Defending Torture

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In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 2007, Rear Admiral John Hutson, (Retired Judge Advocate General of the Navy) observed, "torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough. And that should not be the United States. "

It is going to be a long, long time before we live down what was done in our names.

No investigation, no truth commission is ever going to wipe this stain from our national soul.

Even if George Bush, Dick Cheney and the neo-cons, are eventually proven right about going to war with Iraq, they will NEVER, EVER be right about sanctioning torture.

And now, Cheney is running around like a chicken with his head cut off, defending torture!

Torture will never offer us truth or security or even guaranteed useful information. The very dynamics of torture are power, sadism and dehumanization. Torture is the very antithesis of freedom.

Defending torture and doing so insistently, means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell.
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Christians? Torture?

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• WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis.
• More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
• White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than 6 in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only 4 in 10 of them did.
• The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21.

Did these "Christians" absorb nothing of Jesus? On what do they base their lives?

• Jesus said, ... for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him, `Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, `Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.'
  

Surely, torture lies somewhere within this passage?

What, oh, tell me what, does this say about the "Christians" within this country?
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Will It Never Cease?

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This from McClatchy:

• The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
• A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.
• [In late 2002 and] into 2003 (Emphasis mine; this is very important.), Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
• "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.
• "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."
• Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.
• A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
• In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
  

Why are those dates in bold important?

If torture was to "keep us safe" (although team-Bush had already let us be attacked on 9/11 despite very specific security memos warning just such an attack was going to take place), then why were the extreme measures not used immediately following the attack 11 September 2001?

Now we know.

The torture was not to keep us safe.

The torture was to give team-Bush an excuse to attack Iraq. When no link between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein was found, and when the yellow cake uranium/aluminum tube fiasco was exposed, team-Bush turned to torture. They did this in a desperate attempt to give themselves cover for their invasion of Iraq.

There seems to be no depth to which they would not sink to give themselves cover for that which they went into office desiring to do.

I am beginning to feel as though I awoke into a country where the Monty Python crew is running our internal security forces--the CIA, the FBI, etc.
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The Worst Thing in the World

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I have been working for a long time now on just how to register my agony from what the Bush administration did to this country when they sanctioned torture. My every attempt to date has been less than satisfactory to me.

Jeff Fecke at Alas, a blog has succeeded where I have failed.

• Once, we prided ourselves on being better than our enemies. It was not just idle boasting; the fact that America did not have the gulag system, did not disappear political enemies, did not torture its citizens or its enemies — these were not just signs that we were good people, but they were part of our national belief in our inherent moral superiority. Americans didn’t torture, we said, because we didn’t need to torture.
• We didn’t condone torture. It wasn’t just wrong; it was un-American.
• But in the past eight years, we now know, America abandoned that once-cherished belief. We stopped being a nation that would never stoop to torture, and started looking for ways to rationalize torture so that we could call it something else.
• And today [16 April 2009] we found out that we used psychological forms of torment.
• But while these memos don’t tell us anything new — well, not exactly — they do remind us of just what the previous administration thought of our national soul.
• There are worse things that can happen to a nation than being attacked. The destruction that occurred on September 11, 2001 was awful, but it was transient; it was an awful moment in time, but it was just a moment in time. But in our reaction to it, our thoughtless invasion of Iraq, our shredding of civil liberties, and our embrace of torture methods perfected by our erstwhile enemies in the U.S.S.R. — by these actions, we lost a bit of what it was to be America. We lost a bit of our soul.
• I will always despise George W. Bush and his cronies for that; they stained the very soul of this nation. May God have mercy on our souls for not stopping them, and may we find the strength to do what must be done to prevent this from happening again — and if that means prosecuting the bastards, that’s what we have to do.

We should have been forewarned. But most of us did not look, did not listen. George Bush always liked torture.

• In 1967, a Yale Daily News article exposed hazing traditions that make the stories of contemporary initiation rites seem like a mere weeklong frat party. "Pledge week at DKE this fall began with a food fight," the article stated, "and ended with a hot branding iron applied to the small of each pledge's back." The article, stating that beatings and hot coat hangers bent in a "D" shape were routine parts of DKE initiation, led to a story in The New York Times a week later, in which President George W. Bush '68, a former DKE president, defended his fraternity's practices.

I read 1984 in my early teen years in the late 1950's. I KNEW that America did not do this. I breathed a sigh of relief upon finishing my trip to Oceana. I was safe. This would never be my country. I was wrong.

And so it seems that no matter whether we just go on or whether we set in motion some sort of justice for those at the top who instituted the torture, we lose. Prosecuting Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzales, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Jay Bybee, et al, may make us feel better, but it will never erase the terrible, terrible stain, the very stench of what they did to and in the name of this country.

Don't get me wrong. I yearn for GW to stand before the bar. I crave seeing Cheney, Gonzales, Rich, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Jay Bybee, et al, join him there. I want it to be clear that in this country, truly, no matter how high you sit, you must not injure this country. And they did. I want that made perfectly clear. I want it to never happen again.

However, at the very least, if we are NOT going to prosecute Bush administration members, we SHOULD pardon those soldiers who have already been convicted of actually carrying out the orders from higher ups. Trust me those soldiers never packed for Iraq by putting dog collars and leases into their bags: some one furnished those items and instructed the soldiers in how to use them to humiliate and intimidate the Iraqis.

What a continued, ongoing mess. Sad, sad.
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I Am Sick at Heart

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At Harper's Scott Harper has piece -- well, you just have to go read it for yourself.

• Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story.
• Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees.

CHILD-DETAINEES ? ? When/how did I miss that? Did you know? There were "child-detainees?"

What constitutes a "child-detainee?" My God.

But wait, there's more: [Emphasis added in the following is mine.]

• The Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners.
  
• This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.
• Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

Christ, any "health professional" who would take part in systematic torture is no better than Josef Mengele.

All the "health professionals" who served at Guantanamo should be stripped of any licenses they hold. They should never come close to touching another person in any medical fashion.

Can they suddenly be transformed from a torturer back into a caring person? How? PLEASE TELL ME HOW?

Would you want one of them to treat or care for your mother, your child, yourself?

I wouldn't want any of them even to touch my mother's dog.

Maybe they should not even be allowed in our communities. Leave them at Guantanamo. They, too, can be declared "Enemy Combatants."

Disgusting, rotters, all.

And, so, the list grows.
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