Saturday, December 10, 2005

Artful Lying

Torture and white phosphorus| By John Chuckman : "'The United States will use every lawful weapon to defeat terrorists,' - Condoleezza Rice

That statement is a platitude, useful only to stir blood at a Fourth of July speech in Muncie, Indiana. It tells us nothing. It is inherently evasive because the lawfulness of tactics being used is the very issue in question.

We all recall with a frown or a grimace Bill Clinton's playing with truth when he testified, 'It depends on what you mean by the word is'? Although his statement concerned a relatively trivial matter, it is actually representative of something far greater and more sinister that has grown to become an integral part of American political culture. American politicians and their creatures like Condoleezza simply have become expert in the art of giving an interview or a speech and avoiding saying almost anything meaningful. Artful lying, subtle avoidance, and giving an answer different than the question asked have become a basic set of political job skills.
,br> Members of the American government, more and more, resemble those sleazy well-prepared witnesses on the stand who just can't recall point after point or a cheap lawyers who rephrases a statement to a similar-sounding one and assure you, yes you have his word on that.

The string of lies and misrepresentations leading up to the invasion of Iraq alone are enough, in the words of Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution,'to make the Testament leap from her [the witness's] hand.'

Only recently, after a year of denials about using napalm at Fallujah, despite the words of witnesses and the charred bodies of victims, we learn that white phosphorus was used. Indeed, Marines are trained to use white phosphorus to drive people out to places where they can shoot them, only the people are supposed to be soldiers, not civilians. Now, I am not sure"
Posted by Ben at 5:00 PM 0 comments

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The US has used torture for decades. All that's new is the openness about it

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The US has used torture for decades. All that's new is the openness about it: "But what was the right backdrop for the infamous 'We do not torture' declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.

It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been 'We do torture'. It is here in Panama, and later at the school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found.

According to declassified training manuals, SOA students - military and police officers from across the hemisphere - were instructed in many of the same 'coercive interrogation' techniques that have since gone to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximise shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food 'manipulation', humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions - and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned 'execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment'.

Some Panama school graduates went on to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador; the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's 'disappeared' prisoners; the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador; and military coups too numerous to list here.

Yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the location's sordid history. How could they? That would require something totally absent from the debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials has been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam war.

It's a history exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his forthcoming book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesises this evidence, producing a riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture", based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix programme and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training.

It is not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples". A startling number of torture's most prominent opponents keep telling us that the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11 2001, at which point the methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing in Newsweek on the need to ban torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies ... that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them". It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had launched the Phoenix programme and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating 40 interrogation centres in South Vietnam that killed more than 20,000 suspects and tortured thousands more."

Does it somehow lessen today's horrors to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture, that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, closer to home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8, Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now".

Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never before"? I suspect it stems from a sincere desire to convey the seriousness of this administration's crimes. And its open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented.

But let's be clear about what is unprecedented: not the torture, but the openness. Past administrations kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were committed in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush administration has broken this deal: post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimised by new definitions and new laws.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the real innovation has been in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability. This shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practised but officially and legally repudiated, there is still hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and those responsible deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man". Soon victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility, and danger, of that quest. This is a larger mirror of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.

The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the torture debate is that in the name of eradicating future abuses, past crimes are being erased from the record. Since the US has never had truth commissions, the memory of its complicity in far-away crimes has always been fragile. Now these memories are fading further, and the disappeared are disappearing again.

This casual amnesia does a disservice not only to the victims, but also to the cause of trying to remove torture from the US policy arsenal once and for all. Already there are signs that the administration will deal with the uproar by returning to plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects every "individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States government"; it says nothing about torture training or buying information from the exploding industry of for-profit interrogators.

And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by the US and supervised by commanders like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similar units in El Salvador. The US role in training and supervising Iraq's interior ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, it's a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA's William Colby who, asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix, a programme he helped launch, replied that it was now "entirely a South Vietnamese programme".

As McCoy says, "if you don't understand the history and the depths of the institutional and public complicity, then you can't begin to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus: closing a prison, shutting down a programme, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But he warns, "they will preserve the prerogative to torture."

· A version of this article appears in the Nation www.thenation.com"
Posted by Ben at 10:53 AM 0 comments

Inhuman: Yes or No? By Jackson Diehl | Washington Post

Inhuman: Yes or No? By Jackson Diehl: "A couple of things about this exchange struck me as remarkable. First, how could the attorney general of the United States not be able to state U.S. policy on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners -- especially since his department has repeatedly reviewed the matter in the past several years? Gonzales, mind you, didn't appear to be evading the question. He simply didn't know the answer.

The other issue flows from the first: Why is it that the Bush administration, at enormous cost to U.S. prestige around the world, insists on being ambiguous about this straightforward question? If Gonzales has a defense, it may be that the lawyers in his department who have addressed the issue have done so in a way that could easily confuse someone like their boss -- not to mention the captains and sergeants and civilian contractors actually charged with interrogating prisoners in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

Here's the answer that was submitted on Gonzales's behalf, though apparently without his comprehension, last January: Despite the treaty, the administration contends that "there is no legal prohibition" on the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by U.S. personnel as long as it is inflicted on "aliens overseas." That means the CIA, for example, could legally abuse the al Qaeda suspects it is holding in secret foreign detention facilities, provided it stops short of outright torture. But, Gonzales's ghostwriters added, the administration "wants to be" in compliance with the treaty standard. That suggests that "CID," as the lawyers call it, is prohibited in practice.

Or does it? The Senate has legally defined "cruel, inhuman and degrading" as any treatment that would violate the Fifth, Eighth or 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Gonzales said all approved interrogation techniques had been checked against that standard. But the attorney general was also asked about various specific practices American interrogators are known to have used, including simulated drowning, mock execution, sleep deprivation, forced nudity and the use of dogs to inspire fear. He answered: "Some might . . . be permissible in certain circumstances." That must mean one of two things: Either the Bush administration considers mock execution and simulated drowning allowable under the Constitution -- and thus available for use by the FBI on Americans -- or it does not, in fact, have a policy of prohibiting CID for all prisoners.

Gonzales isn't the only one who doesn't get it. The administration's artfully muddled position has triggered an extraordinary standoff between the White House and a group of Senate Republicans, led by torture victim John McCain. McCain now has eight GOP co-sponsors for an amendment to this year's defense authorization bill that would prohibit the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for all "persons in the detention of the U.S. government." His staff is confident he has the votes to pass the measure when the bill comes up on the floor, probably later this month.

The administration protests that McCain's proposed rule is already being followed. A CIA briefer recently assured congressional staffers that CID was out of bounds for al Qaeda detainees. So why did Vice President Cheney vehemently object to the proposed amendment in a meeting with McCain and Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner this summer? And why did the administration pull the defense authorization bill from the Senate floor in late July rather than allow the amendment to come to a vote?

Maybe there's a good reason. But don't ask Alberto Gonzales."
Posted by Ben at 10:45 AM 0 comments

Voices of Concern Over the Abrogation of Human Rights by Americans

Project Kuwaiti Freedom Throughout the United States, and around the world, wide spread indignation continues to be voiced about the illegal detention of the Guantanamo prisoners.

It is now clear that to deny anyone a fair trial is to deny the American system itself.

Each new day brings fresh expressions of profound concern from world leaders and the world’s most respected humanitarians.

The voices of concern over the abrogation of American rights have been heard from all parts of America…and from all political persuasions.
Posted by Ben at 9:20 AM 0 comments

The US Has Been Torturing Prisoners

If you were like me, you were so surprised and revolted by the spectacle of human suffering and abuse in Abu-grahib, that you were ready to be conforted with the 'few bad apples' excuse.

Now it has become increasingly clear that the problem goes much more deeper than that. Torture was sanctioned by the Bush administration at the highest level. War Crimes have been committed the question now is how the criminals will be held accountable. The following article has been documenting these facts since 2004, but you would not know it unless you actively search for this information as the popular media outlets appear to leave this information from coming to the fore-front because of fear of political and economic sanctions. Here it is:
Mark Danner: The Logic of Torture: "What is difficult is separating what we now know from what we have long known but have mostly refused to admit. Though the events and disclosures of the last weeks have taken on the familiar clothing of a Washington scandal — complete with full-dress congressional hearings, daily leaks to reporters from victim and accused alike, and of course the garish, spectacular photographs and videos from Abu Ghraib — beyond that bright glare of revelation lies a dark area of unacknowledged clarity. Behind the exotic brutality so painstakingly recorded in Abu Ghraib, and the multiple tangled plotlines that will be teased out in the coming weeks and months about responsibility, knowledge, and culpability, lies a simple truth, well known but not yet publicly admitted in Washington: that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the United States, at various locations around the world, from Bagram in Afghanistan to Guantanamo in Cuba to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, have been torturing prisoners. They did this, in the felicitous phrasing of General Taguba's report, in order to 'exploit [them] for actionable intelligence' and they did it, insofar as this is possible, with the institutional approval of the United States government, complete with memoranda from the President's counsel and officially promulgated decisions, in the case of Afghanistan and Guantanamo, about the nonapplicability of the Geneva Conventions and, in the case of Iraq, about at least three different sets of interrogation policies, two of them modeled on earlier practice in Afghanistan and Cuba."
Posted by Ben at 8:39 AM 0 comments

Friday, December 09, 2005

The Uncomfortable Truth

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com: "The uncomfortable truth for Americans should be that our own secret services, including military special operations, equally operate outside of a reasonable level of control and oversight. The President and high government officials direct the activities of the secret services, but when it comes to any potentially controversial or illegal calls in the war on terrorism, more often than not the secret organizations make their own calls, after obsessively writing memos and legal rulings and internally discussing 'sensitive' practices and policies. They then dutifully inform each other and like-minded affiliates, but no one else, of their goings on.

Since 9/11, the aperture between the secret agencies and Congressional and public oversight has gotten smaller and smaller. The secret agencies hide behind hyper routine secrecy, where even their overall budget is kept from the public. The secret agencies practice "plausible deniability," where political leaders are intentionally shielded from the dirty or illegal work.

Even internally, the secret agencies increasingly employ promiscuous compartmentalization to avoid discussion and oversight. Here "special access" labels proliferate to hide questionable activities from either potentially questioning or dissenting officials and bureaucrats as much as from Congressional overseers.

The good news here is that there seems to be little that the secret agencies can actually do that the news media and thus the public doesn't find out about. I know that many supporters of the Bush administration and the war on terrorism think this is the media's fault, but the truth is that revelations about questionable practices and standards are being leaked, and "secrets" are being compromised by dozens of intelligence and special operations officers and officials who are motivated by their concern for the growing incompatibilities between the war on terrorism and American values.

Can we continue to fight the war on terrorism this way? My guess is that the secret agencies themselves would frustratingly answer this question by saying no.

The problem for America is that we seem stuck in habits and practices in which we only find out about all of this after the damage is already done."
Posted by Ben at 1:36 PM 0 comments

Dark Days- Los Angeles Times

Dark Days in Prisons at Home and Abroad - Los Angeles Times: "Mokayev said his brother told him of being forced to kneel with his hands cuffed to his ankles, being sprayed with a gel that caused a painful rash, then carried out, still shackled, and hosed down with a stream of water. Kudayev and several other prisoners said Guantanamo guards would turn up the air conditioning to the freezing point, then turn it off until breathing became difficult.

He was forced to take unidentified pills that gave him chest pains and made his muscles feel like stone.

'They beat them if they didn't want to take these pills, and they would administer them by force to them,' Tekayeva said. 'Afterward, he would just hunch into a fetal position.'

The U.S. has denied forcing medication or any other abuse at Guantanamo but as a matter of policy does not comment on individual cases.

'All detainees in custody at Guantanamo, without exception, are treated humanely and are provided excellent medical care by dedicated medical professionals,' said Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, director of public affairs for the U.S. military in Guantanamo Bay.
"
Posted by Ben at 12:47 PM 0 comments

A Fatal Mistake: The War on Terror

When Terror Defines the Methods to War Against Terror. . . Innocent People (you also)Pay the Price

Newsday.com: Witnesses heard no talk of bomb:
"With all the advances that the U.S. has supposedly made in their war against terrorism, I can't conceive that the marshals wouldn't be able to overpower an unarmed, single man, especially knowing he had already cleared every security check,' Carlos Alpizar said Thursday of his brother's death, in a telephone interview from Costa Rica.
And He is exactly right. What good is all the check points if Marshalls still think that a passanger is by definition a suspect? Are you feeling more secure. How many times there have been hysterical people on air planes? But now every citizen is a target. We are living in dangerous times.
'I will never accept that it was necessary to kill him as if he was some dangerous criminal. And I want to make this distinction: He did not die. He was killed.'

But to federal authorities and security experts, Alpizar -- mentally ill or not -- was responsible for his own death.
Yeah, sure, blame the victim. The authorities who wrongly killed him are responsible for his death.

This is the same deceit of the preemptive rational for war, where the perception of a threat is moral ground enough to trigger a 'defense' when no offense has been committed. This rational of fear is extremly dangerous, and now we know that it works against 'us' as well as it worked against 'them'. We did nt care when preemption was use for our 'security' against other nations. But do you see, preemption can be used against you as well, one the mechanism and justification are in place. Nothing will save us from suffering the abuse of power.

The 'war on terror' itself is the most terroristic menace we face today
'This threat presented itself, and we believe it was necessary to use deadly force. . . . There's no time in making these split-second decisions to analyze their mental health,' said James E. Bauer, special agent in charge of the Federal Air Marshal Service's Miami field office."
Yes, there is.
If there is no time, then no decision should be taken. Either way they are morally responsible for the wrong choice. That is their job. Unless we are willing to give circumstantial 'carte blanche' to Law enforcement and be living 'secure' in the Brave New world under a dangerous police state.
Posted by Ben at 11:55 AM 0 comments

Thursday, December 08, 2005

More on Bush and Torture | by Lawrence R. Velvel

Velvel on National Affairs: Re: Blogs, Bush and Torture: "In the view of some of us -- and the number of people holding this view is, one thinks, vastly increasing -- for about 52 years this country, for its own purposes, has been fomenting wars, coups, right wing revolutions and assassinations all over the globe, and for decades has been pursuing a form of globalization that has wreaked harm on hundreds of millions of people. These things have been done, in major part, for the benefit of the large corporate interests and the wealthy people of this country (like the Bush family). George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other Bushies are the very embodiment of the American views and conduct which have led the country to fight war after war since 1965 and to build an economic global empire that largely benefits them and their kind while economically crucifying so many others, both here and abroad. The Bushies have even been willing to destroy the constitutional system in pursuit of their goals by secretly pretending, for as long as they could get away with it, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, can override the laws passed by Congress, specifically the law against torture, secretly pretending for as long as possible, in order to try to negate a law passed by Congress, that the most abominable torture isn't torture, and claiming that, as Commander-in-Chief, the President can enter warfare just about whenever, and against just about whomever, he chooses. If people like George Bush and his cohort continue in power, and continue doing what has been done since about 1953, the country will one day face disaster. Every empire in world history has ultimately been destroyed. Sooner or later, in one way or another, much of the world will gang up on us, as Muslims are already doing within the still confined limits of their own power. As rich as we are, and as powerful as we are, continuing down Bush's imperial path will one day bring us down. So it is essential for the long run health of the nation to put an end to the hubristic and often hypocritical policies we have followed for over 50 years and, in order to accomplish this, to bring low the architects and proponents of the hubristic policies. If Bush and his crowd were found guilty of a felony because of horrid abuses in the course of their imperial project, and were accordingly impeached and convicted, this would almost certainly go far towards discrediting hubristic imperial actions and those who desire and order such policies.

Yet another very important, politically non-partisan (but intellectually partisan) reason why liberal bloggers should act relates to what has been occurring in the halls of governmental and corporate power for 40 years. I speak of horrible abuses of power that often amount to serious crime. From Johnson, McNamara, Rostow and Rusk to Nixon and Kissinger, to Clinton, to George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, from Billy Sol Estes to Michael Milken and Charles Keating, to Bernie Ebbers, the Enron crowd, the Tyco crowd, the Worldcom crowd and the Arthur Andersen crowd, this country and its economy have been filled with criminals, some convicted, some not even put on trial. These people and their dishonesty have caused economic and international disasters. We will never put a stop to this until we start putting them all in the slammer, no ifs, ands or buts. But the way things have worked for years, many of them do not go to the slammer, and none of the government officials ever do. Most of them, and all the government officials, retire to a life of wealth and prestige, McNamara, Nixon and Kissinger, for example. The criminal conduct and the gross abuses will be with us until all miscreants of this type get put in the slammer, so that jail, not wealth and prestige, awaits them.

George Bush and his cohorts are only the latest example of people who are willing to commit criminal evil because they are confident that no punishment possibly awaits them. For this reason, and others, liberal bloggers should begin to discuss, investigate and make a concerted effort to bring to public attention what Bush and his buddies have done, so that there will be impeachment, conviction and subsequent criminal liability if, as one suspects, serious crimes have been committed."
Posted by Ben at 11:37 PM 0 comments

Bush and Torture | by Lawrence R. Velvel

Velvel on National Affairs: Re: Blogs, Bush and Torture: "The article further said that this technique was approved under a new 'set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners,' that these rules were 'among the first adopted by the Bush administration' for handling detainees after Sept. 11th 'and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.' (Emphasis added.) 'The C.I.A. detention program for Qaeda leaders,' says the article, 'is the most secretive component of an intensive regime of detention and interrogation,' and 'The secret detention system houses a group of 12 to 20 prisoners, government officials said, some under direct American control, others ostensibly under the supervision of foreign governments.' (Emphasis added.) Moreover, the 'high-level detainees . . . have been held in strict secrecy. Their whereabouts are such closely guarded secrets that one official said he had been told that Mr. Bush had informed the CIA that he did not want to know where they were.' (Emphasis added.)

Now, I ask you, does all of this sound like George Bush had no idea that prisoners were being held abroad for torture and were being handed over to foreign governments for torture? Why do I think the answer to this is negative? If the article is correct, what we have here is a super secret program to get information out of the Qaeda leaders by any means necessary at foreign locations, with the whole business being so secret that Bush doesn't even want to know where the prisoners are being held. Does this sound like a guy who has no idea what is going on, or like a guy who knows perfectly well what is going on, desires it so that we will obtain information, and is trying to set up a false claim of lack of knowledge by being able to say, if the you know what ever hits the fan, that he didn't even know where the pertinent events"
Posted by Ben at 11:13 PM 0 comments
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