George Bush was unaware of torture going on in Iraq committed by allied troops. And you lot know it! Under no circumstances does the United States government sanction the use of torture. Saddam Hussein's regime on the other hand used extreme torture routinely!

It was the CIA who taught Saddam's troops, idiot.

And the US military has ALWAYS employed torture during its military aggressions. That's why the Bush/PNAC Regime is incapable of answering a simple yes or no answer.

Q I'd like you to clear up, once and for all, the ambiguity about torture. Can we get a straight answer? The President says we don't do torture, but Cheney --

MR. McCLELLAN: That's about as straight as it can be.

Q Yes, but Cheney has gone to the Senate and asked for an exemption on --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, he has not. Are you claiming he's asked for an exemption on torture? No, that's --

Q He did not ask for that?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that is inaccurate.

Q Are you denying everything that came from the Hill, in terms of torture?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you're mischaracterizing things. And I'm not going to get into discussions we have --

Q Can you give me a straight answer for once?

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me give it to you, just like the President has. We do not torture. He does not condone torture and he would never --

Q I'm asking about exemptions.

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me respond. And he would never authorize the use of torture. We have an obligation to do all that we can to protect the American people. We are engaged --

Q That's not the answer I'm asking for --

MR. McCLELLAN: It is an answer -- because the American people want to know that we are doing all within our power to prevent terrorist attacks from happening. There are people in this world who want to spread a hateful ideology that is based on killing innocent men, women and children. We saw what they can do on September 11th --

Q He didn't ask for an exemption --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and we are going to --

Q -- answer that one question. I'm asking, is the administration asking for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: I am answering your question. The President has made it very clear that we are going to do --

Q You're not answering -- yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen, and I'm going to tell them the facts.

Q -- the American people every day. I'm asking you, yes or no, did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: And let me respond. You've had your opportunity to ask the question. Now I'm going to respond to it.

Q If you could answer in a straight way.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I'm going to answer it, just like the President -- I just did, and the President has answered it numerous times.

Q -- yes or no --

MR. McCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology, and intent on killing innocent men, women and children.

Q Did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are going to do what is necessary to protect the American people.

Q Is that the answer?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are also going to do so in a way that adheres to our laws and to our values. We have made that very clear. The President directed everybody within this government that we do not engage in torture. We will not torture. He made that very clear.

Q Are you denying we asked for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, we will continue to work with the Congress on the issue that you brought up. The way you characterize it, that we're asking for exemption from torture, is just flat-out false, because there are laws that are on the books that prohibit the use of torture. And we adhere to those laws.

Q We did ask for an exemption; is that right? I mean, be simple -- this is a very simple question.

MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered your question. The President answered it last week.

 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051108.html

... and ever since, Scott sort of stopped doing a daily press briefing.

And the White House's Talking Points on the issue are BS too, because it is well-known that torture never leads to valuable intelligence. It's a Tool of Intimidation, and nothing more.

Torture's Dirty Secret: It Works
Naomi Klein

I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an event honoring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is the world's most famous victim of "rendition," the process by which US officials outsource torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching planes in New York when US interrogators detained him and "rendered" him to Syria, where he was held for ten months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out periodically for beatings.

Arar was being honored for his courage by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organization. The audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear mixed in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders kept their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some speakers were unable even to mention the honored guest by name, as if he had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: The tenuous "evidence"--later discredited--that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe?

In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, "not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so." Fear of being the next Maher Arar.

The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of torture, the message is clear: You are being watched, your neighbor may be a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you could disappear onto a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep dark hole that is Guantánamo Bay," to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

But this fear has to be finely calibrated. The people being intimidated need to know enough to be afraid but not so much that they demand justice. This helps explain why the Defense Department will release certain kinds of seemingly incriminating information about Guantánamo--pictures of men in cages, for instance--at the same time that it acts to suppress photographs on a par with what escaped from Abu Ghraib. And it might also explain why the Pentagon approved the new book by a former military translator, including the passages about prisoners being sexually humiliated, but prevented him from writing about the widespread use of attack dogs. This strategic leaking of information, combined with official denials, induces a state of mind that Argentines describe as "knowing/not knowing," a vestige of their "dirty war."

"Obviously, intelligence agents have an incentive to hide the use of unlawful methods," says the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer. "On the other hand, when they use rendition and torture as a threat, it's undeniable that they benefit, in some sense, from the fact that people know that intelligence agents are willing to act unlawfully. They benefit from the fact that people understand the threat and believe it to be credible."

And the threats have been received. In an affidavit filed with an ACLU court challenge to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, Nazih Hassan, president of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, Michigan, describes this new climate. Membership and attendance are down, donations are way down, board members have resigned--Hassan says his members fear doing anything that could get their names on lists. One member testified anonymously that he has "stopped speaking out on political and social issues" because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself.

This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues to be debated in the United States as if it were merely a morally questionable way to extract information, not an instrument of state terror. But there's a problem: No one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool--least of all the people who practice it. Torture "doesn't work. There are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 16. And a recently declassified memo written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative techniques." The Army's own interrogation field manual states that force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

And yet the abuses keep on coming--Uzbekistan as the new hot spot for renditions; the "El Salvador model" imported to Iraq. And the only sensible explanation for torture's persistent popularity comes from a most unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu Ghraib, was asked during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had forced naked prisoners into a human pyramid. "As a way to control them," she replied.

Exactly. As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture.

 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050530/klein

Torture's Part of the Territory
by Naomi Klein
 http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0607-21.htm

It is strange how you only quote biased anti-American news sources. How come there are not articles about American troops torturing Iraqi prisoners in mainstream news outlets like The Times, NBC or BBC? Could it be because these torture stories have been fabricated.

By the way the above poster is talking rubbish, the CIA never trained Saddam Husseins army, nor did they have any contact with the Saddam regime while he was in power. Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq through his own efforts and half the weaponary he was sold came from the Soviet Union.

.

What makes me worthy not to be tortured in some CIA prison, if I will not stand vehemently opposed to such evil? Will I stand up when it is too late?



If they are trying to decide if they should charge you with a crime, let them investigate the matter on their own time.



We are not required to submit to privacy with those who might possibly be exploiting their position in order to lead us into a dark political alley. So many people get screwed over for speaking without family, friends, witnesses, or lawyers present. With witnesses it is much more difficult for politically deployed agents to twist your testimony around in court. Let them deal with this difficulty, rather than you incurring the difficulty of disproving what your nervous psyche supposedly uttered in some dark political alley.



Whether or NOT one is charged with a crime, when one is alone, one should not speak but verbalize this determination and firmly expect the agents to refrain from intimidation or further questioning. Until one is charged with a crime, it is one’s right to continue walking. If you have the desire to be helpful invite them to a popular coffee spot.



Remember too, that your psychological state is yours to maintain and yours to protect yourself from legal disadvantages.



Torture is an absolute abomination of the Fifth Amendment. If torture is overlooked when people are suspected of terrorism, corrupt politicians will be looking to label dissenters terrorists. I am afraid that this is already happening. Democracy must organize itself to cut off the lifeblood of those who hold such gruesome command.



Those who are illegally detained by US and international authorities rightly ought to be defended in the International Criminal Court, and deserving of restitution. When such crimes become the order of any democratic administration, democracy receives a deadly wound.



Are innocent people serving time while being tortured?



Who is at all interested in preventing government sanctioned torture from coming to his or her neighborhood?
If anyone needs help deciding if I am guilty of demanding that the game of politics must be made to remain transparent and fair at any attention-getting cost, they will have to decide that in court.

Let my accuser choose between meeting with me in court, or joining Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan and I for a long overdue dialogue.



When the great terrorist comes charging at me, what will I be charged with?

Who will scuttle me away into the dark alley where the abomination of desolation begins?

What makes me worthy not to be tortured in some CIA prison, if I will not stand vehemently opposed to such evil? Will I stand up when it is too late?





NOTE: Feel free to incorporate this, or any other of my writings into your own publications at Independent Media (indymedia.org).

There might even be an indymedia.org serving your region. You can publish locally or internationally. Most Independent Media websites are quite lenient with their anonymous publishers; in fact they will even save the crazy rants at a link called ‘Hidden Posts’ or ‘Hidden Articles’.

If you have problems publishing at the main website, try any of the other regions listed down the left side of its opening URL:  http://www.indymedia.org

Realist, you have to be the lamest troll ever...

"It is strange how you only quote biased anti-American news sources."

Actually, that's not true.

These sources simply speak the truth in a way the tightly-controlled, corrupted media won't, and to you, that may seem "anti-American", but it's actually a reaction to the Fascism and Aggression of the Extremists in DC, whose kind the country was originally Founded to provide a safe haven from.

"How come there are not articles about American troops torturing Iraqi prisoners in mainstream news outlets like The Times, NBC or BBC?"

There are. Where have you been ... ?

"the CIA never trained Saddam Husseins army"

Yes, they did, along with providing him with logistical support, arming him, protecting him from numerous coup attempts, and sending him BILLIONS in tax-payer and "black" money. Any cursory amount of research will prove this.

You're just trying to shift the focus off of the fact that the Fascists, who you support, employ the most vicious of torture, which is a Tool of Intimidation, and are guilty of the most evil War Crimes. The article I posted simply destroys their Talking Points, because it is known that torture never leads to valuable intelligence.