was to extract as much intelligence as possible.

Interrogation experts at Abu Ghraib prison were there to help make the prison staff "more able to garner intelligence as rapidly as possible". ..


British judges air Guantanamo details U.S. wanted kept secret, By julie Sell, McClatchy Newspapers,March 23, 2009

LONDON — Two British High Court judges revealed Monday that U.S. military prosecutors tried to pressure a former detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into a plea bargain — on charges that hadn't been specified — that would have resulted in a 10-year sentence in addition to the years he'd already been detained.

In a previously secret annex to a ruling they made last autumn, Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones, who had access to classified U.S. documents, also revealed that American prosecutors had tried to pressure Binyam Mohamed into signing a statement that said he hadn't been tortured and wouldn't sue the U.S. government or its allies over his treatment in captivity.

The Obama administration freed Mohamed last month and returned him to Britain after holding him for seven years without charges, after the High Court's initial statements provoked a public furor in Britain.
...The British judges said they released the annex to their judgment partly because Mohamed "wanted it to be made clear to the world what had happened and how he had been treated by the United States government." Mohamed lived in Britain for a number of years before he traveled to Pakistan in 2001 and was arrested. U.S. officials alleged that he was training with al Qaida.

Mohamed's U.S. and British lawyers on Monday condemned the reported attempt to pressure and silence their client while he was in captivity. They said that in addition to requiring Mohamed to deny that he was tortured, the U.S. military prosecutor wanted Mohamed to agree not to speak to the news media after he was freed.

"My reaction to this is shock and shame," said Air Force Reserve Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, Mohamed's U.S.-assigned military lawyer, who was involved in the plea-bargain talks with U.S. prosecutors. "All these things have been done behind closed doors and in dark corners of U.S. prisons."

The revelations of Mohamed's treatment in U.S. captivity are "the tip of the iceberg," Bradley said. "I think he will be breaking ground for other detainees."

"The facts revealed today reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture," said Clive Stafford Smith, a member of Mohamed's legal team and the director of the legal-aid charity Reprieve.

"He was being told he would never leave Guantanamo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment," Stafford Smith said. "Gradually, the truth is leaking out, and the governments on both sides of the Atlantic should pause to consider whether they should continue to fight to keep this torture evidence secret."

UK High Court demands U.S. torture documents by Julie Sell ,McClatchy Newspapers, April 22, 2009

LONDON — The chief justice of the British High Court on Wednesday gave the British government one week to obtain the U.S. release of classified information about the alleged torture of a British resident who'd been detained at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba .

The court indicated that it would issue its own order if the government doesn't respond or justify why continued secrecy is warranted.

Noting that President Barack Obama had released highly sensitive documents tracing the decisions on torture during the Bush administration's war on terror, the high court judges voiced exasperation that the British government hasn't acted in what they said was the British public interest in being similarly open.

The hearing illustrated how Obama's decision to be more transparent about his predecessor's detainee policies is having ripple effects abroad, but it also threw the ball back to the Obama administration to approve release of the contested information.




also see: "Guantanamo Bay: Recent Developments "AloysiaB, Amnesty International, 20 March 2009


also see: " The Torture Timeline " By Annie Lowrey, Foreign Policy.com, April 2009

Check out and sign ACLU Petition at Stand with the ACLU. Ask Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate the interrogation of detainees in the war on terror.

Bush Memos aka The Torture Memos read memos at ACLU RELEASED: The Bush Administration's Secret Legal Memos: On April 16, 2009, the Department of Justice released four secret memos used by the Bush administration to justify torture.

and read the recently released Red Cross Report " ICRC REPORT ON THE TREATMENT OF FOURTEEN “HIGH VALUE DETAINEES” IN CIA CUSTODY

also see the five part series by McClatchy Newspapers Report on Prisoners at Guantanamo : Guantanamo Beyond The Law June 2008

and The Green Light by Philippe Sands at Vanity Fair May 2008

at AlterNet.org
"The Bush White House's Appalling and Evil Legacy: Now We Know the Whole Story" By Frank Rich, The New York Times. April 27, 2009.

and so it goes,
GORD>

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Olbermann Waterboarding Sean Hannity & Torturing Suspected Witches or Detainees To Get False Confessions

" The Green Light " by Philippe Sands , Vanity Fair, May 2008



"...Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality".

From: "The Bush White House's Appalling and Evil Legacy: Now We Know the Whole Story" By Frank Rich, The New York Times. April 27, 2009.


... The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, the U.N.'s top anti-torture envoy said Friday.

Manfred Nowak, who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said Washington is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to prosecute U.S. Justice Department officials who wrote memos that defined torture in the narrowest way in order to justify and legitimize it, and who assured CIA officials that their use of questionable tactics was legal.

"If it should turn out ... that the (U.S.) government and its authorities are not willing to prosecute those where we have enough evidence that they instigated or committed torture, then there is also an obligation on all other 145 states" party to the convention to exercise universal jurisdiction, Nowak said.

That means countries would have an obligation to arrest the individuals in question if they were on their soil and extradite them to the U.S. if Washington gave clear assurances they would bring them to justice. In the absence of such assurances, it would fall upon the respective country to take the individuals to court.

From:US Must Prosecute Bush Torture Memo Lawyers: UN Torture Envoy by Veronika Oleksyn, at Huffington Post, April 25, 2009

and it appears an FBI agent was able to gain more useful intel from a detainee by NOT USING TORTURE:


...Mr Obama yesterday visited the FBI headquarters to address and praise staff there, the day after a former agent claimed that he had gained valuable information, including the identity of the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, from an al-Qaeda suspect without resorting to harsh interrogation tactics.

Ali Soufan said he was appalled by tactics used by the CIA at a secret prison in Thailand in 2002 on Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaeda operative, after he had spent time questioning him. One day, he told Newsweek, he found Abu Zubaydah stripped naked next to a "confinement box" that looked like a coffin.

After the CIA took over the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, they used techniques that Mr Soufan called "borderline torture". He said he told the CIA agents: "We're the United States of America. We don't do that kind of thing."


From: Pressure grows to impeach Judge Jay Bybee over 'torture memos' by Tim Reid at Times ONLINE, April 29, 2009


UPDATE: 11:55 AM & 1:30 PM April 29, 2009

Keith Olbermann Finds Man To Waterboard Sean Hannity for Charity
April 27, 2009



Doctors were standing by during waterboarding ready to cut the throats of the victims if they were unable to breathe by performing a Tracheotomy. The Pro-Torture Lobby claim since there was a doctor present ( Mengele) this interrogation technique could not possibly be considered torture. As Ann Coulter has pointed out we have had a long and illustrious history of the use of torture and it always proved effective whether on those nasty evil witches in Salem or who had infested Europe and those other evil characters such as Heretics & Infidels who refused to bow down to this church leader or that or who didn't accept Church policies or claimed the Earth was Round or that the Earth revolved around the Sun - note the Bible clearly states God stopped the Sun from moving to allow a particular battle to take place & rainbows are a miracle created by God after the flood - those who believe otherwise should be tortured into telling the truth-many witches revealed they had copulated with Satan himself - Ah well as Coulter says those were the good old days - **see articles below on Witchcraft & the Efficacy of torture-

Turley taunts Bush: If GOP SO Confident Waterboarding NOT Torture Allow Special Prosecutor!
April 27, 2009



Also see:

INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY REPORT Of The COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES UNITED STATES SENATE November 20, 2008

Check out and sign ACLU Petition at Stand with the ACLU. Ask Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate the interrogation of detainees in the war on terror.

Bush Memos aka The Torture Memos read memos at ACLU RELEASED: The Bush Administration's Secret Legal Memos: On April 16, 2009, the Department of Justice released four secret memos used by the Bush administration to justify torture.

and read the recently released Red Cross Report " ICRC REPORT ON THE TREATMENT OF FOURTEEN “HIGH VALUE DETAINEES” IN CIA CUSTODY

also see the five part series by " McClatchy Newspapers Report on Prisoners at Guantanamo : Guantanamo Beyond The Law " June 2008

and The Green Light by Philippe Sands at Vanity Fair May 2008

And see article by Seymour Hersh on U.S. use of torture:"The Gray Zone:How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib." by Seymour M. Hersh at The New Yorker,May 24,2004

also see: " The Torture Timeline " By Annie Lowrey, Foreign Policy.com, April 2009


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And see PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS Report:
Broken Laws & Broken Lives:Medical Evidence of Torture by the US Report by Physicians For Human Rights



PHR: After Senate Report, Psychologists Who Tortured Must Be Held to Account April 21, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contacts:
Jonathan Hutson
jhutson [at] phrusa [dot] org
Tel: (617) 301-4210
Cell: (857) 919-5130

In the wake of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) report on detainee abuse, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is calling for the psychologists who justified, designed, and implemented torture for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DoD), to lose their professional licenses and to face criminal prosecution.

“Long before Justice Department lawyers were tasked to justify torture, US psychologists were busy actually perpetrating it,” said Steven Reisner, PhD, Advisor on Psychological Ethics at PHR. “These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law, they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics.”

The SASC report is the latest and most comprehensive account of the Bush Administration’s regime of torture and the central role health professionals played. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), Chair of SASC, is calling for the Department of Justice to review the report and pursue any evidence of criminal wrongdoing, a move that PHR supports.

“The Senate Armed Services Committee confirms what we have long known—health professionals were the agents that spread the virus of torture,” said Nathaniel Raymond, Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture which brings together thousands of health professionals who oppose torture in all circumstances. “Now is the time for those who violated our laws and our values to be held to account.”

PHR is renewing its call to Congress and the White House to immediately create a non-partisan commission to investigate the Bush Administration’s use of torture, with a specific focus on the role that psychologists and medical professionals played in its design, justification, supervision, and use.

“A non-partisan commission is required if the American people are to know the truth about our nation’s descent into torture,” said John Bradshaw, JD, PHR’s Washington Director. “Congress must move quickly and show the world that we are serious about restoring our reputation as a nation that defends human rights and the rule of law.”

PHR urges human rights supporters to sign its online petition calling for the establishment of a commission to investigate US torture and hold health professionals accountable.

Since 2005, PHR has documented the systematic use of psychological and physical torture by US personnel against detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram airbase, and elsewhere in its groundbreaking reports, Break Them Down, Leave No Marks, and Broken Laws, Broken Lives. The Senate report confirms the use of abusive and illegal interrogation techniques documented in these PHR reports. These techniques include:

* beating
* sexual and cultural humiliation
* forced nakedness
* exposure to extreme temperatures
* exploitation of phobias
* sleep deprivation
* sensory deprivation and sensory overload
* prolonged isolation
* threats of imminent harm

Physicians for Human Rights has repeatedly called for an end to the use of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) interrogation tactics by US personnel, an end to the use of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and called for a non-partisan commission to investigate the US government’s use of torture. Additionally, PHR has worked to mobilize the health professional community, particularly the professional associations, to adopt strong ethical prohibitions against direct participation in interrogations.

[Editors, please note: PHR has four leading experts on torture—physicians and psychologists who have investigated torture by US forces, studied the physical and psychological consequences, and advocated to hold health professionals accountable. To arrange an interview, please contact Jonathan Hutson, jhutson[at]phrusa[dot]org or 857-919-5130.]

Posted by Ben Greenberg on Apr 21.09


: McClatchy Newspapers Investigative Report Of Detainees Held By The U.S.:

" America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men " By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers, June 15, 2008

Mohammed Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. But they had the wrong guy. Local anti-government insurgents had fed false information to U.S. troops.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

...But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court challenge, it's impossible to know how many of the 770 men who've been held there were terrorists.

A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy combatants" beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.

...LITTLE INTELLIGENCE VALUE

The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn't belong there.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.


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Ann Coulter , Sean Hannity , Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld , Condi Rice, Gonzales etc. believe that torture or "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques work- in fact Coulter claims this is a truism going back thousands of years.

Also see On the debate over the efficacy of torture some articles on the Witch Hunts in the U.S. & Europe.

Confessing Witches
about.com
Under Torture, Accused Witches Would Confess to Almost Anything ;Getting Accused Witches to Confess From Austin Cline, About.com

Confessions of witchcraft, extracted under torture or threat of torture, commonly came attached to denouncements of other possible witches, keeping the Inquisitors in business. In Spain, church records tell the story of Maria of Ituren admitting under torture that she and sister witches turned themselves into horses and galloped through the sky. In a district of France, 600 women admitted to copulating with demons. Some entire villages in Europe were may have been exterminated.


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Torture: It's not just for witches anymore!
2007-05-17 By Baron Earl at Pigdog Journal, pigdog.org


During the second Republican Presidential Debate each of the candidates was given a hypothetical "impending doom from terrorists" scenario and asked if they would use torture to extract information from prisoners who might have some information about a possible imminent attack. The answers ranged from "yes" to "absolutely yes" to Mitt Romney's "yes, as long as we refer to torture as 'enhanced interrogation techniques'." John McCain was the lone dissenter stating categorically "no". Too bad John McCain doesn't know his history. Torture was used to stop terrorism here before there was a USA. In 1692 the town of Salem, Massachusetts was being terrorized, and they successfully used torture to stop the terror.

The people of Salem weren't being terrorized by some low-rent Al-Qaeda operatives either, they were being terrorized by Satan himself. Originally the town of Salem thought that there were only a few young girls who were possessed by the devil, but upon questioning them they named others in the town. After being tortured and threatened with death, the accused named other witches, which led to more and more witches being discovered in the township.

Of course it's not a good idea to question the policy of torturing and killing witches, as John Proctor found out. He was openly skeptical of the witch trials, but as it turned out, he was skeptical because he was a witch himself! Several people testified that ghosts had told them John Proctor was a murderer, and that was good enough for the courts -- John Proctor was hung by the neck until dead. When President Bush says that you're with the terrorists if you question his tactics, just remember what happened to John Proctor -- and you'll support the President 110%!

Thanks to torture, the people of Salem managed to uncover the devil's terrorists.

* The people of Salem hanged nineteen witches
* They pressed Giles Corey to death under a pile of stones (he didn't confess and wouldn't consent to a trial, so he was pressed rather than hanged)
* They killed two dogs (the dogs were accomplices of the witches)
* At least 4 accused witches died in jail awaiting trial (the exact number is unknown)
* Somewhere between one and two hundred other persons were arrested and imprisoned on witchcraft charges. They were later released due to the work of meddling liberals such as Increase Mather.

Without the use of torture these witches would never have been unmasked. So when someone asks you if you support torture, just say "Hell yes!" It worked in Salem to uncover witches that no one ever suspected were witches, and it can work in Guantanamo to find terrorists that no one ever suspected were terrorists.

Torture -- it's not just for witch hunts anymore!


------

Medieval Sourcebook:
Witchcraft Documents [15th Century]



Real or not, witches and witchcraft, were very real phenomena to the writers of the fifteenth century and later. Their writing tell us much about their thought worlds, and also their attitudes towards women. There can be no doubt that, whether of not there were real groups of witches, many women and a few men, suffered intense persecution and death as a result of intolerance. As Arthur Miller showed in his play The Crucible, set in Massachusetts at the time of the Salem witch trials but about McCarthyism, irrational prejudice and state action based on such, is hardly a medieval, or even a religious, phenomenon.


and so it goes,
GORD.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Is Obama Siding With The Pro-Torture Crowd & Does He Fear FOX NEWS & THE C.I.A.

Is Obama siding with the Pro-Torture Crowd

" President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won't vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don't need another commission. We don't need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation's commitment to the rule of law."
From: Frank Rich, The New York Times. April 27, 2009


"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

U.S. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba

"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.
The Independent UK, April 26, 2009

'Interrogation' American style

Army Interrogator Tony Lagouranis reveals the 'interrogation' methods he used in Iraq -- AND the methods used by Navy Seals and Force Recon.



Counter Terror With Justice- Amnesty International
When Did Torture Become An American & a Christian Value?

Assumed guilt. Arbitrary detention. Cruel and inhumane treatment. When did torture become part of the American way? Watch this important video now and join us in demanding the U.S. respect our founding principles of justice by respecting human rights and ending torture. Voice over by Freddy Rodriguez



Torture Victims are People Too with names & Faces

Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan - he was 15 under international law he is considered a Chil Soldier and therefore should be looked after and rehabilitated. Instead he has been held for years at Guantanamo where he underwent abuse and torture. Cnadian Prime MInister Stephen Harper a Bush admirer refuses to help Omar - Harper and many Canadians want revenge for Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan and are not interested in justice or Human Rights . So they would prefer for this child soldier to just disappear so they won't have to deal with the matter. Torture and abuse of prisoners has become part of Canada's as well as Britain's and Americas culture. Making this boy suffers seems to make some people feel good about themselves and their country. I thought Christians believed in forgiveness, turning the other cheek, and in love and kindness instead they prefer to torture and brutalize those people they have decided are not like them and are therefore no quite human. A society can be measured by how it deals with the helpless -






Another thing that gets lost in the debate about prosecutions of C.I.A. low level agents is whether or not those higher in the chain of command who should have known better should be prosecuted.

First we have the evidence that the F.B.I. showing a bit of restraint, backbone, moral fiber or a sense of self-preservation refused to take part in torture. And what reward doe the F.B.I. get for doing this no kudos from Obama or medals of honor instead they are ignored while Obama goes off to the C.I.A. extolling their virtues while granting all C.I.A. agents a blanket pardon. So the F.B. I. gets a slap in the face for trying to do the right thing while the C.I.A. gets rewarded for committing criminal and immoral acts . So is Obama as Machiavellian as the Bush Neocons.

The other thing of it is these guys in the C.I.A. are not to be compared to your average soldier. The agents working for the C.I.A. supposedly go through rigorous screening and are well trained and should be well versed in the laws of the US and International Law and are trained in Interrogation techniques and are told which are lawful or moral and which are not etc. If anything they are more culpable than some army reserve soldier on the night shift at Abu Ghraib who it turns out were just following orders.

And further anyone who dared stand up to their commanders and refused to take part it turns out they wasted their time and energy since it would be better to go along because the President of the United might give you a pardon and from now on no one need fear torturing someone because if Obama doesn't issue a pardon a later president probably will.

And now for Joshua Holland's deconstructing of Harry Reid's twisted Catch 22 logic about investigations of alleged torture. Holland then follows by taking on Obama's cavalier attitude towards the whole issue of torture . Obama just wants to move on and forget about the past eight nightmarish years of the Bush cabal of dictators running the country. But what about the victims of torture or the victims of the unnecessary immoral brutal Iraq War.

So Obama wants to forgive Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Condoleeza Rice , Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz et al because they had good intentions and acted according to Obama in "GOOD FAITH" but they didn't it appears. They cooked up intel to go ahead with their War in Iraq. They tortured people in order to get false confessions and phony intel to justify their unnecessary war . They kept their intentions, their motives and their activities secret so they could get re-elected for a second term.
They used their positions of power to carry out immoral and illegal activities. Along the way they committed War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity . Obama gives them all a pardon . That's nice of him but it is not JUSTICE. I know most Americans or at least the pro-Bush , Pro-War, Pro-Torture crowd in America do not really believe in JUSTICE.Maybe Obama just wants to hold the American Empire together at all cost but he is not going to make friends by not pursing justice.

Obama and Americans in general need to be reminded that those hundreds if not thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan who were imprisoned and then abused by their American captors are the real victims not the C.I.A. agent who did the torturing . The victims are mostly nameless nobodies whether Iraqis or Afghans etc. many of whom were not guilty of anything and their lives were turned upside down or completely ruined as they have to live with the physical and psychological consequence of what their Holier Than Thou American Captors put them through.

We that is those of us who are not tainted by American Exceptionalism, American expediency and American Immorality and an American lack of respect for Human Rights or the Rule Of Law - we can only hope that other nations will stand up and take the United States to task and engage in investigations and indictments of any Americans involved in these War Crimes. Otherwise America will get away literally with murder and torture of innocent people. If they do what incentive is there for any nation to try to act according to the Rule of Law. Saddam never worried about such nonsense nor does Al Qaeda .

" Harry Reid's Incoherent Opposition to a Truth Commission " by Joshua Holland, AlterNet April 24, 2009.

Meanwhile, what about deterrence?

This is Harry Reid on proposals to establish a "truth commission" to investigate torture and other abuses in the "War on Terror" (as quoted by The Hill):

“It would be very unwise, from my perspective, to start having commissions, boards, tribunals until we find out what the facts are, and I don’t know of a better way of getting the facts than through the Intelligence Committee,” said Reid.

I'm hard pressed to recall a more ludicrous statement. He's saying: 'We can't establish an investigation into the facts until we get all the facts.'

And he doesn't know a better way of getting facts than through the Intelligence Committee. That'd be the same committee which promised in 2004 to investigate the pre-war "intelligence" used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and issued a report four years later that ignored all the available evidence that White House officials had pressured analysts to tell them what they wanted to hear. White-wash? You betcha.

Anyway, there's a lot of debate about whether to hold people accountable for torture, and, if so, whom. And a lot of folks are arguing that lower-level CIA operatives who conducted those "coercive interrogations" shouldn't be prosecuted. They were, after all, just following orders. And, unlike others who offered the same defense in the past, they had those slick legal memos to cover their asses.

I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the argument -- or to the related argument that going after the rank-and-file is a means of absolving those further up the food chain.

But lost in the discussion, it seems to me, is that justice isn't just about retribution or revenge, but deterrence. There's clearly quite a bit of resistance within the Obama administration and among Congressional leaders to go after those at the top -- too partisan, they say, too political... looking backwards instead of forward. And while those who formulated the policy certainly should be held to account for their crimes (and I'm not suggesting otherwise -- the debate seems based on a false choice), I think a lot of people are forgetting about the value of prosecuting those further down the chain of command in terms of deterring future abuses.

-------------------
Pro-Torture Advocates Equivocate and Lie about Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. These Techniques under International Law are considered TORTURE- No matter what Bush or Obama think- the use of these techniques is a War Crime. If Obama's administration doesn't begin a full investigation with suboena powers and the possibility of indictments then Obama according to the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture would be an accessory after the fact.

Though there are those who claim the abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib and a few dozen other US run prisons besides all the Super-secret Black Sites that torture has continued under Obama's administration - is he doing enough to stop it - but why should anyone pay heed to Obama's rhetoric on abuse, torture & inhumane treatment since he argues as the Bush Regime did that these detainees are not protected by the Geneva Conventions etc.

Besides Obama has defended renditions even to countries where the prisoners would be tortured. If he was sincere why are Child Soldiers such Omar Khadr and those detainees who are known to be innocent still held at Guanatanamo or Abu Ghraib or Bagram etc. why isn't he insisting on their release.

So it is no wonder that the Pro-Torture lobby do not take much of this seriously. They have convinced themselves that it is all a matter of semantics or just a matter of opinion or it is all relative - liberals call it torture while a conservative calls it Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. Odd though that conservatives and Republicans and the Religious Right are using Relativism as a defense.

I thought they believed in Core Vales , Moral Absolutes etc, except when it comes to the policies and actions of a Republican Government-

Olbermann Calls Hannity's Bluff: $1000 For Every Second Of Waterboarding

Posted by Nico Pitney, Huffington April 24, 2009.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann will pay for Sean Hannity's waterboarding.



and here's the outrageous reality of American Mainstream Media

The supposed liberals on this panel are not much better than the conservatives and are concerned about politicization of the issue of torture
Justice unimportant to most Americans since they have no interest in victims
Coulter erroneously claims these techniques including sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation etc. are not torture and she is not concerned that it might be wrong or immoral - nor is she concerned about those who were tortured may have been innocent. She also erroneously claims Zubadiah only gave up useful intel after being waterboarded.
Coulter also erroneously claims the US never prosecuted anyone for Waterboarding
Even Geraldo defends torture see below: "Reagan's DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff for Waterboarding Prisoners " by Jason Leopold at truthout.org, April 27, 2009

Heated Torture Debate: Coulter, Estrich, Pirro, and Geraldo!



In an article by Lawrence Velvel he first writes up a short version of the Legal Torture Memos as if written by NAZI lawyers to justify the treatment of the Jews under the NAZI regime. His point is the comparison of the attempt to add a mere veneer of legalese to cover up immoral & inhumane actions . By adding legal jargon the perpetrators can feel that the actions are to some extent rationalized. He refers to the case of Eichmann or the NUREMBERG defense that merely following orders is a defense. Or that as long as actions can be justified by law they are therefore right . Making up laws out of thin air is not enough. And just by calling Torture Techniqes Enhanced Interrogation Techniques does not transform them magically into not being torture.

(Lawrence Velvel is Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover and author of the award-winning “Blogs From the Liberal Standpoint: 2004-2005”(The Doukathsan Press.) Reach him at velvel[at]mslaw.edu)

" The Four Torture Memos, Eichmann, And The Obama Administration "By Lawrence Velvel, Media With A Conscience, April 27

I have read the four memoranda that were recently released by the DOJ and authorized torture. Permit me to invent a similar but short memo that will allow the reader, without reading the approximately 120 densely packed pages of the four memos, to grasp their style, their character, their techniques, their aims, and, inherently and avoidably, the nature of the people who wrote or signed off on them: John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury.

From the foregoing short invention, whose style, character, techniques and aims mimic many a legal memo and in particular mimic the four torture memos, one can readily grasp a lot. The short invented memo exemplifies the kind of language used in the four Department of Justice memos: formal, legalistic, bloodless, designed to camouflage the most horrible conduct in abstract formulations. It mimics the acceptance, use, and non-questioning of facts and arguments that have been provided by the persons who seek the legal opinions for their own protection. It mimics the torture memos' use of legal materials to approve monstrous actions, which is done at phenomenal length in the four torture memos (as if extreme long windedness can substitute for rightness).

It mimics the transparent goal of trying to clothe the most awful actions in high sounding reasons of state in order to justify such actions under the law. It mimics the four memos' (obviously guilt-caused) effort to escape responsibility as much as possible by saying it is confined to the facts given to the writer. It mimics the self referential technique of referring to prior memos from the same office which say the same things. It mimics the four memos' claim that the most horrible acts are performed in a way that supposedly causes no pain -- which the authors of the torture memos have no real way of knowing since they were not themselves subjected to the techniques nor even present to see their effects. It mimics the claim that acts are overseen by medical personnel. It shows how, as in the four memos, the techniques of writing and law can be used to justify the most horrific conduct while pretending to be an exercise in legitimate lawyering. It shows why the New York Times said, on Sunday, April 19th (as has been said here in part in previous postings):

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors' statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country's most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

And it mimics the transparent fact, or at least it would if it had been written "for real" instead of only to enable readers to understand the nature of the torture memos, that the authors of the torture memos are monsters disguised as human beings.




It appears the C.I.A. etc. which was willing to take part in the use of Torture aka "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques " never did any sort of evaluation to examine whether the techniques worked or whether they were doing severe harm to their victims.

" CIA reportedly declined to closely evaluate harsh interrogations :Current and former U.S. officials say the failure to carefully examine the value of 'enhanced' methods such as waterboarding -- despite calls to do so as early as 2003 -- was part of a broader trend." By Greg Miller, at Los Angeles Times April 26, 2009

Reporting from Washington -- The CIA used an arsenal of severe interrogation techniques on imprisoned Al Qaeda suspects for nearly seven years without seeking a rigorous assessment of whether the methods were effective or necessary, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The failure to conduct a comprehensive examination occurred despite calls to do so as early as 2003. That year, the agency's inspector general circulated drafts of a report that raised deep concerns about waterboarding and other methods, and recommended a study by outside experts on whether they worked.

That inspector general report described in broad terms the volume of intelligence that the interrogation program was producing, a point echoed in smaller studies later commissioned by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss.

But neither the inspector general's report nor the other audits examined the effectiveness of interrogation techniques in detail or sought to scrutinize the assertions of CIA counter-terrorism officials that so-called enhanced methods were essential to the program's results. One report by a former government official -- not an interrogation expert -- was about 10 pages long and amounted to a glowing review of interrogation efforts.

"Nobody with expertise or experience in interrogation ever took a rigorous, systematic review of the various techniques -- enhanced or otherwise -- to see what resulted in the best information," said a senior U.S. intelligence official involved in overseeing the interrogation program.

As a result, there was never a determination of "what you could do without the use of enhanced techniques," said the official, who like others described internal discussions on condition of anonymity.

(and the claim is that by using these techniques the volume of Intel had increased but there was no follow up of how plausible the intel was- increase volume but lower quality intel-)

...A U.S. intelligence official familiar with its contents confirmed that the inspector general's report contains language that is consistent with the assertions by former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and others that the interrogation program accounted for more than half of the intelligence community's reports on Al Qaeda.

But officials said the document did not assess the quality of those reports. It also did not attempt to determine which methods were yielding the best information, or explore whether the agency's understanding of Al Qaeda would have suffered significantly without the use of coercive techniques.

"Certainly you got additional considerable volume of reporting when you started up with anything enhanced," the U.S. intelligence official said. "But nobody went back to say exactly what were the conditions under which we learned that which was the most useful."


at AlterNet.org
"The Bush White House's Appalling and Evil Legacy: Now We Know the Whole Story" By Frank Rich, The New York Times. April 27, 2009.

Did we torture to extract bogus "intelligence" from detainees to make the case for Iraq?

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government's highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to "24"; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. ..

Judge Bybee's ...currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation "techniques" like "facial slap (insult slap)" and "insects placed in a confinement box."

He proposed using 10 such techniques "in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique." Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it "does not, in our view, inflict 'severe pain or suffering.' "

...Bybee's memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book "The One Percent Doctrine," Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.'s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group's flight booker and "greeter," like "Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar's Palace." Zubaydah "knew very little about real operations, or strategy." He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

...As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. ..

...The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantnamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful." As higher-ups got more "frustrated" at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, "there was more and more pressure to resort to measures" that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration's ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee's memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) "Downing Street memo," in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." A month after Bybee's memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on "Meet the Press," hyping both Saddam's W.M.D.s and the "number of contacts over the years" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus "intelligence" from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won't vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don't need another commission. We don't need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation's commitment to the rule of law.


Note to Ann Coulter et al even Ronald Reagan prosecuted a law enforcement officer for Waterboarding

"Reagan's DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff for Waterboarding Prisoners " by Jason Leopold at truthout.org, April 27, 2009

George W. Bush's Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn't even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan's Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case - which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later - was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week.

The failure to cite the earlier waterboarding case and a half-dozen other precedents that dealt with torture is reportedly one of the critical findings of a Justice Department watchdog report that legal sources say faults former Bush administration lawyers - Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury - for violating "professional standards."

Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury also shocked many who have read their memos in the last week by their use of clinical and legalistic jargon that sometimes took on an otherworldly or Orwellian quality. Bybee's August 1, 2002, legal memo - drafted by Yoo - argued that waterboarding could not be torture because it does not "inflict physical pain."


Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba who investigated Abu Ghraib says Bush and his thugs did in fact engage in the torture of prisoners and in doing so broke U.S. law and International Law and so should be put on trial for War Crimes

General Who Probed Abu Ghraib Says Bush Officials Committed War Crimes" by Warren Strobel at McClatchy Newspapers,( at Truthout.org) April 23, 2009

Washington - The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."


UN special rapporteur says Obama is obligated to investigate and to indict where necessary those who committed War Crime if not it is up to other countries to do their own investigations of US officials and personnel followed by Indictments if necessary. One can only hope if Obama or AG Eric Holder do not fullfil their International obligations that this may eventually happen.

US Must Prosecute Bush Torture Memo Lawyers: UN Torture Envoy by Veronika Oleksyn, at Huffington Post, April 25, 2009

VIENNA — The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, the U.N.'s top anti-torture envoy said Friday.

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations. He had previously absolved CIA officers from prosecution.

Manfred Nowak, who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said Washington is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to prosecute U.S. Justice Department officials who wrote memos that defined torture in the narrowest way in order to justify and legitimize it, and who assured CIA officials that their use of questionable tactics was legal.

"That's exactly what I call complicity or participation" to torture as defined by the convention, Nowak said at a news conference. "At that time, every reasonable person would know that waterboarding, for instance, is torture."

Nowak, an Austrian law professor, said it was up to U.S. courts and prosecutors to prove that the memos were written with the intention to incite torture.

Nowak and other experts said that a failure to investigate and prosecute when there was evidence of torture left those responsible vulnerable to prosecutorial action abroad.

"If it should turn out ... that the (U.S.) government and its authorities are not willing to prosecute those where we have enough evidence that they instigated or committed torture, then there is also an obligation on all other 145 states" party to the convention to exercise universal jurisdiction, Nowak said.

That means countries would have an obligation to arrest the individuals in question if they were on their soil and extradite them to the U.S. if Washington gave clear assurances they would bring them to justice. In the absence of such assurances, it would fall upon the respective country to take the individuals to court.



" Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11 :A US major reveals the inside story of military interrogation in Iraq" The Independent UK, April 26, 2009.

By Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism

...The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.

"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.


Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. "It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. "People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."

In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the "ticking bomb" argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?

Major Alexander says he faced the "ticking time bomb" every day in Iraq because "we held people who knew about future suicide bombings". Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. "It hardens their resolve. They shut up." He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to build up trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, "even if my mother was on a bus" with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.


Meanwhile some US lawmakers are insisting on going ahead with legal action against Bush administration individuals who ordered or took part in torture.

US lawmakers vow public probe into torture PRESS TV April 25, 2009

US lawmakers say despite Obama's reluctance, they will push for a public inquiry into torture techniques practiced during the Bush era.

US President Barack Obama, last week released “top secret” memos in which Bush administration lawyers declared torture techniques such as waterbording to be legal.

The memo's also described the exact methods to be used in interrogating “high-value” prisoners at secret CIA-run prisons.

Obama immediately urged against "recrimination" for the George W. Bush-era torture of terror suspects, only to retreat five days later, reopening the possibility of investigation - and even prosecution.

Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois on Friday announced a decision to lobby for an open inquiry by the House Intelligence Committee.

“I would like to be sure that if not the full committee, the subcommittee can play a role here,” Schakowsky said.

“One of the things I'd really like to focus on is how we can do this at least in part in open hearings, so that all of this once again isn't pushed behind closed doors, so we can bring witnesses and have this discussion before the American people,” she continued.

Republicans Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan has also thrown his weight behind Schakowsky's call for hearings.


and so it goes,
GORD.
--------

Monday, April 27, 2009

Bush, Cheney & the Pro-Torture Lobby Redefining America's Core Values

Special Mission Unit (SMU) Task Force (TF) interrogation policies were influenced by the Secretary of Defense's December 2,2002 approval of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at GTMO. SMU TF interrogation policies in Iraq included the use of aggressive interrogation techniques such as military working dogs and stress positions. SMU TF policies were a direct cause of detainee abuse and influenced interrogation policies at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.

During his assessment visit to Iraq in August and September 2003, GTMO
Commander Major General Geoffrey Miller encouraged a view that interrogators should be more aggressive during detainee interrogations.


Interrogation policies approved by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, which included the use of military working dogs and stress positions, were a direct cause of detainee abuse in Iraq. Lieutenant General Sanchez's decision to issue his September 14,2003 policy with the knowledge that there were ongoing discussions as to the legality of some techniques in it was a serious error in judgment The September policy was superseded on October 12,2003 as a result of legal concerns raised by U.S. Central Command. That superseding policy,however, contained ambiguities and contributed to confusion about whether aggressive techniques, such as military working dogs, were authorized for use during interrogations.


The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2,2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.


A Few Conclusions from : INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY REPORT Of The COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES UNITED STATES SENATE November 20, 2008

- The abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan was not simply a matter of a "FEW BAD APPLES" but was part of an approved policy from the White House down.

- "Enhanced Techniques " are in fact torture techniques
Pro-Torture Lobby Redefining American Values

- They claim that Any action which is done in the defense of America's security is by definition moral and acceptable

-So much for their Christian Principles of Peace , Love, Compassion, Empathy these get tossed out in favor of barbarism in the defense of America-

-But why is Obama acting as an apologist for their criminal and immoral actions
If the torturers or those who ordered the use of torture are allowed to go free then -what does Obama mean by "The Rule Of Law' ?

-Is the Rule of Law only to be applied to some Americans bu not all because some because they are politically powerful , or because they acted in "GOOD FAITH " they are to be exempt or are these people in Obama's view as in Bush's and Cheney's part of the ELECT- the chosen of God as the Evangelical Christian Fundamentalists would claim-

-Or are some people or some Americans "MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS"



Bush Enjoying Himself- Given what we now know that is what has become part of the public record the characterization of Bush in this photo no longer appears as outrageous as it once did.

Remember the Bush White House had been told torture or the so-called "Enhanced Techniques " did not work.

Bush and Cheney were told these Techniques constituted torture no matter how they tried to redefine or re-brand these techniques.

Further the White House was told that all these techniques were illegal under U.S. law and under the Geneva Conventions - & the CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment(see NOTE below)

and according to the "U.S. Constitution, Article VI:

[A]ll Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land." and this would include the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture.


Another factor is that the F.B.I. refused to take part in the use of these enhanced techniques because they were against the law and because they were not as effective as more traditional forms of interrogation.

Yet the C.I.A. and the U.S. military freely chose to take part in the training of their personnel in these techniques and then took them into the field and put them into use. Like the F.B.I they could have refused and showed that they believed in the rule of law and that acting in a moral fashion was more important then some form of expediency to merely appease the White House.

Torture Was Used To Link Saddam Hussein To September 11th
Earthtoobama
http://earth2obama.org/ April 22, 2009 MSNBC



Bill O'Reilly calls torture a matter of opinion and goes onto claim that Torture is OK to use to defend America. Being a bit cynical this just reveals what a significant number of Americans believe which is that the Rule of Law or moral and ethical considerations do not apply to America when America feels imperiled.From torture to the unnecessary and therefore immoral invasion of Iraq may or may not have been wrong but no other Nation or the United Nations or any International Criminal Court have no right to judge America. Once again we are back to the notion of "American Exceptionalism " . America can judge other nations but no nation can judge America.

O'Reilly 's argument is that all that the anti-torture people want is a Show Trial- ala Stalin or other dictators so this plays into O'Reillys and Glenn Beck's and Fox News ' notion about Obama being a socialist and a communists who is dedicated to turning America into a state similar to that of Stalin's or Mao's in which they held phony trials with phony confessions which are often referred to as "Show Trials".

What O'Reilly is also arguing is that the torture issue is just a means for the Democrats, the Godless Liberals and the Left to take revenge on the Republicans, the Conservative movement and the Bush administration to tarnish the Bush legacy. Since O'Reilly like Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity and Fox News believe the Bush presidency was in fact a resounding success which the Liberals and left will do anything to undermine.

Why Are You Afraid Of The FACTS! Bill?
http://earth2obama.org/ April 22, 2009 News Corp



The Goal of Torture " The Requirement " ala Ron Susskind
Did Cheney Order The Torture To Get Bad Information?
April 23, 2009
Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com



GOP Strategist Phil Musser claims just by walking through Guantanamo he could tell how guilty and evil the detainees were. So no need for trials or solid evidence to determine guilt - you can just tell by looking at them -
I discussed a similar attitude of another Bush employee in an earlier blog on Phillipe Sands article in Vanity Fair "The Green Light" in May 2008:
Diane Beaver was a legal counselor under the Bush Regime who helped write some of the justification for the use of torture described Gitmo detainees as “psychopaths. Skinny, runty, dangerous, lying psychopaths.” is it racist or a matter of turning the enemy into the Other or demonizing/dehumanizing them to make it easier to hate and to kill and to torture them .

Lawrence O'Donnell Absolutely Hammers GOP Strategist- The Young Turks
April 22, 2009




See full documents at: "Bush Torture Memos Released By Obama: See The Complete Documents" at Huffington Post

and recently released:
Red Cross Report on Detainee Torture At Guantanamo
-----
" In 2002, Military Agency Warned Against 'Torture'Extreme Duress Could Yield Unreliable Information, It Said" By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writers, April 25, 2009

The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week.

It remains unclear whether the attachment reached high-ranking officials in the Bush administration. But the document offers the clearest evidence that has come to light so far that technical advisers on the harsh interrogation methods voiced early concerns about the effectiveness of applying severe physical or psychological pressure.

The document was included among July 2002 memorandums that described severe techniques used against Americans in past conflicts and the psychological effects of such treatment. JPRA ran the military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning.

The cautionary attachment was forwarded to the Pentagon's Office of the General Counsel as the administration finalized the legal underpinnings of a CIA interrogation program that would sanction the use of 10 forms of coercion, including waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning. The JPRA material was sent from the Pentagon to the CIA's acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo, and on to the Justice Department, according to testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he thinks the attachment was deliberately ignored and perhaps suppressed. Excerpts from the document appeared in a report on the treatment of detainees released this month by Levin's committee. The report says the attachment echoes JPRA warnings issued in late 2001.

"It's part of a pattern of squelching dissent," said Levin, who added that there were other instances in which internal reviews of detainee treatment were halted or undercut. "They didn't want to hear the downside."

..."In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time-consuming conventional interrogation process. The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate information. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption."

There was no consideration within the National Security Council that the planned techniques stemmed from Chinese communist practices and had been deemed torture when employed against American personnel, the former administration official said.

The JPRA attachment said the key deficiency of physical or psychological duress is the reliability and accuracy of the information gained. "A subject in pain may provide an answer, any answer, or many answers in order to get the pain to stop," it said.

In conclusion, the document said, "the application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably the potential to result in unreliable information." The word "extreme" is underlined.

--------------------------
When reality and historical facts are ignored to fit with the Cheney Pro-Torture propaganda and bizarre Talking Points which are in fact lies ie These Enhanced Techniques are not torture,
Torture is a faster and better way to gain information, these techniques are legal, these techniques have little enduring effect on those who undergo them :

" Yes, National Review, We Did Execute Japanese for Waterboarding " by Paul Begala, at Huffinton PostApril 24, 2009

In a CNN debate with Ari Fleischer, I said the United States executed Japanese war criminals for waterboarding. My point was that it is disingenuous for Bush Republicans to argue that waterboarding is not torture and thus illegal. It's kind of awkward to argue that waterboarding is not a crime when you hanged someone for doing it to our troops. My precise words were: "Our country executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime we are now committing ourselves."

Mr. Fleischer, ordinarily the most voluble of men, was tongue-tied. The silence, rare in cable debates, spoke volumes for the vacuity of his position.

Now Mark Hemingway of the National Review Online has asserted that I was wrong. I bookmark NRO and read it frequently. It's smart and breezy -- but on this one it got its facts wrong.

Mr. Hemingway assumed I was citing the case of Yukio Asano, who was convicted of waterboarding and other offenses and sentenced to 15 years hard labor -- not death by hanging. Mr. Hemingway made the assumption that I was referring to the Asano case because in 2006 Sen. Edward Kennedy had referred to it. (Sen. Kennedy accurately described the sentence as hard labor and not execution, by the way.)


" Are leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture? Congress was briefed in real time on the Bush-era torture tactics. Is that why some Democrats prefer whitewash commissions and closed-door hearings?" By Jeremy Scahill at Rebel Reports.com, April 24, 2009

...There are not exactly throngs of Democratic Congressmembers beating down the doors of the Justice Department demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder appoint a special Independent Prosecutor to investigate torture and other crimes. And now it seems that whatever Congress does in the near term won’t even be open to the public. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said this week that he prefers that the Senate Intelligence Committee hold private hearings. The chair of the committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has asked the White House not to take any action until this private affair is concluded. She estimates that will take 6-8 months.

...There are some powerful Democrats who certainly would not want an independent public investigation, particularly those who served on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees when Bush was in power and torture was being ordered and authorized. That’s because in the aftermath of 9/11, some in Congress were briefed on the torture methods in real time and either were silent or, in some cases, supported these brutal tactics or, as some have suggested, possibly encouraged them to be expanded.

...But contrary to Pelosi’s assertion, The Washington Post reported that Pelosi and other Democrats were “given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk:”

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.


“Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said [Porter] Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”


also see; "Nobody Said This Was Going To be Pretty" by digby at Hullabaloo, April 24. 2009

The Washington Post has obtained a full copy of the July 2002 JPRA (military) memo, mentioned in this week's Armed Services report, which stated that the military believed that using SERE torture techniques was illegal and unreliable. (This was before the Bybee memo. )


At AlterNet "Jack Bauer Tactics Used In Attempt to Establish Non-Existent Iraq-al Qaida Link" by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly April 22, 2009.

...Life-saving apparently wasn't always the goal of torture.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge of the interrogation issue told McClatchy, "There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used. The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

The official added, "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA ... and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

That was considered the wrong answer, so senior administration "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information."


Bush and Cheney in desperation clutching at straws to justify Iraq War used torture to try to establish evidence of links between Al Qaeda, Saddam and 9/11.


" Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link " by Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers, April 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.


and :

CIA official: no proof harsh techniques stopped terror attacks by Mark Seibel & Warren P. Strobel at McClatchey Newspapers, April 24, 2009

WASHINGTON — The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

That undercuts assertions by former vice president Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials that the use of harsh interrogation tactics including waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, was justified because it headed off terrorist attacks.


What journalists don't want to know . If they don't know some ugly truths for certain then they don't have to think about such things or have to decide what to do about those things given that they are supposed to honest and ethical and reporting the truth on behalf of the people. But many journalists are so cozy with those who are members of the elite that they are reluctant to report certain stories or to take a stand.

Many Journalists act as if their job were to defend the elite at all cost. The laws of the land apply to everyone except the members of the elite- the in group however that group might be defined . The rich , the powerful, the well connected .

" Three Key Rules of Media Behavior Shape Their Discussions of “the ‘Torture’ Debate”by Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com,April 24, 2009

...For years, media stars ignored the fact that our Government was chronically breaking the law and systematically torturing detainees ... Now that the sheer criminality of this conduct, really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates as a result of the OLC memos, media stars are forced to address it.

... Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses -- things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions, and accountability when they abuse their power.

...(1) Any policy that Beltway elites dislike is demonized as coming from "the Left" or -- in this case (following Karl Rove) -- the "hard Left."

...(2) Nobody is more opposed to transparency and disclosure of government secrets than establishment "journalists."

...(3) The single most sacred Beltway belief is that elites are exempt from the rule of law.



-----------
NOTE: the CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
Part I
Article 1

1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.

Article 2

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 3

1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") 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.
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

Article 4

1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.


and so it goes,
GORD.