The United States of Torture
Mark Whitney | 06.11.2005 00:49 | Repression
As if Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were not horrifying enough, the Washington Post has unmasked an even greater scandal that will heap disgrace on the nation.
Dana Priest's article "The CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons" paints a sobering picture of an administration that has completely derailed and abandoned any shred of moral authority. The United States has become the number 1 exporter of torture in the world today and George Bush has become the uncontested sovereign of savagery; quite a distinction.
The article provides a window into the constellation of CIA concentration camps that dot the globe like the myriad stars in the Milky Way. Thousands of Muslim's have been swept up in a global dragnet and dumped in secret gulags where they are subjected to the grueling regimen of beatings and torture. The prison camps were authorized by President Bush in an executive "finding" 6 days after Sept 11, that's when, as one high-ranking official said, "The gloves came off". It "gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world."
The result of Bush's action was the development of "black sites" where the "disappeared" victims of American foreign policy could be taken and treated with impunity. These prisoners have been abducted from sovereign nations, in clear violation of international law, tortured and, perhaps, killed, without any type legal process in place to shield them from the arbitrary authority of US agents. How can any US citizen or American ally defend this capricious and lethal conduct?
"The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials," Priest states.
"Complete isolation"? "No legal rights"? "Underground cells"?
Again, the pattern is all too familiar with an administration which refuses to be bound by either international law or common decency.
Ironically, Bush and co. have resurrected a number of the Soviet-era prisons in the Eastern block for their vile activities. How strange that the spawn of Ronald Reagan, arch-rival of the "Evil Empire", would breathe new life into these relics of communist rule; throwing open the iron gates and putting them back to work.
Have we really come full-circle?
Certainly, Dick Cheney would match up quite nicely with his antecedent, Joe Stalin. Cheney has become the administration's foremost "advocate of torture" (Washington Post). He has made a straightforward appeal to members of Congress to continue to allow the "cruel, degrading and inhuman" treatment of prisoners even though it is in clear violation of US treaties banning torture and the Geneva Conventions. Many people now believe that Cheney's impassioned plea to Congress has less to do with his heartfelt convictions and more to do with the fact that the bloody footprints for the abusive behavior leads straight to the VP's front door. As Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, stated on NPR, "The Secretary of Defense, under cover of the Vice President's office, began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen. There was a visible audit trail from the Vice President's office through the Secretary of Defense, down to commanders in the field."
Clearly, Cheney's present machinations in the Senate are just a way of concealing his involvement in creating the policy. There's little doubt now of his culpability.
The political and moral fallout from the abuse-scandal will linger for decades to come, savaging the image of the United States as a staunch defender of human rights. What began in metal containers in Afghanistan where Taliban suspects were asphyxiated in the broiling summer sun, led to the open-air cages in Guantanamo Bay where prisoners were callously exposed to the elements for nearly 6 months. The devolution of policy has produced a daisy-chain of rat-infested dungeons manned by CIA goons and bearing the imprimatur of the President of the United States. The war on terror has transformed into a war OF terror and the Bush regime has become the greatest threat to human rights in the world today.
The Red Cross, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all provided documented evidence that the Bush administration is engaged in widespread prisoner abuse. The allegations are further corroborated by the eyewitness accounts of military personnel, former inmates, and even Abu Ghraib's former-Commanding Officer, Gen. Janice Karpinski. There's no doubt that cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners is administration policy or that the chain of command follows a straight path to the Oval Office.
The long catalogue of abominations and abuses begins and ends with George W. Bush. He is personally responsible and will have to be held accountable.
Courtesy and Copyright © Mike Whitney
Dana Priest's article "The CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons" paints a sobering picture of an administration that has completely derailed and abandoned any shred of moral authority. The United States has become the number 1 exporter of torture in the world today and George Bush has become the uncontested sovereign of savagery; quite a distinction.
The article provides a window into the constellation of CIA concentration camps that dot the globe like the myriad stars in the Milky Way. Thousands of Muslim's have been swept up in a global dragnet and dumped in secret gulags where they are subjected to the grueling regimen of beatings and torture. The prison camps were authorized by President Bush in an executive "finding" 6 days after Sept 11, that's when, as one high-ranking official said, "The gloves came off". It "gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world."
The result of Bush's action was the development of "black sites" where the "disappeared" victims of American foreign policy could be taken and treated with impunity. These prisoners have been abducted from sovereign nations, in clear violation of international law, tortured and, perhaps, killed, without any type legal process in place to shield them from the arbitrary authority of US agents. How can any US citizen or American ally defend this capricious and lethal conduct?
"The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials," Priest states.
"Complete isolation"? "No legal rights"? "Underground cells"?
Again, the pattern is all too familiar with an administration which refuses to be bound by either international law or common decency.
Ironically, Bush and co. have resurrected a number of the Soviet-era prisons in the Eastern block for their vile activities. How strange that the spawn of Ronald Reagan, arch-rival of the "Evil Empire", would breathe new life into these relics of communist rule; throwing open the iron gates and putting them back to work.
Have we really come full-circle?
Certainly, Dick Cheney would match up quite nicely with his antecedent, Joe Stalin. Cheney has become the administration's foremost "advocate of torture" (Washington Post). He has made a straightforward appeal to members of Congress to continue to allow the "cruel, degrading and inhuman" treatment of prisoners even though it is in clear violation of US treaties banning torture and the Geneva Conventions. Many people now believe that Cheney's impassioned plea to Congress has less to do with his heartfelt convictions and more to do with the fact that the bloody footprints for the abusive behavior leads straight to the VP's front door. As Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, stated on NPR, "The Secretary of Defense, under cover of the Vice President's office, began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen. There was a visible audit trail from the Vice President's office through the Secretary of Defense, down to commanders in the field."
Clearly, Cheney's present machinations in the Senate are just a way of concealing his involvement in creating the policy. There's little doubt now of his culpability.
The political and moral fallout from the abuse-scandal will linger for decades to come, savaging the image of the United States as a staunch defender of human rights. What began in metal containers in Afghanistan where Taliban suspects were asphyxiated in the broiling summer sun, led to the open-air cages in Guantanamo Bay where prisoners were callously exposed to the elements for nearly 6 months. The devolution of policy has produced a daisy-chain of rat-infested dungeons manned by CIA goons and bearing the imprimatur of the President of the United States. The war on terror has transformed into a war OF terror and the Bush regime has become the greatest threat to human rights in the world today.
The Red Cross, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all provided documented evidence that the Bush administration is engaged in widespread prisoner abuse. The allegations are further corroborated by the eyewitness accounts of military personnel, former inmates, and even Abu Ghraib's former-Commanding Officer, Gen. Janice Karpinski. There's no doubt that cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners is administration policy or that the chain of command follows a straight path to the Oval Office.
The long catalogue of abominations and abuses begins and ends with George W. Bush. He is personally responsible and will have to be held accountable.
Courtesy and Copyright © Mike Whitney
Mark Whitney
Comments
Hide the following 6 comments
What about Saddam Hussein
06.11.2005 11:22
Concerned
at the moment
06.11.2005 12:37
Let's not forget the "Mirror" scandal where actors posed as a Britsh troops to look as if they were mistreating prisoners.
rex
This is what indymedia does
06.11.2005 14:36
Wanna draw us a picture of a rainbow, the sun, a blue sky, and flying pigs while your at it??? Dont forget the sun always always smiles.
Over 18
LOOK!!!! & consider this - Tony B a Liar
06.11.2005 15:47
but consider the
''rendition program'' now
and consider the
spin for war
now here is a numbers game
just one dead, anywhere is a disgrace, sure,
but
state sanctioned murder is still
happening here [de Menezes] and in Iraq
as Operation Steel curtain is underway
on the Syrian border
consider: Why would Blair need to exaggerate?
need to make him into a bogeyman?
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PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
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Sunday July 18, 2004
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered. The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'
On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.' The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq. Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead.
The Baathist regime was responsible for massive human rights abuses and murder on a large scale - not least in well-documented campaigns including the gassing of Halabja, the al-Anfal campaign against Kurdish villages and the brutal repression of the Shia uprising - but serious questions are now emerging about the scale of Saddam Hussein's murders. It comes amid inflation from an estimate by Human Rights Watch in May 2003 of 290,000 'missing' to the latest claims by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, that one million are missing.
At the heart of the questions are the numbers so far identified in Iraq's graves. Of 270 suspected grave sites identified in the last year, 55 have now been examined, revealing, according to the best estimates that The Observer has been able to obtain, around 5,000 bodies. Forensic examination of grave sites has been hampered by lack of security in Iraq, amid widespread complaints by human rights organisations that until recently the graves have not been secured and protected. While some sites have contained hundreds of bodies - including a series around the town of Hilla and another near the Saudi border - others have contained no more than a dozen.
And while few have any doubts that Saddam's regime was responsible for serious crimes against humanity, the exact scale of those crimes has become increasingly politicised in both Washington and London as it has become clearer that the case against Iraq for retention of weapons of mass destruction has faded. The USAID website, which quotes Blair's 400,000 assertion, states: 'If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.' It is an issue that Human Rights Watch was acutely aware of when it compiled its own pre-invasion research - admitting that it had to reduce estimates for the al-Anfal campaign produced by Kurds by over a third, as they believed the numbers they had been given were inflated.
Hania Mufti, one of the researchers that produced that estimate, said: 'Our estimates were based on estimates. The eventual figure was based in part on circumstantial information gathered over the years.'
A further difficulty, according to Inforce, a group of British forensic experts in mass grave sites based at Bournemouth University who visited Iraq last year, was in the constant over-estimation of site sizes by Iraqis they met. 'Witnesses were often likely to have unrealistic ideas of the numbers of people in grave areas that they knew about,' said Jonathan Forrest.
'Local people would tell us of 10,000s of people buried at single grave sites and when we would get there they would be in multiple hundreds.'
A Downing Street spokesman said: 'While experts may disagree on the exact figures, human rights groups, governments and politicians across the world have no doubt that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and their remains are buried in sites throughout Iraq.' Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
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The British MI6 establishes Operation Mass Appeal, a British intelligence mission "designed to exaggerate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in order to shape public opinion. The operation plants stories in the US, British, and foreign media from the 1990s through 2003. Intelligence used by Mass Appeal is said to be "single source data of dubious quality."
After the First Gulf War, the operation seeks to justify the UN sanctions policy. But after the September 11 attacks, its objective is to secure public support for an invasion of Iraq. The mission is similar to Operation Rockingham, another British intelligence disinformation program. Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter says in late in 2003 that he supplied Mass Appeal with intelligence while serving as UN chief weapons inspector from the summer of 1997 until August 1998 and that he met with British agents involved in the operation several times in both New York and London. -
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Revealed: how MI6 sold the Iraq war - Nicholas Rufford
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Blair LIED thousand have died
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BBC cover story
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While the Joint Intelligence Committee advised Mr Blair that Saddam may have retained some old WMD from the original Gulf War, he was claiming publicly that Saddam had "stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons."
When the JIC reported that intelligence was "limited" and based mainly on "assessment", Mr Blair said the matter was "beyond doubt."
Last Autumn Mr Blair also told the Hutton inquiry that he'd published the dossier "because there was a tremendous amount of information and evidence coming across my desk as to the weapons of mass destruction and the programmes associated with it that Saddam had."
Yet, the Ministry of Defence's chief WMD intelligence analyst at the time tells Panorama that the Prime Minister's comments "confused me.....Certainly no-one on my staff had any visibility of large quantities of intelligence of that sort."
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[the WMD dossier] conspiracy to defraud the British public
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"Why don't we issue it in the name of the JIC?
Makes it more interesting to the media"
from an e-mail by Daniel Pruce to Alistair Campbell
11th Sept 2002
used as evidence in the Hutton Report
inquiry into the death of Dr David C Kelly
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cw
Just a Mo...
06.11.2005 23:30
Twilight will appear in a minute and tell us its all a cunning double-bluff, doubtless due entirely to Blair.
Amused
Please be my friend
08.11.2005 01:14
Concerned