Showing posts with label military torture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label military torture. Show all posts
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
PERVERTS IN POWER: THE TORTURE-LOVERS WHO RULE
Perverts in Power: The Torture-Lovers Who Rule Us
By Chris Floyd
April 11, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- The ordeal of Fatima Bouchar, detailed by Ian Cobain in the Guardian, exemplifies the vile essence of the 'Terror War' being conducted by United States and its abject satellite, Great Britain, against large swathes of the world's population (including, increasingly, their own people). It is a case of brutal torture against an innocent, defenseless pregnant woman, whose only "crime" was to be married to a man who belonged to an organization which had long been supported by the US and UK -- until the geopolitics of oil made the group expendable. It is a tale of cowardice and cruelty, of hypocrisy and corruption, of deliberate atrocity that exacerbates the extremism it purports to combat. It is the emblem of an evil system ordered, countenanced, championed and protected at the very highest levels of the two governments -- a system that is very much still in operation today.
Bouchar was married to Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a member of a group seeking to overthrow Moamar Gadafy in Libya. For 10 years, members of the group had been given asylum in Britain and other countries. According to credible reports, they were being supported by British intelligence in their efforts to oust the Libyan dictator. Then Gadafy began negotiating his deal with George W. Bush and Tony Blair to open up Libyan oil fields to the West. Suddenly, his enemies became enemies of the West; as in Afghanistan, stalwart "freedom fighters" were transformed into "terrorists" overnight, when the agenda of the West's corporate overlords demanded it. (The same process would be reversed in 2011, after Gadafy had proved less servile than expected.)
At that point, Bouchar and her husband suddenly became bargaining chips in the backroom deal being greased in Washington, London and Tripoli. As proved by secret files and messages unearthed in Libya after Gadafy's fall, Bouchar and Belhaj were offered to Gadafy as a gift from the British, a sweetener to pave the way for his first meeting with Tony Blair -- and for the oil deals that swiftly followed.
Here is what happened to the couple in 2004 when they were detained in Thailand -- site of one of America's innumerable secret prisons -- as they tried to fly to the "friendly" confines of the UK. They were kidnapped by American agents at the behest of British intelligence. As Cobain writes:
Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.
Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn't stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. "My left eye was closed when the tape was applied," she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. "But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony." The journey would last around 17 hours. ...
Belhaj says he was blindfolded, hooded, forced to wear ear defenders, and hung from hooks in his cell wall for what seemed to be hours. He says he was severely beaten. The ear defenders were removed only for him to be blasted with loud music, he says, or when he was interrogated by his US captors.
Bouchar says that when she was dragged away from her husband she feared he was going to be killed. "I thought: 'This is it.' I thought I would never see my husband again ... They took me into a cell, and they chained my left wrist to the wall and both my ankles to the floor. I could sit down but I couldn't move. There was a camera in the room, and every time I tried to move they rushed in. But there was no real communication. I wasn't questioned." Bouchar found it difficult to comprehend how she could be treated in this way: she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. "They knew I was pregnant," she says. "It was obvious." She says she was given water while chained up, but no food whatsoever. She was chained to the wall for five days. At the end of this period she was taped to the stretcher and put aboard the aircraft, unaware of where she was going or whether her husband was on board. At one point the aircraft landed, remained on the ground for a short period and then took off again. Only when it landed a second time did she hear a man grunting with pain, and realise her husband was nearby. ...
Two weeks after the couple were rendered to Libya, Tony Blair paid his first visit to the country, embracing Gaddafi and declaring that Libya had recognised "a common cause, with us, in the fight against al-Qaida extremism and terrorism". At the same time, in London, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110 million deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast. ...
As we noted here recently, these torture-renditions are by no means at an end. They thrive under the leadership of Barack Obama and David Cameron just as vigoously as they did under Bush and Blair. As Bill Blum put it last week:
Shortly after Obama's inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that "rendition" was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported: "Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States." ...
After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had "left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules ... Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of 'rendition' — picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country."
Here, at least, is a promise that Obama has kept.
II.
But why do these tortures go on? (As noted in that previous post, Obama has in no way "ended torture" by American officials; even the official guidelines he has openly approved allow techniques that are torture in every sense of the word.) What is the point of these atrocities? In the vast majority of cases, "terrorist suspects" are the smallest of small fry, even in the eyes of their captors; they are tortured merely to extract some crumb of information from them, some tidbit that might somehow fit into the "mosaic" -- the conceptual tool used by our intelligence services to weave gigantic, world-threatening conspiracies which can only be thwarted by ever more vast expenditures and arbitrary power for our intelligence services. As is well known, this interrogation strategy produces mountains of useless crap, which our intelligence "experts" then mold into whatever shape our politicians (and their paymasters) require. It is worse than useless; it is demonstrably counterproductive. It does not enhance "national security." It doesn't even do anything in particular to advance the agendas of our corporate and political overlords, because it throws up too much dust and chaos to be of practical use in plotting their future moves.
So why does it happen? Why are innocent pregnant women wrapped in tape, why are children abducted, why are innocent people strung up in "stress positions," why are captives beaten, bombarded with brain-scrambling noise, stripped naked and sexually humiliated, drugged, deprived of sleep, threatened with murder -- and sometimes murdered in fact? Why is this being done by official representatives of the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom?
Why? Because -- and let us be absolutely clear about this -- because these people want to torture others. They like it, they enjoy it. There is clearly a zest, a psychosexual rush at work. Like child abusers, they enjoy their full, unchallengeable physical power over the bodies of their defenseless victims. They get off on it. They are the moral equivalent of pedophiles, and in any remotely healthy society, they would be treated as such.
And of course we are not talking solely of those doing the hands-on torture. Their bosses are of exactly the same ilk. I refer here to our great and good, our high and mighty, the minsters of state, the cabinet members, the military chieftains, the lords and legislators, the prime ministers, the presidents. All of them are eager participants in this extreme perversity. They love the fact that they can order human beings to be tortured -- to be beaten, trussed up, stripped and probed, drugged, driven crazy. They love how tough it makes them feel. They love how powerful it makes them feel. There should be no mistake about this. Torture is being carried out because our leaders want it to be, because they like it. There are no reluctant torturers -- neither at highest levels nor among the factotums actually doing the deed.
There are no reluctant torturers. This point is important to remember. No one is forced to carry out torture. This is one of the great absolving myths that societies tell themselves when, at some point, their filthy crimes are belched forth and cannot be denied. (This generally happens when their government collapses, either from military defeat or internal rot.) For example, almost no German soldier was ever punished or prosecuted for refusing to take part in Nazi atrocities. The historical record is filled with instances where individual German soldiers or officers refused to join an "aktion" against civilians. They were not court-martialed, imprisoned or killed; they were simply left out of the operation, assigned other duties or transferred to other units. The idea that the soldiers who carried out atrocities did so on pain of death from their tyrannical overlords is just a myth. They did it because they actively wanted to do it -- or saw no reason not to do it.
Now it is also a fact that very few of those who participated in these atrocities would have done so if their leaders had not created the structure and circumstances for the atrocities to occur. The same is true of the Anglo-American torture system in operation today. Over the past 10 years, US and UK soldiers and operatives have been formed into death squads carrying out secret killings in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. They've kidnapped unarmed people (or often just bought them, like slaves, from profiteering locals), and sent them to secret prisons in the American gulag or to torture chambers in cooperative countries -- including, at various times, Gadafy's Libya and Assad's Syria. They have murdered, beaten, sexually abused and psychologically tortured thousands upon thousands of people, very few of whom ever posed even the slightest threat to the United States or Great Britain.
But again, very few of the low-ranking perpetrators of these atrocities would have carried them out if the bipartisan leadership of their countries -- the world's most "advanced" democracies, the self-proclaimed defenders of law, decency, freedom and human rights -- had not very deliberately created the circumstances and the structure for the commission of these crimes. This does not absolve the individual perpetrator from the responsibility for his or her own actions, of course. They were not forced to do something against their conscience. They were not even conscripted into service; they entered it freely. But once presented with the atrocity-bearing situation created by their leaders, they either embraced or accepted the opportunity, with varying degrees of eagerness or indifference. The taint runs throughout the whole system.
III.
This is the reality of our age. What Americans and Britons once refused to do to Adolf Hitler's minions -- torture, abuse, and deprive them of legal rights -- they now do routinely, continually and without shame to people whom they know to be either completely innocent or -- even in the torturers' own estimation -- to be peripheral, unimportant and unthreatening. They are torturing people because they want to do it, because they like to do it.
And the entire political class of both Britain and the United States acquiesce in this. They accept it. They do not denounce the perpetrators and orchestrators and orderers of torture as evil. They do not condemn them and shun them as they would child abusers and murderers. They thunder and bluster over small straws of difference and policy nuances, but they swallow whole the steaming, blood-soaked viscera of Terror War torture. Instead, they prosecute officials and soldiers who try to tell the truth about torture and other atrocities of the Terror War, as Jesselyn Raddack reports here. War crime is now completely normalized in American politics and American society. It's what we do. It's what we are. And we don't care.
Yet everywhere you look -- even in the oh-so-fervent, "we're the good guys," liberal progressive humanitarian blogosphere -- you will see incessant, obsessive coverage of all the minute ins and outs of the political circus: the primaries, the polls, the money, the momentum, the players. Every day -- every hour -- they read the tea leaves and poke through the entrails, hoping to divine what needs to be done so that "our side" wins. Our torturers. Our renditioners. Our abusers of innocent pregnant women. Our beaters and batterers and chainers and killers. We want our man, not their man, to commit the atrocities.
This obscene dynamic is now the essence of the American political process. It is rotten to the core, rotten at the top, rotten to the roots. As we've noted here many, many times before, Henry David Thoreau gave the only possible response that anyone who aspires to a measure of honor can give to the obscenity that engulfs us:
"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."
Chris Floyd blogs at www.chris-floyd.com
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Friday, December 12, 2008
The headline reads, "Will Obama Buy Torture Lite"
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?
From change-you-can-believe-in we seem to be slipping back to fear-you-can-trade-on. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has publicly warned those in charge of the administration transition that "continuity is going to be pivotal in keeping us safe and secure." Thus, he argues, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden should stay in their posts.
If that were not enough, Reyes told Congress Daily's Chris Strohm, that he (Reyes) had advised the Obama team that some parts of what Strohm referred to as "CIA's controversial alternative interrogation program" should be allowed to continue. Using some of the same euphemisms and circumlocutions employed by the ersatz-lawyers hired by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Reyes fired this shot across the bow of Barack Obama's transition ship:
"It gets back to a world that is very dangerous...there are some options that need to be available...We don't want to be known for torturing people. At the same time, we don't want to limit our ability to get information that's vital and critical to our national security. That's where the new administration is going to have to decide what those parameters are, what those limitations are."
Background
Someone needs to tell Reyes what those parameters, what those limitations should be. They are set by the Geneva accords and the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996. Those are the laws that President George W. Bush's overly clever lawyers told him he could safely-well, pretty safely-disregard, because of the "new paradigm" post 9/11.
Pretty safely? Even those Mafia-type lawyers felt it necessary to warn their clients that Section 2441 of the U.S. War Crimes Act, passed by a Republican-led Congress in 1996, could conceivably come back to haunt the president and others who approved or took part in torture. This is the best they could do by way of offering reassurance:
"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination [that Geneva does not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
If that sounds like the kind of advice one would expect to get from lawyers for the Mob, that's because it is. The casuistry virtually drips from a Jan. 25, 2002 memorandum for the president drafted by then-counsel to the Vice President, David Addington and signed by then-counsel to the president, Alberto Gonzales. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell objected for a day or so but then saluted sharply, as is his wont.
As will be seen below, the lawyers' advice did come back to haunt the president, putting him in a cold sweat until he got Congress to grant him retroactive immunity.
To say President Bush was dumb to take their dubious advice is not the half of it. Really dumb was his decision to put it in writing. You see, the goons uncovered by CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were not about to torture without a signed authorization from the president. So Bush decided to go ahead on the basis of the Addington/Gonzales opinion and signed a presidential memorandum on Feb. 7, 2002 incorporating that advice.
The opinion is written verbatim, twice, into that short executive memorandum. Over the president's large felt-tip signature appears convoluted text depicting, despite itself, a circle that refuses to be squared. Bush orders that detainees be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva."
That was the official start of post-9/11 torture authorized from the top, although an American, John Walker Lindh, was the first to be actually tortured after his capture in Afghanistan in late Nov. 2001, when senior Justice Department officials deliberately chose not to prevent his mistreatment. In the wake of the smoking-gun presidential memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, subsequent memos by the administration's Mob lawyers were mostly ex post facto attempts at CYA.
Shame
What incalculable shame this has brought on the U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency, in both of which I was privileged to serve. I am hardly the first to use a Mafia analogy.
Consider the case of Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who was the first to investigate the Abu Ghraib prison abuse-the most glaring result of the president's memo and Rumsfeld's implementing instructions. "Make sure this happens!" in Rumsfeld's handwriting appeared on a memo over Rumsfeld's signature that was prominently posted at Abu Ghraib.
Taguba issued a tough report, which was then leaked to the press-and thus was largely responsible for preventing the scandal from being swept entirely under the rug. Rather than thank Taguba for upholding the honor of the U.S. military, the Bush administration singled him out for ridicule, retribution, and forced retirement.
Taguba told Seymour Hersh of a chilling conversation he had with Gen. John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, a few weeks after Taguba's report became public in 2004. Sitting in the back of Abizaid's Mercedes sedan in Kuwait, Abizaid quietly told Taguba, "You and your report will be investigated."
"I'd been in the Army 32 years by then," Taguba told Hersh, "and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."
Getting Squared Away
The Army, to its credit, was able to push brownnoses like Abizaid off to the margins and, more important, to keep Mafia-type lawyers out of the process of updating the Army Field Manual for interrogation. Such was not the case at CIA, where Mob lawyers continued to prosper-including the one who offered interrogators the following basic guidance: "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."
I like to think that our nation's decisions are not totally bereft of moral considerations, and that a majority of Americans would agree that torture-like rape or slavery-is intrinsically evil.
But it is also intrinsically dumb. And an Army general with guts said precisely that on the very day President Bush was extolling the merits of "alternative sets of procedures" for interrogation.
Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, a career intelligence officer and expert in interrogations, minced no words in describing the new Army Field Manual (FM 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collection Operations). He stressed that it is "consistent with the requirements of law, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Geneva Conventions, and that it was endorsed by the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI, Kimmons said "coordinated laterally with the CIA."
Doesn't take a crackerjack intelligence analyst to figure out why the CIA would not "endorse" it.
As a former Army intelligence officer who had to commit the previous interrogation field manual virtually to memory, I was particularly proud that Kimmons had the guts to seize the bull by the horns:
Conceding past "transgressions and mistakes," Kimmons insisted: "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.
"Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility. And additionally, it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't go there.
"Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been-in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized, humane interrogation practices in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of the legal, moral, and ethical-now as further defined by this field manual. So we don't need abusive practices in there. Nothing good will come from them."
Kimmons emphasized that the new manual is written in "straightforward language for use by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines; it is not written for lawyers." He explained that the field manual explicitly prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment or punishment.
No-Torture Commandments
Among the specific prohibitions mentioned by Kimmons were:
"-Interrogators may not force a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner;
-They cannot use hoods or place sacks over a detainee's head or use duct tape over his eyes;
-They cannot beat or electrically shock or burn them or inflict other forms of physical pain-any form of physical pain;
-They may not use water boarding, hypothermia, or treatment which will lead to heat injury;
-They will not perform mock executions;
-They may not deprive detainees of the necessary food, water, and medical care; and
-They may not use dogs in any aspect of interrogation."
Meanwhile, just across the Potomac at the White House an hour later that same day (Sept. 6, 2006), President Bush devoted half of a long speech to cops-and-robbers examples, none of them confirmed or persuasive, showing how "tough" interrogation techniques-he called them "an alternative set of procedures"-had yielded information preventing all manner of catastrophe.
He made clear that his government had "changed its policies," giving intelligence personnel "the tools they need" to fight terrorists, and that he wanted the "CIA program" to continue. Bush appealed for and, just before Congress changed hands in Nov. 2006, succeeded in getting legislation granting retroactive immunity to him and other practitioners of "alternative" procedures.
It had been sweaty-palms time for the president. Two months earlier, on June 29, 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court had ruled that Geneva DOES apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees, and rejected the artifice of "unitary executive power" used by the Bush administration to "justify" practices like torture.
One senior Bush official is reported to have gone quite pale when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy raised the ante, warning that "violations of Common Article 3 [of Geneva] are considered 'war crimes.'" That threw a scare into a whole bunch of what one might call "unitary executives," prompting the president on Sept. 6 to plead with Congress to give "top priority" to new legislation holding them harmless for violation of Geneva. This they got in the "Military Commissions Act" passed by Congress and signed into law just before the mid-term elections in 2006.
Back to the Future, Mr. Chairman
Chairman Reyes, you may have been told that when fellow Texan Rep. Charlie Wilson took the reins of a House oversight panel, he immediately wrote to the operations people at CIA, saying, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you like." Your predecessor as House Intelligence Committee chair, Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, also gave the CIA free rein as long as then-Director George Tenet did the White House's bidding-whatever that bidding happened to be.
Is that how you see your role, Mr. Congressman? Is that why you have been running interference for the Bush/Cheney administration? Specifically, why did you stiff-arm those of your colleagues who wanted to put language into the FY09 Intelligence Authorization Bill ordering CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual for interrogation?
Have a look at the above list of practices expressly forbidden by the manual. Have the folks in the hen house told you that some are absolutely necessary? Which ones strike your fancy?
You served in Vietnam. Did you see "alternative techniques" in use there? Could you visualize them being used on you-or your grandsons?
Do you think former Air Force General and now CIA Director Michael Hayden or former Navy Admiral Mike McConnell know more about effective interrogation techniques than the head of Army intelligence? Do you really think they are being candid with you?
Getting Snowed
Are you not aware that many of those on the operations side of CIA ply their trade as con men? Such activities are supposed to be directed abroad. But all too often they are applied with consummate, smirking skill to the Hill.
Don't believe the tales they tell you about the "successes" of torture techniques. They are normally told by folks with zero experience or folks simply snowing you. Take former Deputy Director John McLaughlin, for example. I have known John for 40 years; he would not recognize an interrogation if he tripped over one.
And he and his boss Tenet were so duplicitous that the former head of State Department intelligence permitted himself the undiplomatic comment that the two should have been shot for their role in deliberately falsifying intelligence-especially the bogus reporting about those non-existent "mobile biological weapons laboratories" in Iraq.
Not long ago, McLaughlin made the mistake of purveying the myth about how effective harsh interrogation techniques have been, with the usual "If you saw the intelligence I have seen..." Trouble was, the senior intelligence officer he was talking to had seen it all, and more, and answered, "I have seen all of it John. Either you are hopelessly naïve, incredibly credulous, or you are lying."
How McLaughlin and John Brennan, both eager accomplices of George Tenet, got picked for the intelligence transition team boggles the minds of those of us who are familiar with their role in the saddest and most unconscionable chapters of U.S. intelligence-regarding both analysis and operations.
But there they are, whispering into the credulous ears of people like Silvestre Reyes.
Chairman Reyes, go talk to Gen. Kimmons.
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Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Who saw the video with the Marines tossing a puppy to its death?
Youtube.com removed it for a day. There's a serious problem here that is not being covered by
the media. These soldiers, who laugh as they kill animals (criminals often do this - for example, serial killers and severe abusers) before they murder their victims. When they come back here to the US, many will be hired as law enforcement officers.
I am cautioning you now, that this following link shows several videos from all over the web, of our soldiers killing animals. It is not pretty. I am going to call Congressmen, Senators, leave a message on the White House line, and try to call the Pentagon. I have contacted humane organizations. I am absolutely sick about this, and the more I see, the sicker I become.
The toll-free numbers to Congress - FREE CALLS - are 10877-851-6437 and 1-866-340-9281.
Do NOT let children see this.
http://www.infowars.net/articles/march2008/05308puppyvid.htm
This is absolutely unacceptable. It disgraces all of the good men and women in our military, and especially, the Marine Corps. I am ashamed.
the media. These soldiers, who laugh as they kill animals (criminals often do this - for example, serial killers and severe abusers) before they murder their victims. When they come back here to the US, many will be hired as law enforcement officers.
I am cautioning you now, that this following link shows several videos from all over the web, of our soldiers killing animals. It is not pretty. I am going to call Congressmen, Senators, leave a message on the White House line, and try to call the Pentagon. I have contacted humane organizations. I am absolutely sick about this, and the more I see, the sicker I become.
The toll-free numbers to Congress - FREE CALLS - are 10877-851-6437 and 1-866-340-9281.
Do NOT let children see this.
http://www.infowars.net/articles/march2008/05308puppyvid.htm
This is absolutely unacceptable. It disgraces all of the good men and women in our military, and especially, the Marine Corps. I am ashamed.
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