Torture still doesn't work
« on: 2008-02-08 12:02:51 »
Torture does not work, as history shows
The Americans are just apeing their predecessors in the Inquisition
Source: THe Independent Authors: Robert Fisk Dated: 2008-02-02
"Torture works," an American special forces major – now, needless to say, a colonel – boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men's anuses – and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees – has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned – the "waterboarding" technique – before they could be seen by US investigators? Yet only a few days ago, I came across a medieval print in which a prisoner has been strapped to a wooden chair, a leather hosepipe pushed down his throat and a primitive pump fitted at the top of the hose where an ill-clad torturer is hard at work squirting water down the hose. The prisoner's eyes bulge with terror as he feels himself drowning, all the while watched by Spanish inquisitors who betray not the slightest feelings of sympathy with the prisoner. Who said "waterboarding" was new? The Americans are just apeing their predecessors in the inquisition.
Anther medieval print I found in a Canadian newspaper in November shows a prisoner under interrogation in what I suspect is medieval Germany. In this case, he has been strapped backwards to the outer edge of a wheel. Two hooded men are administering his agony. One is using a bellows to encourage a fire burning at the bottom of the wheel while the other is turning the wheel forwards so that the prisoner's feet are moving into the flames. The eyes of this poor man – naked save for a cloth over his lower torso – are tight shut in pain. Two priests stand beside him, one cowled, the other wearing a robe over his surplice, a paper and pen in hand to take down the prisoner's words.
Anthony Grafton, who has been working on a book about magic in Renaissance Europe, says that in the 16th and 17th centuries, torture was systematically used against anyone suspected of witchcraft, his or her statements taken down by sworn notaries – the equivalent, I suppose, of the CIA's interrogation officers – and witnessed by officials who made no pretence that this was anything other than torture; no talk of "enhanced interrogation" from the lads who turned the wheel to the fire.
As Grafton recounts, "The pioneering medievalist Henry Charles Lea ... wrote at length about the ways in which inquisitors had used torture to make prisoners confess heretical views and actions. An enlightened man writing in what he saw as an enlightened age, he looked back in horror at these barbarous practices and condemned them with a clarity that anyone reading public statements must now envy."
There were professionals in the Middle Ages who were trained to use pain as a method of enquiry as well as an ultimate punishment before death. Men who were to be "hanged, drawn and quartered" in medieval London, for example, would be shown the "instruments" before their final suffering began with the withdrawal of their intestines in front of vast crowds of onlookers. Most of those tortured for information in medieval times were anyway executed after they had provided the necessary information to their interrogators. These inquisitions – with details of the torture that accompanied them – were published and disseminated widely so that the public should understand the threat that the prisoners had represented and the power of those who inflicted such pain upon them. No destroying of videotapes here. Illustrated pamphlets and songs, according to Grafton, were added to the repertory of publicity.
Ronnie Po-chia Hsia and Italian scholars Diego Quaglioni and Anna Esposito have studied the 15th-century Trent inquisition whose victims were usually Jews. In 1475, three Jewish households were accused of murdering a Christian boy called Simon to carry out the supposed Passover "ritual" of using his blood to make "matzo" bread. This "blood libel" – it was, of course, a total falsity – is still, alas, believed in many parts of the Middle East although it is frightening to discover that the idea was well established in 15th century Europe.
As usual, the podestà – a city official – was the interrogator, who regarded external evidence as providing mere clues of guilt. Europe was then still governed by Roman law which required confessions in order to convict. As Grafton describes horrifyingly, once the prisoner's answers no longer satisfied the podestà, the torturer tied the man's or woman's arms behind their back and the prisoner would then be lifted by a pulley, agonisingly, towards the ceiling. "Then, on orders of the podestà, the torturer would make the accused 'jump' or 'dance' – pulling him or her up, then releasing the rope, dislocating limbs and inflicting stunning pain." [ Hermit : This is often lumped in with so called "Stress positions" and remains a perennial favorite with jailers.]
When a member of one of the Trent Jewish families, Samuel, asked the podestà where he had heard that Jews needed Christian blood, the interrogator replied – and all this while, it should be remembered, Samuel was dangling in the air on the pulley – that he had heard it from other Jews. Samuel said that he was being tortured unjustly. "The truth, the truth!" the podestà shouted, and Samuel was made to "jump" up to eight feet, telling his interrogator: "God the Helper and truth help me." After 40 minutes, he was returned to prison.
Once broken, the Jewish prisoners, of course, confessed. After another torture session, Samuel named a fellow Jew. Further sessions of torture finally broke him and he invented the Jewish ritual murder plot and named others guilty of this non-existent crime. Two tortured women managed to exonerate children but eventually, in Grafton's words, "they implicated loved ones, friends and members of other Jewish communities". Thus did torture force innocent civilians to confess to fantastical crimes. Oxford historian Lyndal Roper found that the tortured eventually accepted the view that they were guilty.
Grafton's conclusion is unanswerable. Torture does not obtain truth. It will make most ordinary people say anything the torturer wants. Why, who knows if the men under the CIA's "waterboarding" did not confess that they could fly to meet the devil. And who knows if the CIA did not end up believing him.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Torture still doesn't work
« Reply #1 on: 2008-02-08 12:19:16 »
Waterboarding: Two Questions for Michael Hayden
[ Hermit : And I would suggest for Mukasey, Bush and Cheney who seem to take it as an article of faith that torture is effective even if its use contravenes the US and International Law (and thus the US Constitution) and that because they managed to get an "opinion" from the justice department that it was not illegal if the President ordered it, that this places their actions beyond review. ]
Source: Anitiwar.com Authors: Andy Worthington Dated: 2008-02-07
(Andy Worthington is a historian based in London. He is the author of The Guanta'namo Files, the first book to tell the stories of all the detainees in Guantana'mo. He writes regularly on issues related to Guanta'namo and the "War on Terror" on his Web site.)
The media is buzzing with the news that Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted in an open session of Congress on Tuesday that waterboarding – a long-reviled torture technique, which produces the perception of drowning – was used on three "high-value" al-Qaeda suspects in CIA custody in 2002 and 2003. The three men – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri – are discussed in my book The Guanta'namo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison.
My questions for Mr. Hayden are simple. Firstly, if it's true that only three detainees were subjected to waterboarding, then why did a number of "former and current intelligence officers and supervisors" tell ABC News in November 2005 that "a dozen top al-Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe" were subjected to six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," instituted in mid-March 2002?
According to the ABC News account, the six techniques used by the CIA on the "dozen top al-Qaeda targets" were "The Attention Grab," "Attention Slap," "The Belly Slap" and three other techniques that are particularly worrying: "Long Time Standing," "The Cold Cell," and, of course, "Waterboarding." "Long Time Standing" was described as "among the most effective [techniques]," in which prisoners "are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours." The ABC News report added, "Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions." In "The Cold Cell," the prisoner "is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water."
The description of "Waterboarding" was as follows: "The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt."
The article proceeded with recollections of the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who apparently "won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess" (the interrogators tried it on themselves, but "only lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in").
According to the ABC News report, one other detainee who was waterboarded was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the director of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, who was captured in November 2001. His current whereabouts are unknown, although there are suspicions that he was finally delivered to the Libyan government. Having slipped off the radar, the government clearly does not want his case revived, not only because it may have to explain what has happened to him, but also because, as a result of the application of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," al-Libi claimed that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.
Al-Libi's "confession" led to President Bush declaring, in October 2002, "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases," and his claims were, notoriously, included in Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. The claims were of course, groundless, and were recanted by al-Libi in January 2004, but it took Dan Cloonan, a veteran FBI interrogator, who was resolutely opposed to the use of torture, to explain why they should never have been believed in the first place. Cloonan told Jane Mayer, "It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq ... The reason they got bad information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way.
My second question for Mr. Hayden concerns an allegation made by Murat Kurnaz, the German detainee who was released from Guanta'namo in August 2006. In an article in the Washington Spectator last July, focusing on Kurnaz's story, as described in his book Fu"nf Jahre Meines Lebens: Ein Bericht Aus Guanta'namo (Five Years Of My Life: A Report From Guanta'namo), the following passage came after Kurnaz's recollections of being hung by his wrists for "hours and days," interrupted only by a doctor who came to "check his vital signs to determine if he could withstand more enhanced interrogation," and his recollections of seeing, in the neighboring cell, another detainee who had died as a result of this ordeal:
Kurnaz said he was also subjected to waterboarding and electric shock. And that beatings were routine and constant. He theorizes that much of the torture was a result of the failure of the American soldiers and agents to capture any real terrorists in the initial sweeps. (He was told that he was sold to the Americans for $3,000 by Pakistani police, who identified him as a terrorist.) 'They didn't have any big fish. And they thought that by torture they could get one of us to say something. "I know Osama" or something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish.'
In light of the comments made by CIA sources in November 2005, and by Murat Kurnaz in his book, I can only wonder how it's feasible for Mr. Hayden to assert that the use of waterboarding was restricted to three of the 14 "high-value" detainees who were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, and, by extension, to claim that waterboarding was not used elsewhere in the "War on Terror" prisons; specifically, as Murat Kurnaz alleged, in one of the US prisons in Afghanistan, which, with Guanta'namo, provided the template for the well-chronicled riot of torture and abuse that later migrated to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Torture still doesn't work
« Reply #2 on: 2008-02-09 04:14:40 »
[Blunderov] A list that will live in infamy.
George W. Bush Richard “Dick” Cheney John Ashcroft Alberto Gonzales Donald Rumsfeld George J. Tenet John E. McLaughlin Porter Goss David Addington Jay S. Bybee John Yoo Jack Goldsmith General Ricardo Sanchez General Geoffrey Miller General Janis Karpinski
It might actually be in the interests of these moral cretins to face the music at the Hague voluntarily- unless of course they plan to spend the rest of their lives never venturing into public places without massive protection. (And also never boarding an aircraft of any sort in case of inconvenient diversions.) Something which is sometimes forgotten about the purpose of custodial sentences is that they are also, partially, to protect the convict against the law of the talon.
Also, it simply is not right to put unecessary temptation in the path of those who might be overcome by it.
Imagine someone murdered and raped somebody's daughter (or son). And that person was paroled after, say, 5 years. And was then seen alone in a parking lot by the murdered persons parent...
Imagine someone perpetrated war crime which wiped out a persons entire family and then bumped into that person in the street...
Turn yourselves in gentlemen (and lady). For your own peace of mind and conscience. Throw yourselves upon the mercy of the court. Get some while it's going is my recommendation.
Ping Hermit: I see that necessity is specifically excluded as an admissable defence to torture charges! Interesting.
Global Research, February 8, 2008 Head On Radio Network
Now that George Bush and Michael Hayden have publicly confessed to government waterboarding in a press conference on February 6, 2008, and in testimony before Congress on February 5, 2008, you may find the following information useful:
makes clear that waterboarding is torture and is a crime and a war crime punishable under a number of treaties to which the United States is a party and several U.S. statutes.
The article also explains that there is no defense available due to either (1) prior legal advice, or (2) circumstances (including, without limitation, terrorist acts – see citations in Footnotes 21 and 25 in the article), contrary to the claims of Bush and Hayden.
The law review article (see pages 359 to 374) also establishes that under a number of treaties to which the United States is a party, the U.S. has an obligation to initiate an official investigation regarding confessed acts of torture. For example, the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture, (1465 UNTS 85), Article 12 reads as follows:
“Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.” (NOTE: The article also explains why “territory under its jurisdiction” includes GITMO and all DOD and CIA secret detention sites for the United States.)
The following case, among others, has held that waterboarding is torture:
In re Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos Human Rights Litigation, 910 F. Supp. 1460, 1463 (District of Hawaii, 1995)
Waterboarding is torture regardless of the surrounding circumstances – there is no circumstantial or necessity defense to torture claims.
It is time for the appointment of a special prosecutor – General Mukasey must recuse himself because of his refusal to publicly state that waterboarding is criminal torture. As explained in the law review article and elsewhere, the following individuals played primary roles in the authorization of waterboarding and should be immediately identified as the primary subjects of the investigation:
George W. Bush Richard “Dick” Cheney John Ashcroft Alberto Gonzales Donald Rumsfeld George J. Tenet John E. McLaughlin Porter Goss David Addington Jay S. Bybee John Yoo Jack Goldsmith General Ricardo Sanchez General Geoffrey Miller General Janis Karpinski
Bush/Cheney Pardon Calendar
Under the circumstances – a public confession of criminal acts by George W. Bush — you should expect that immediately after the November elections George W. Bush will pardon all of the people listed above, then resign. At that point, Richard “Dick” Cheney would become President, and you should expect that in that capacity Cheney will immediately pardon George W. Bush.
Immediate Appointment of Special Prosecutor
As a result of the expected pardons, a special prosecutor should be appointed immediately
Commencement of Impeachment Proceedings
As a result of the expected pardons, on the day after the November elections, the House of Representatives should impeach George W. Bush and Richard “Dick” Cheney for high crimes — torture — violating the following statutes, among others:
Please note the strategic importance of simply presenting the impeachment to members of the House with no hearings and an immediate vote on the day after the November elections. There is no reason for hearings or delay, since George W. Bush has admitted the criminal act that is the basis of the impeachment.
International Crimes Not Subject to Pardon Power
It is worth pointing out that torture violations of the Law of War and international treaties are not subject to the Presidential pardon power. We will see these individuals on trial in the Hague for their publicly confessed war crimes.
“Above the Law: Unlawful Executive Authorizations Regarding Detainee Treatment, Secret Renditions, Domestic Spying and Claims to Unchecked Executive Power,” Jordan J. Paust, Utah Law Review, 2007, Number 2, Pages 345 to 419
Saturday, February 9, 2008 Waterboarding should be prosecuted as torture: U.N.
Fri Feb 8, 2008 6:43pm EST MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding and used by the United States qualifies as torture, the U.N. human rights chief said on Friday.
"I would have no problems with describing this practice as falling under the prohibition of torture," the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told a news conference in Mexico City.
Arbour made her comment in response to a question about whether U.S. officials could be tried for the use of waterboarding that referred to CIA director Michael Hayden telling Congress on Tuesday his agency had used waterboarding on three detainees captured after the September 11 attacks.
Violators of the U.N. Convention against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' which allows countries to try accused war criminals from other nations, Arbour said.
"There are several precedents worldwide of states exercising their universal jurisdiction ... to enforce the torture convention and we can only hope that we will see more and more of these avenues of redress," Arbour said.
The U.S. Congress is considering banning the practice, in which prisoners are immobilized and water is poured into their breathing passages to simulate drowning.
Arbour referred to an arrest warrant issued in 1998 by a Spanish judge for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died in 2006, on charges of torture, murder and kidnapping in the years that followed his 1973 coup.
Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s were known to use waterboarding on political prisoners.
(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)
Posted by CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS mparent7777 Marc Parent CCNWON at 8:55 AM
Re:Torture still doesn't work
« Reply #4 on: 2008-02-10 18:32:18 »
Torture is a sign of militaristic desparation. If we did other things more competantly it would never come down to such decisions in the first place. We need more translators, intelligence sources, and reality based decision making. Speaking of torture victims, we don't need some PTSD veteran who has already straight-talked us into a 10,000 year war in Iraq!! That's simply a slow suicide as surely as anything. Civilizations have collapsed for similar and even lesser stupidities. We don't need nutjobs like McCain running our military into the ground, we've already had seven years of this crap, and he is as loyal a Bushie as there ever was. When they voted against their constituents desires they did so together. Whether it was the radio con heads in the immigration bill, or when it came to swindling the public on the Iraq war, McCain and Bush were together. There is nothing insurgent about McCain. It was his turn. He was loyal when it mattered, therefore the GOP "takes turns". It is his turn. There is something deep in the GOP DNA about that. I like to call it the last best loser rule. Democrats do it too, sometimes, but not as religiously as Republicans. If someone is smart and up-to the job, they sometimes get to cut in. The moment demanded someone in particular and it was you. If Huckaby hangs in long enough, he may qualify as the last best loser next time. Or perhaps Vice Presidential preference. Still the last best loser, but some what enobled by having an office.
Re:Torture still doesn't work
« Reply #5 on: 2008-02-11 02:40:11 »
[Blunderov] Some quotable quotes courtesy of Information Clearing House.
"It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people" Gore Vidal
"They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages". Richard Bourke, Australian attorney
[torture] "presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness".. . - Ariel Dorfman [from his book "Torture: A Collection"]
"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason." Octavio Paz quotes
"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world. " James Baldwin [From chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976), page 489 of Collected Essays
"What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer" Bertrand Russell
"The healthy man does not torture others " Carl Gustav Jung
"We don't torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country". George W. Bush [Interview with Australian TV - October 18, 2003]
Re:Torture still doesn't work
« Reply #6 on: 2008-02-11 03:17:07 »
[Blunderov] Think what a splendid tool of law enforcement torture would be. Undoubtably there are "circumstances" in which "American lives" would be at risk if torture was not applied to perpertrators of violent crime. Where might they strike next? Who else do they know that might be about to commit a violent crime? Yup, there are obviously many "circumstances" where "American lives" could be saved by such means.
Think also of the cost savings to be had. More confessions. Less time wasted on those stupid sentimental legal niceties that protect criminals at the expense of normal, decent, god-fearing, torturer Americans.
To sum up: what possible "justifications" for torture in a military context could not also be applied indentically to American civilian life in certain "circumstances"? How is the one permissable but not the other? Or is this hypocrisy the simple expression of the innate assumption that only Americans are human beings? (Where have we see THAT before I wonder?)
Talking of god-fearing; we all know that the coward 4th estate has abandoned any pretence of fulfilling its democratic functions but where are the churches? Their silence, from the Catholics down, is egregious beyond comprehension. The sychophant journalists have at least the excuse that their livings depend on their spread-legged and supine complaisences. The prelates, who supposed answer first to "god", have no such excuse.
To sum up: where the fuck are the churches? How can they sleep at night and continue to say nothing?
Waterboarding for God, With Decency and Compassion
by Ray McGovern
After one spends 45 years in Washington, high farce does not normally throw one off balance. I found the past few days, however, an acid test of my equilibrium.
I missed the National Prayer Breakfast – for the 45th time in a row. But as I drove to work I listened with rapt attention as President George W. Bush gave his insights on prayer:
"When we lift our hearts to God, we're all equal in his sight. We're all equally precious…. In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion. … When we answer God's call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man – and a deeper relationship with our eternal Father."
Vice President Dick Cheney skipped Thursday's prayer breakfast in order to put the final touches on the speech he gave later that morning to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Perhaps he felt he needed some extra time to devise careful words to extol "the interrogation program run by the CIA … a tougher program for tougher customers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11," without conceding that the program has involved torture.
But there was a touch of defensiveness in Cheney's remarks, as he saw fit repeatedly to reassure his audience yesterday that America is a "decent" country.
After all, CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed publicly on Tuesday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other "high-value" detainees had been waterboarded in 2002-2003, though Hayden added that the technique has since been discontinued.
An extreme form of interrogation going back at least as far as the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been condemned as torture by just about everyone – except the hired legal hands of the Bush administration.
On Wednesday President Bush's spokesman Tony Fratto revealed that the White House reserves the right to approve waterboarding again, "depending on the circumstances." Fratto matter-of-factly described the process still followed by the Bush administration to approve torture – er, I mean "enhanced interrogation techniques" like waterboarding:
"The process includes the director of the Central Intelligence Agency bringing the proposal to the attorney general, where the review would be conducted to determine if the plan would be legal and effective. At that point, the proposal would go to the president. The president would listen to the determination of his advisers and make a decision."
Dissing Congress
Cheney's task of reassuring us about our "decency" was made no easier Thursday, when Attorney General Michael Mukasey stonewalled questions from the hapless John Conyers, titular chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers tried, and failed, to get straight answers from Mukasey on torture.
Conyers referred to Hayden's admission about waterboarding and branded the practice "odious." But Mukasey seemed to take perverse delight in "dissing" Conyers, as the expression goes in inner-city Washington. Sadly, the tired chairman took the disrespect stoically.
He did summon the courage to ask Attorney General Mukasey directly, "Are you ready to start a criminal investigation into whether this confirmed use of waterboarding by U.S. agents was illegal?"
"No, I am not," Mukasey answered.
Mukasey claimed "waterboarding was found to be permissible under the law as it existed" in the years immediately after 9/11; thus, the Justice Department could not investigate someone for doing something the department had declared legal. Got that?
Mukasey explained:
"That would mean the same department that authorized the program would now consider prosecuting somebody who followed that advice."
Oddly, Mukasey himself is on record saying waterboarding would be torture if applied to him. And Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, was even more explicit in taking the same line in an interview with Lawrence Wright of New Yorker magazine. McConnell told Wright that, for him:
"Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful! Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture."
Okay, it would be torture if done to you, Mike; how about if done to others? Sadly, McConnell, too, missed the prayer breakfast and the president's moving reminder that we are called "to love a neighbor as ourselves." Is there an exception, perhaps, for detainees?
Cat Out of Bag
When torture first came up during his interview with the New Yorker, McConnell was more circumspect, repeating the obligatory bromide "We don't torture," as former CIA Director George Tenet did in five consecutive sentences while hawking his memoir on 60 Minutes on April 29, 2007. As McConnell grew more relaxed, however, he let slip the rationale for Mukasey's effrontery and the administration's refusal to admit that waterboarding is torture. For anyone paying attention, that rationale has long been a no-brainer. But here is McConnell inadvertently articulating it:
"If it is ever determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it."
Like death. Even Alberto Gonzales could grasp this at the outset. That explains the overly clever, lawyerly wording in the Jan. 25, 2002, memorandum for the president drafted by the vice president's lawyer, David Addington, but signed by Gonzales. Addington/Gonzales argued that the president's determination that the Geneva agreements on prisoners of war do not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban:
"Substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441) … enacted in 1996…
"Punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death penalty…
"[I]t 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 would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
Mike McConnell needs to get his own lawyers to bring him up to date on all this. For that memorandum was quickly followed by an action memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002. The president's memo incorporated the exact wording of Addington/Gonzales' bottom line. To wit, the U.S. would "treat the detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of [Geneva]" (emphasis added).
That provided the loophole through which then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA director George Tenet and their subordinates drove the Mack truck of torture. Even the Bush-administration-friendly editorial page of the Washington Post saw fit on Friday to declare torture "illegal in all instances," adding that "waterboarding is, and always has been, torture."
Waterboarding has been condemned as torture for a very long time. After WWII Japanese soldiers were hanged for the "war crime" of waterboarding American soldiers.
Patriots and Prophets
Patriots and prophets have made it clear from our earliest days that such abuse has no place in America.
Virginia's Patrick Henry insisted passionately that "the rack and the screw," as he put it, were barbaric practices that had to be left behind in the Old World, or we are "lost and undone." Attorney General Mukasey, for his part, recently refused to say whether he considers the rack and the screw forms of torture, dismissing the question as hypothetical.
As for prophets, George Hunzinger of Princeton Theological Seminary has awakened enough religious folks to form the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of 130 religious organizations from Left to Right on the political spectrum. Hunzinger puts it succinctly: "To acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east," adding:
"All the dissembling in high places that makes these shocking abuses possible must be brought to an end. But they will undoubtedly continue unless those responsible for them are held accountable…. A special counsel is an essential first step."
Sadly, Hunzinger and his associates have been unable to overcome the pious complacency of the vast majority of institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques in this country and their reluctance to exercise moral leadership.
How It Looks From Outside
Sometimes it takes a truth-telling outsider to throw light on our moral failures.
South African Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, erstwhile chaplain to Nelson Mandela in prison and longtime outspoken opponent of apartheid, has this to say to those clergy who might be moved to preach more than platitudes:
"We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly or indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.
"All around the world there are those who long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet."
Mukasey's thumbing his nose at Conyers' committee yesterday was simply the most recent display of contempt for Congress on the part of the Bush administration. The founders expected our representatives in Congress to be taken seriously by the executive branch, and expected that members of Congress would hold senior executives accountable – to the point of impeaching them, when necessary, for high crimes and misdemeanors.
That used to worry those officials and put a brake on more outlandish behavior. Not any more.
No Worries, George
One reads George Tenet's memoirs with some nostalgia for the days of a modicum of congressional oversight, and with a strong sense of irony – as he confesses concern that Congress might one day hold him and others accountable for taking liberties with national and international law.
It seems likely that then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington counseled Tenet that his concerns were quaint and obsolete and, alas, they may have been right, the way things have been going. But Tenet apparently entertained lingering misgivings – perhaps even qualms of conscience.
In the immediate post-9/11 period, Tenet says he told the president "our only real ally" on the Afghan border was Uzbekistan, "where we had established important intelligence-collection capabilities." We now know from UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray that those "collection capabilities" included the most primitive methods of torture, including boiling alleged "terrorists" alive.
Tenet adds that he stressed the importance of being able to detain unilaterally al-Qaeda operatives around the world. His worries shine through the rather telling sentences that follow:
"We were asking for and we would be given as many authorities as CIA ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them, could end up spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before congressional overseers our new freedom to act." (At the Center of the Storm, p. 177-178)
Tenet need not have worried. He would be shielded from accountability by a timid Congress as well as an arrogant White House able to arrogate unprecedented power to itself and to shield those it wished to protect.
Setting the Tone
It was President George W. Bush who set the tone from the outset. After his address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, he assembled his top national security aides in the White House bunker – the easier, perhaps, to foster a bunker mentality. Among them was counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, who quoted the president in his memoir:
"I want you to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they're gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda. …
"I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."
Clarke, of course, took his book's title from the oath of office we all swore as military officers and/or senior government officials: "To defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
John Ashcroft, head of the Department of Justice at the time, fell in lockstep with the thrust of the president's comment dismissing any concern with international law – or, as would quickly be seen, domestic law, as well. With the enthusiastic assistance of David Addington, the affable Ashcroft assembled a cabal of Mafia-like lawyers whose imaginative legal opinions on torture, warrantless eavesdropping, and other abuses mark them forever as "domestic enemies" of the Constitution.
Add Mukasey to this distinguished roster.
Torture: The Hallmark
What is not widely known is that Justice Department-approved torture was first applied on an American citizen, John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan in late November 2001. The White House and corporate press immediately sensationalized Lindh as "the American Taliban."
Jesselyn Radack, a conscientious legal adviser in the Justice Department's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, which gives ethics advice to department attorneys, insisted that Lindh be advised of his rights before any interrogation. Instead, he was tortured mercilessly during the first few days of his internment and denied medical care.
Lindh had had the foolishness and bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, i. e., in a large group of prisoners rounded up by CIA and Army paramilitary forces – too large a group, it turned out.
A spontaneous uprising took place, and CIA paramilitary officer Johnny "Mike" Spann, who had questioned Lindh just minutes before, was shot dead. Outraged, Spann's colleagues applied "frontier justice," totally ignoring the constitutional cautions of Radack.
The Department of Justice moved quickly to fire Radack for her principled stand. But she had the presence of mind to save e-mails providing chapter and verse of the difficult exchanges in which she had insisted on respect for Lindh's rights as an American citizen. Newsweek carried the story briefly, but neither Congress nor anyone else in the media showed much interest.
Radack's book recounting this experience, The Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, is available online.
Against this backdrop, together with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, Patrick Henry's warning remains a challenge for our time: Are we "lost and undone?" I think not, but we had better get it together soon, for, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned, "There is such a thing as too late."
A shorter version of this article appeared on ConsortiumNews.com. </snip>
Religious Leaders Urge Bush to Sign Anti-Torture Bill
By Katherine T. Phan Christian Post Reporter Sat, Mar. 01 2008 10:31 AM ET
NEW YORK – Calling torture an "instrinsic evil" that must be "absolutely" rejected, four faith group leaders signed a joint letter Thursday urging President Bush to change his mind and approve the Intelligence Authorization Act.
"Nothing could be more urgent in a democratic society than to uphold the fundamental values of democracy," the letter reads.
"'Enhanced' interrogation practices – like waterboarding, hypothermia, long-time standing, sleep deprivation and the use of psychotropic drugs – which are part of the CIA interrogation program, contradict our democratic values as well as essential principles of morality and faith."
The signatories of the letter are the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, general secretary of the National Council of Churches; the Rev. Dr. Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary; Dr. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America; and Rabbi David Saperstein, director and counsel of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
The four faith leaders also requested, in the letter, to meet with the president before he proceeds with his threatened veto of the anti-torture bill. Bush is expected to veto the intelligence bill next week, the Congressional Quarterly reports.
Torture is an "intrinsic evil" that will doom a society to "moral breakdown" if it is embraced, the faith leaders state in the letter.
"Our scriptures couldn't be clearer in their condemnation of cruelty and abuse," Kinnamon said Thursday. "The letter we have sent sums it up very succinctly: torture is an intrinsic evil."
The faith leaders urge in the letter for torture to "be repudiated absolutely."
"There can be no exceptions to this rule. It is a rule that unites religious conscience with reason."
The plea was prompted by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, of which NCC is a member.
On Wednesday, the national anti-torture group sent its own letter calling the president to pass H.R. 2082 and repudiate forms of torture. The United Methodist Church and Presbyterian Church (USA) also signed the NRCAT statement.
"Abolishing torture throughout the world is an essential part of our Christian calling because it violates the timeless truth that all persons are created in the image of God and therefore have basic inalienable rights," said Bill Mefford, staff member of the UMC Board of Church and Society.
"We have a unique opportunity before us to ensure this year that the U.S. halts its use of torture as a form of interrogation," he added.
Last week, the Senate approved the intelligence bill that limits the CIA to using 19 less-aggressive interrogation tactics outlined in a U.S. Army Field Manual.
Over 18,000 people have also endorsed a shorter statement by NRCAT that says torture undermines the basic human dignity people of all faiths hold dear.
The idea that waterboarding doesn't work is, of course demonstrably false. The US Government has only waterboarded three people, all high value Al Qaeda terrorist masterminds. One of them, Khalid Shaykh Muhammed, the operational mastermind of, among other heinous atrocities, the 9-11 terror flyer attacks, when weeks of other tactics had failed, after only 2 1/2 minutes of waterboarding gave up more than a dozen ongoing operations, the disruption of which saved thousands of innocent lives, and several high-value Al Qaedan associates, the apprehension of which most likely saved thousands more. The other two, by the way, were Abu Zubaydeh, Al Qaeda's chief financier, who told them where the money was going, and the operational mastermind of the Bali bombing. In fact, the radical degradation of Al Qaeda as a globally threatening force can most probably be traced to that single interrogation. I posted here an ABC report by Brian Ross, the chief investigative reporter for ABC news, with a person who was present at Khalid Shaykh Muhammed's waterboarding - and it made these precise points. Without it, we could have had a dozen transatlantic flights from Europe blown up over US metropolises, and have lost the Chicago Sears Tower, the Los Angeles Library Tower, and the Seattle Space Needle, among many other targets the plans for which were disrupted as a result of the info obtained through Muhammed's waterboarding. The leaders of the US Congress, both Republican and Democrat, were advised of the decision beforehand, and rather than protest, they inquired whether even more coercive techniques could be employed (they weren't).
The canard that waterboarded captives will say anything, whether true or not, and even issue disinformation, is also demonstrably untrue. Their info is rapidly checked, as everyone concerned knows it will be, and if it is proven to have been misleading, both the terrorists and their waterboarders know that they will be seeing each other again.
Also failing is the contention that such actions will allow our adversaries license to perpetrate the same tactics against members of our own military. Anyone who can read the news or download videos full well knows that not only do terrorist groups curl their contemptuous lips at such conventions (they view them as signs of weakness), but that they have also perpetrated far worse against our own captured soldiers, both before and since the waterboardings - tactics such as scooping out eyes with spoons, using electric shock on genitals, power-drilling into joints, and beheading with dull knives.
People who would prefer for thousands of innocent civilian citizens to die horrible deaths than for a genocidal terrorist mastermind to endure a few minutes of extreme discomfort which does no enduring physical damage, and is in fact employed to train members of our own military in SERE school in resistance to interrogation techniques, are, in my opinion, ethically and morally bankrupt, on any utilitarian cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the total misery contingent upon either employing or failing to employ the practice.
I have made this case here before, and prevailed; I find it extremely interesting that the thread in which I made it has mysteriously disappeared from the board, and the authors of the vanquished position have cynically attempted to resurrect their defeated arguments as if the previous debate never happened. But it DID occur, and those who were in it or who read it remember full well not only that it did, but also the nature of the outcome. Perhaps now that I am Stalinistically limited to one post a day, they feel that they can win on mere sheer quantity a case that they previously decisively lost on its qualitative merits. But a thousand bad arguments are powerless against a single good one - and I have profferred several which have yet to be refuted on this board. ___________________________________________________________________________
Added after Blunderov's reply:
Yeah, that's right, Blunderov; when you can't refute the message, ban the messenger. How appreciative of the free marketplace of ideas you are! And how confident you are that yours will win out in Darwinian confrontation! And you call yourself a Virion...while invoking the hand of the board God.
Why don't you instead, try to contend your case against me? After all, you can smother the thread with "facts", "logic" and "evidence", while I am restricted to a single post a day. All the board restrictions are in your favor. And you will have plenty of help from those, such as Hermit, who brazenly contend that every action or omission of the US is corrupt and criminal, and every genocidal outrage of the US's adversaries is clean, pure and pristine, even going so far as to post a rationalization by Noam Chomsky, who even defended Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and Milosevic's, Mladic's and Kradzic's Serbian genocides because the US opposed them, of Imad Mugniyeh, who has engineered the deaths of more US citizens than any terrorist outside of Al Qaeda.
But the case in dispute is not in your favor, and you in your heart of hearts know that - which is why you would rather rid yourself of the crushing cognitive dissonance, and demand that my heretical stance - which you fear might just be correct - be filtered from your awareness. How courageous, truth-seeking, and noble of you!
It reminds me of the statement of Nietsche's concerning Christians: Faith is not wanting to know. But it is much worse than that in these times; people want NOT to know, and demand that no one else be permitted to know, or even to consider, either. All while the Faithful are worshipping at the feet of the Obama Messiah, and are willing to follow wherever he leads, while having not the faintest idea where that might be.
COME to your new Maharishi-Bhagwan avatar Obama...kneel and drink of his sanctified holinesss...meanwhile studiously ignoring his Iraqi financier Auchi and his Syrian bagman Rezko and his parishionership in a church whose pastor praises Louis Farrakhan, who has enthusiastically endorsed him, and his thrall to Chicago Machine politics, and his paid political homage at the house of Ayers and Dorhn, the Weatherman bombing couple.
Barak Hussein Obama: Pass Iraq from Hussein to Osama...or, more likely, to Ahmedinejihad, the zealously nuke-seeking Hojetiyyah cultist, a leader in the seizing and holding of 52 US Embassy hostages for 444 days in order to prevent an Iranian-US rapproachement that had been engineered by Carter - Ahmedinejihad, the man whose cult was even outlawed during Khomeini's Iranian rule because even he, who famously said that he cared not if Iran burned if it advanced the cause of Islam, deemed it too fanatical and extreme- a man who has promised to obliterate Israel in quest of the return of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi (after which Al Sadr's militia is notoriously named), while offering the Palestinians there up as martyrs to Paradise...and on whom MAD deterrence will not work, for he fervently and piously seeks same, in order to facilitate the Advent of the Shia Second Coming. I'm sure he will be grateful enough for the ending of the pressure on Iraq's Western border to mothball his Bomb program - the one that all governments in Europe - the ones we allowed to unsuccessfully negotiate for it's cessation - clearly see, meanwhile instructing his funded and controlled Hezbollah and Hamas proxies to stand down from their kidnappings and rocketings of Israeil citizens.
Welcome to the Armageddon you so profoundly seem to desire. For if Israel falls, Dimona will glow with the Samsonian launch of 200 nuclear missiles, to make their enemies pay for their perfidies.
And for hermit, whose foam-flecked and rabid ad hominem rant failed to address a single issue I raised in my post, this is a book I highly recommend for you. Becoming aware of your pathology is the first step towards recovery. The author, Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D., received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago. He is board certified in both general and forensic psychiatry and has diagnosed and treated mental disorders for more than forty years. He has been retained by numerous public offices, courts, and private attorneys as a forensic psychiatrist and has consulted in more than 2700 civil and criminal cases in both state and federal jurisdictions. I would only disagree with Dr. Rossiter in his labeling of the pathology as liberalism, since I myself am a classic liberal (root word liberty), who believes in the expansion of personal freedoms both at home and abroad (yes, I am pro-choice, pro-gay-civil-union, pro-gambling, pro-assisted-suicide, pro-marijuana-legalization, pro-consenting-adult-pornography and prostitution - hardly positions that one could categorize as right-wing stances). It is surpassingly clear to me that the malady that Dr. Rossiter characterizes as liberalism is more aptly described as leftism. Unlike liberals, who abhor authoritarian regimes of any stripe, leftists have yet to meet a theocracy or totalitarianism - from those of Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Milosevic, Ortega and Castro through Saddam, Mullah Omar, Qaddafi, Assad, Turabi, Ahmedinejad and Chavez - with which they have not become enthralled, so long as it was virulently antiamerican - even extending to Islamofascist jihadists, the most virulently illiberal force on the face of the planet. But Europe is beginning to wake up from this fitful fever dream; perhaps, in time, the US left will follow.
Btw, hermit has a lot of gall to talk about insults, considering his own repugnant history with them; years ago, after I told people here that I was caring for my Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, he repeatedly posted the accusation - from a thousand miles away, and from a person who has never met either myself nor any member of my family - that I was having sex with her, simply because he disagreed with my political opinions (before those disagreements, he thought that I walked on water, even going so far as to quote my work in his articles, and refer to me as "one of the icons of the CoV" - and I actually, and quite mistakenly, since he has subsequently proven himself to be neither worthy of the books nor capable of comprehending them, spent $200 of my own money to have instructional philosophy texts sent to him, an action for which he expressed profuse gratitude). After she died and was buried, he accused me onlist of digging her up and having sex with her dead body. The list uproar and outrage was so comprehensive and intense that he left the list in shame for some time. Just ask the other older members, such as David Lucifer, Blunderov, Mermaid, and Jonathan Davis about it. The guy is one sick twisted warped demented puppy, and execrable beyond all possible redemption.
Re:Torture still doesn't work
« Reply #10 on: 2008-03-04 16:15:24 »
To discourage trolls, memebots and drive by graffiti while maintaining a largely unmoderated board, the number of posts a person can make on the CoV BBS is based on their reputation - which is in turn determined based on the votes of the members of Meridion (see http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=5;action=voteMeridion and particularly http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=5;action=repIndex2 as well as http://www.churchofvirus.org/wiki?pagename=Meridion). This encourages people to learn to make effective posts, ought to train even the most stubborn troll in the niceties of BBS etiquette and hopefully will teach even the most unwilling learner how not to run with scissors and potentially cut themselves or others. This after Joe Dees/Salamantis flooded multiple boards with virulently bigoted articles seemingly culled at random from AM talk radio and Zionist infestations across the Internet. This ultimately necessitated moving the afflicted boards behind a wall, where they remain available to members of the CoV with sufficiently high reputations, but where his hate and fear filled perspective does not totally overwhelm visitors who might not realize that a single poster has placed more material on the BBS than the rest of the CoV put together - and that far from being representative, his bigotry is, according to his reputation, rejected by practically every active member of the Church.
So the reason that Joe Dees/Salamantis is limited to 1 post a day has nothing to do with "Stalinistic limitations", but is merely an artifact of his massive unpopularity. His peers have evaluated his bigoted perspective, tendency to dump massive amounts of unedited and often unrelated items in single posts, willingness to act as a conduit for the most rabid right wing nastiness and inability to argue rationally or recognize that his ability to consider issues has collapsed - rated him accordingly and, as the evidence reflects, have largely stopped looking at his droppings. If Dees/Salamantis had any rational remnant in what passed for a brain, he would realize that it is himself that suffers from cognitive dissonance in being incapable of recognizing his irrelevance and face full of scissor cuts, just as he apparently lacks the capacity to recognize that he not only failed to "prevail" in arguing for "terrorizing individuals" to "prevent terror attacks" but that he was undoubtedly repeatedly trounced by those arguing against his self-contradictory positions.
Unfortunately, the shattered shards of his intellect more or less guarantee that Joe Dees/Salamantis inevitably will be wrong about almost everything; and that while he can be relied upon to deliver extremist propaganda, his Meridion reputation suggests that he is seen only as providing a dreadful warning about the actual and apparently permanent neurological damage that can be caused by a combination of fear, terror, despair and, or, a surfeit of Faux TV. Given that 6 years after 9/11 there has been no improvement in his condition or his attitude, and while he is incapable of recognizing that he requires intervention to function appropriately in a social setting, even a virtual one, I don't see any positive changes as being likely.
That said, I completely agree with Blunderov's recommendation. There are many places on the Internet where brain damaged right wing lunatics can froth and rant in positive orgies of fervidity and civilized people don't need to be bothered by them. There is, in my opinion, no need for the CoV to provide a platform for such inimical perspectives, a passion for torture or even to tolerate Joe Dees' ongoing attempted insults. Enough is more than enough.
I too vote to ban Dees/Salamantis altogether.
Hermit
PS Filtering for the IP subnet used for his postings might be the most effective technical measure to implement this
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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