John ("Jack") Choon Yoo is America's Eichmann. Bear with me, I am not making this up; I'll give you the links to "reputable" MAINSTREAM sites. Furthermore, Yoo is the biggest personal threat to the U.S. Constitution. He wrote two infamous Torture Memos of the U.S. Justice Dept. He has prepared legal briefs paving the way for George Bush (or some successor) to become an actual -- not virtual -- dictator of the United States. This testicles bit is so incredible I will just give you the link: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo He would authorize U.S. military and intelligence to crush the testicles of young boys to get their parents to talk! (And U.S. troops and CIA agents have proven themselves capable of worse atrocities.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo He would authorize U.S. military and intelligence to crush the testicles of young boys to get their parents to talk! (And U.S. troops and CIA agents have proven themselves capable of worse atrocities.)
Author of Bush's Torture Policy
John Yoo's complex is shown in his torture advice.
John Yoo lives where the famed Peter Arnett used to.
John C. Yoo, wrote Bush's torture policy.
Yoo condones testicle crushing. A complex?
Yoo lives in the former home of famed newsman Peter Arnett.
IMAGES: THE FACE OF EVIL, JOHN C. YOO
HERE'S QUOTE ON TESTICLES
In explaining the Yoo Doctrine, John C. Yoo made the following statements during a December 1, 2005, debate in Chicago, Illinois, with Notre Dame Law School Professor Doug Cassel:
"Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that." [End quote.]
Cassell-Yoo exchange shown above, January 8, 2006 (mp3 audio file): http://rwor.org/downloads/file_info/download1.php?file=yoo_on_torture.mp3 .
It is possible that Yoo, despite having psychiatrists for parents, may have a complex on those organs (perhaps not uncommon, see the prestigious Nature Magazine, http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/jared_diamond/jared_diamond_race_testis_1986_page2.pdf ).
IMAGE: ASIAN TESTICLE SIZE
And beyond all this, a well known Muslim cleric in London has finally issued a fatwah on John Choon Yoo, 40, the most evil Korean alive, barring even dictator Kim Jong Il, Moonies leader Sun Myung Moon, and Virginia Tech massacre perpetrator Seung-Hui Cho. (Yoo was born in S. Korea, but later acquired U.S. citizenship.)
WHERE'S YOO NOW? LATEST NEWS
IMAGE: EYEBALLING JOHN YOO'S HOUSE
Former high Justice Department official John Choon Yoo lives with his wife, Elsa C. Arnett, in McLean, VA, the home of the CIA. Elsa C. Arnett is the daughter of Peter G. Arnett, a reporter retired from CNN, and a woman he met in Vietnam. In fact, Yoo and Elsa have taken over Peter Arnett's former house in McLean (1503 McLean Corner Lane -- see map). It is a million-dollar two-story brick townhouse with a two-car garage in front. IMAGE
Who could spawn such a creature that would scare the tar out of Hitler? Two Korean psychiatrists. These people, John C. Yoo and his parents, are not even native-born Americans, and the younger Yoo has the temerity to second-guess America's Founding Father's and produce the most wide-sweeping revisionist interpretations of the Constitution that have ever been implemented by the Executive Branch. In a few crack-brain papers -- sophomoric in their broadness, extremist, CYA (cover yourself) nonsense -- Yoo has swept away over 200 years of American legal tradition and over 500 years of Western humane tradition (restraints on torture that have existed since at least since the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition).
Torture Yoo's father is John H. Yoo, M.D., who practices general psychiatry in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His mother is Sook Hee Yoo, M.D., who practices geriatric psychiatry and general psychiatry in Gladwyne and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Sook Yoo graduated with a MD.
Two astonishing things about these people: They are medical doctors who produced a son who almost single-handedly legalized deliberate, heinous destruction of the human body by the U.S. Government. And, two, they sent John Yoo and his brother to the Episcopal (!) Academy near Philadelphia before sending them off to college. Here is part of the school prayer (I intend no disrespect to faith or prayer in including this in an article about Yoo): "Give to us hearts of flesh with which to love, minds filled with wisdom that we may serve others, bodies fit to play and work in your service."
This shows how low people can go when they go amoral. They take advantage of America's welcoming tradition, they use their meager skills and nondescript education as doctors to bankroll their son's expensive schools, they take advantage of a religious institution, and their son uses all of this against our most sacred institutions as a servant of the Bush.
IMAGE: YOU RESPONSIBLE FOR MOST U.S. TORTURES
BUSH'S "FINAL SOLUTION," COURTESY OF JOHN "LOON" YOO
Yoo served as a deputy -- not even the head of the darned thing -- of the Office of Legal Counsel, which can put the brakes on presidential actions, or issue "get out of jail" cards" for war crimes the administration thinks officials could later be tried for. Thanks to Justice Department "memos" of John Yoo:
Bush has the right (legally) to make war on any country. Yoo has taken the war-making role of Congress away. This makes military aggression against Iran a virtual certainty before Bush's term is up. It makes war upon China, Russia, or any other country a distinct possibility, depending on which demented minds win out in the Executive Branch.
----- In overturning the "Separation of Powers" of the U.S. Constitution, Yoo said: “We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts the laws, the President enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the Executive Branch.” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/10/INGKSKV5TR1.DTL&hw=bob+egelko&sn=001&sc=1000
Bush has the legal right to imprison people indefinitely without trial. The "authority" has already been abused by this administration in the case of thousands of Muslims, some of whom were fighters against the U.S., but some of whom were imprisoned (and often tortured) because of mistaken identity, false evidence, U.S. paranoia, or just for the fun of it. The excesses of Yoo and George Bush rival those of the Nazi author of the Jewish extermination (the "Final Solution"), Adolf Eichmann, in terms of depravity if not numbers of victims.
----- On this, Yoo said, : “As a result, any customary international law of armed conflict in no way binds, as a legal matter, the President or the U.S. Armed Forces concerning the detention or trial of members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5032094/site/newsweek/
JOHN C. YOO: LAWYER AND LEGAL SCHOLAR
John Yoo is a licensed attorney and a would-be Founding Father of the New World Order, but he has never practiced law in any real way. He has never brought a case to completion through a trial!
His law skills are such that he lives off his father-in-law and his wife while acting as a "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute and on leave from his supposed job as a professor at UC Berkeley. Even the house Yoo and his wife live in was given to his wife by her father. This is the great "legal scholar" John C. Yoo.
--------------------------------
JOHN CHOON YOO (Age: 40) intelius.com
FREMONT, CA
BERKELEY, CA
MC LEAN, VA
---------------------------------
JOHN CHOON YOO Sep 1967 10-08-2004 1503 MCLEAN CORNER LN, MCLEAN, VA 22101 703-356-1268 ZabaSearch
ELSA C ARNETT Sep 1967 09-01-2005 1503 MCLEAN CORNER LN, MCLEAN, VA 22101 703-847-0427
---------------------------------
John Yoo
University of California, Berkeley
Boalt Hall School of Law
890 Simon Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone: (510) 643-5089
Fax: (510) 642-3728
E-Mail:
yoo@law.berkeley.edu
--------------------------------
Contact Information
John Yoo
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 510-643-5089
Assistant: 202-828-6027
Fax: 202-862-7177
E-mail: JYoo@aei.org
WHAT JOHN YOO DESERVES TO BE TRIED FOR:
Guantánamo's Lost Souls (Guardian). By American lawyer George Brent Mickum.
Excerpts: The day after tomorrow marks the confluence of two ignominious anniversaries. The first is the five-year anniversary of the opening of the notorious prison camps run by the US at the Guantánamo naval air station in Cuba. In the five years since the US started shipping prisoners from around the world to Guantánamo, approximately 99% have never been charged with any transgression, much less a crime. Approximately 400 prisoners, characterised by the Bush administration as "the worst of the worst," have been released without charge, many directly to their families. That any prisoners have been released is due almost entirely to the outrage of the civilised world.
Thursday is also the start of my clients' fifth year of captivity around the world: Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna...Bisher and Jamil have withstood various forms of physical torture during their five years as prisoners. Both have suffered numerous beatings (Bisher suffered broken ribs and perhaps a broken foot because of beatings by guards, though both injuries went untreated - despite Bisher's requests for medical assistance), stress positions, temperature extremes, extreme sleep deprivation, death threats, threats to family and, at various times, starvation and being denied water that was fit to drink.
It pains me to report that, at the start of his fifth year in prison, the once healthy and extremely articulate Bisher is failing. He is no longer able to withstand the most insidious form of torture being used by the US military: prolonged isolation combined with environmental manipulation that includes constant exposure to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation...
What the British government knows and the British public needs to know is that Bisher's treatment is designed to achieve a single objective: causing an individual to lose his psychological balance and, ultimately, his mind. Every aspect of Bisher's prison environment is controlled and manipulated to create constant mental instability. The damage to Bisher's psyche is not unexpected. The ravages of extended isolation and sensory deprivation leave no marks, but they destroy the mind...
Bisher al-Rawi is, slowly but surely, slipping into madness. British officials have long been aware of Bisher's treatment. To my knowledge, they have done nothing to intercede on his behalf. They have done nothing to end his torture and constant mistreatment. They have done nothing to address the constantly changing list of spurious, new allegations that the military is uses to justify continued imprisonment.
Among the latest new allegations: the military alleges that Bisher received terrorist training in Bosnia and Afghanistan. British officials know these charges are false beyond conjecture. Bisher has never been in Bosnia and has signed an affidavit to that effect. The only time Bisher has been in Afghanistan was when the CIA rendered Bisher and Jamil there aboard CIA Gulfstream V-N379P out of the Republic of the Gambia to Cairo, Egypt, where the aircraft refuelled, then went on to the notorious Dark Prison. The reports Bisher and Jamil have given us have matched exactly the flight logs of CIA flights we have obtained. In the Dark Prison, Bisher and Jamil spent weeks underground, encased in total darkness, chained to a wall and shackled in leg irons, starved, and assaulted 24 hours a day with cacophonously loud noise before being transferred to Bagram....
Until last March the British government adamantly refused to intercede on behalf of any of the British residents still interred at Guantánamo....That changed suddenly when the government asked for Bisher's return on non-humanitarian grounds, belatedly conceding that Bisher had worked for MI5. Unfortunately for Bisher, this long-overdue admission, and the British government's request for his immediate repatriation, coincided with Bisher being thrown into isolation. He remains there more than nine months later, with no end in sight.
Bisher's world is a cell 6ft by 8ft in Camp V, where alleged "non-compliant" prisoners are incarcerated. After all these years and hundreds of interrogations, Bisher finally refused to be interrogated further. Despite the fact that Guantánamo officials have publicly proclaimed that prisoners are no longer required to participate in interrogations, Bisher is deemed to be non-compliant and hence is tortured daily....
Solitary confinement is but a single aspect of the torture that Bisher endures on a daily basis. While in isolation, Bisher has been constantly subjected to severe temperature extremes and other sensory torments, many of which are part of a sleep deprivation program that never abates. Frequently, Bisher's cell is unbearably cold because the air conditioning is turned up to the maximum. Sometimes, his captors take his orange jumpsuit and sheet, leaving him only in his shorts. For a week at a time, Bisher constantly shivers and is unable to sleep because of the extreme cold. Once, when Bisher attempted to warm himself by covering himself with his prayer rug, one of the few "comfort items" permitted to him, his guards removed it for "misuse." On other occasions, the heat is allowed to become so unbearable that breathing is difficult and labored. For a week at a time, all Bisher can do is lie completely still, sweat pouring off his body during the day when the Cuban heat can reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature inside Camp V is even higher.
Bisher is allowed no contact with fellow prisoners. Bright lights are kept on 24 hours a day. Bisher is given 15 sheets of toilet paper per day, but because he used his sheets to cover his eyes to help him to sleep, his toilet paper - considered another comfort item by his beneficent constabulary - has been removed for "misuse." Accordingly, he is no longer receives his daily ration of 15 sheets of toilet paper. Imagine being in the position of having to make a choice between using your tiny allotment of toilet paper for the purpose for which it was intended or using it to sleep, and then having it removed altogether...
Changes of clothing take place at midnight when prisoners are given a single, thin cotton sheet. Prisoners are unable to sleep until close to 1am. They are awakened at 5am, when each is required to return his sheet. All of Bisher's legal documents and family photographs were seized from him last June and have never been returned.
If Bisher spends four more months in the conditions I have described, the man I met in September 2004, who was healthy, articulate, thoughtful and humorous, will in all likelihood no longer exist. He will probably slip into a madness that is permanent. If that comes to pass, Britain must recognise and accept the grave culpability it bears...
The Bush Administration, of course, continues to deny that the United States uses torture, prating endlessly about the Administration's humane treatment of the prisoners and its robust compliance with the Geneva Conventions. It long ago defined away torture in the now infamous "Torture Memo" commissioned by now Attorney General Alberto Gonsales. But thousands of pages of memoranda generated by FBI field agents at the prison camps in Guantánamo and released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act litigation belie the Administration's hollow assertions and paint a grim and accurate picture...
These memoranda expose in detail only some of the "torture techniques" employed by the military. They document abuses that include "strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings" (document 4911 entitled Urgent Report). Mamdouh Habib, a former prisoner at Guantánamo who was rendered first to Egypt for unmentionable torture before being transferred to Guantánamo, arrived there without fingernails and bleeding from the ears and nose where cigarettes had repeatedly burned him. Habib, one of the few prisoners actually charged by the military, was summarily released to his home in Australia once the extent of his abuse was exposed. But before placing Habib on the aircraft that would eventually take him home, military officials could not resist one last gratuitous torture: they told him he was being transferred back to Egypt! Among the horrors I have been exposed to in this case, this particular story haunts still.
These FBI memoranda also document efforts by the military to cover-up the abuses. Document number 3977 is a memorandum entitled "Impersonating FBI at GTMO." It informs FBI superiors in Washington, DC that military interrogators at Guantánamo are impersonating the FBI when torturing prisoners. It goes on to state: "These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralisation nature to date and [the Department of Defense, Criminal Investigation Task Force] believes that [the torture] techniques have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators. The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public."
If I alone were making these claims, I would expect at least some readers to doubt the reliability of my account. But FBI field agents wrote these documents. The FBI withheld them until a US court ordered their production. Notably, no one in the Bush Administration or the military has questioned the veracity of these FBI accounts. Thus, there is no debate regarding the authenticity or accuracy of the information contained in these documents.
But if corroboration is needed, the FBI accounts are confirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which reports that the methods used at Guantánamo have, over time, become "more refined and repressive" than those witnessed by the Red Cross on previous visits. Red Cross officials are on record stating that military interrogators seek to make detainees dependent upon them through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions." They confirm that prisoners are exposed to loud and incessant noise and music and were subjected to "some beatings."
The Red Cross also reports that interrogators not only used psychological and physical coercion, but also enlisted the participation of medical personnel in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics." Doctors and other medical personnel work directly with military officials at Guantánamo, conveying data about prisoners' "mental health and vulnerabilities." The Red Cross reports these medical professionals become part of the torture and interrogation machine. Their chief function is not the medical care of prisoners, but assisting interrogators in extracting information. As a result, prisoners no longer trust doctors and others to whom their treatment is entrusted.
It should come as a surprise to no one that the Red Cross concluded that "[t]he construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture."
...Almost a hundred prisoners that we know of have died in US custody; 33 of these deaths are formally classified as homicides by the military. Not since the second world war, when the US imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent, has this country experienced such a constitutional nadir. If the world is to fight this war on terror, morality must not be allowed to become collateral damage. The time is long past for the British government to demand Bisher's and Jamil's immediate return. Paradigms of innocent suffering, they will remain wraiths that hover above the political and moral landscape, constantly reminding us that the destinies of those who would wage just war and those against whom that war is waged are mingled.
HERE'S QUOTE ON TESTICLES
In explaining the Yoo Doctrine, John C. Yoo made the following statements during a December 1, 2005, debate in Chicago, Illinois, with Notre Dame Law School Professor Doug Cassel:
"Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that." [End quote.]
Cassell-Yoo exchange shown above, January 8, 2006 (mp3 audio file):
http://rwor.org/downloads/file_info/download1.php?file=yoo_on_torture.mp3 . It is possible that Yoo, despite having psychiatrists for parents, may have a complex on those organs (perhaps not uncommon, see the prestigious Nature Magazine,
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/jared_diamond/jared_diamond_race_testis_1986_page2.pdf ). IMAGE: ASIAN TESTICLE SIZE
And beyond all this, a well known Muslim cleric in London has finally issued a fatwah on John Choon Yoo, 40, the most evil Korean alive, barring even dictator Kim Jong Il, Moonies leader Sun Myung Moon, and Virginia Tech massacre perpetrator Seung-Hui Cho. (Yoo was born in S. Korea, but later acquired U.S. citizenship.)
WHERE'S YOO NOW? LATEST NEWS
IMAGE: EYEBALLING JOHN YOO'S HOUSE
Former high Justice Department official John Choon Yoo lives with his wife, Elsa C. Arnett, in McLean, VA, the home of the CIA. Elsa C. Arnett is the daughter of Peter G. Arnett, a reporter retired from CNN, and a woman he met in Vietnam. In fact, Yoo and Elsa have taken over Peter Arnett's former house in McLean (1503 McLean Corner Lane -- see map). It is a million-dollar two-story brick townhouse with a two-car garage in front. IMAGE
Who could spawn such a creature that would scare the tar out of Hitler? Two Korean psychiatrists. These people, John C. Yoo and his parents, are not even native-born Americans, and the younger Yoo has the temerity to second-guess America's Founding Father's and produce the most wide-sweeping revisionist interpretations of the Constitution that have ever been implemented by the Executive Branch. In a few crack-brain papers -- sophomoric in their broadness, extremist, CYA (cover yourself) nonsense -- Yoo has swept away over 200 years of American legal tradition and over 500 years of Western humane tradition (restraints on torture that have existed since at least since the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition).
Torture Yoo's father is John H. Yoo, M.D., who practices general psychiatry in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His mother is Sook Hee Yoo, M.D., who practices geriatric psychiatry and general psychiatry in Gladwyne and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Sook Yoo graduated with a MD.
Two astonishing things about these people: They are medical doctors who produced a son who almost single-handedly legalized deliberate, heinous destruction of the human body by the U.S. Government. And, two, they sent John Yoo and his brother to the Episcopal (!) Academy near Philadelphia before sending them off to college. Here is part of the school prayer (I intend no disrespect to faith or prayer in including this in an article about Yoo): "Give to us hearts of flesh with which to love, minds filled with wisdom that we may serve others, bodies fit to play and work in your service."
This shows how low people can go when they go amoral. They take advantage of America's welcoming tradition, they use their meager skills and nondescript education as doctors to bankroll their son's expensive schools, they take advantage of a religious institution, and their son uses all of this against our most sacred institutions as a servant of the Bush.
IMAGE: YOU RESPONSIBLE FOR MOST U.S. TORTURES
BUSH'S "FINAL SOLUTION," COURTESY OF JOHN "LOON" YOO
Yoo served as a deputy -- not even the head of the darned thing -- of the Office of Legal Counsel, which can put the brakes on presidential actions, or issue "get out of jail" cards" for war crimes the administration thinks officials could later be tried for. Thanks to Justice Department "memos" of John Yoo:
Bush has the right (legally) to make war on any country. Yoo has taken the war-making role of Congress away. This makes military aggression against Iran a virtual certainty before Bush's term is up. It makes war upon China, Russia, or any other country a distinct possibility, depending on which demented minds win out in the Executive Branch.
----- In overturning the "Separation of Powers" of the U.S. Constitution, Yoo said: “We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts the laws, the President enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the Executive Branch.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/10/INGKSKV5TR1.DTL&hw=bob+egelko&sn=001&sc=1000 Bush has the legal right to imprison people indefinitely without trial. The "authority" has already been abused by this administration in the case of thousands of Muslims, some of whom were fighters against the U.S., but some of whom were imprisoned (and often tortured) because of mistaken identity, false evidence, U.S. paranoia, or just for the fun of it. The excesses of Yoo and George Bush rival those of the Nazi author of the Jewish extermination (the "Final Solution"), Adolf Eichmann, in terms of depravity if not numbers of victims.
----- On this, Yoo said, : “As a result, any customary international law of armed conflict in no way binds, as a legal matter, the President or the U.S. Armed Forces concerning the detention or trial of members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban,”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5032094/site/newsweek/ JOHN C. YOO: LAWYER AND LEGAL SCHOLAR
John Yoo is a licensed attorney and a would-be Founding Father of the New World Order, but he has never practiced law in any real way. He has never brought a case to completion through a trial!
His law skills are such that he lives off his father-in-law and his wife while acting as a "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute and on leave from his supposed job as a professor at UC Berkeley. Even the house Yoo and his wife live in was given to his wife by her father. This is the great "legal scholar" John C. Yoo.
--------------------------------
JOHN CHOON YOO (Age: 40) intelius.com
FREMONT, CA
BERKELEY, CA
MC LEAN, VA
---------------------------------
JOHN CHOON YOO Sep 1967 10-08-2004 1503 MCLEAN CORNER LN, MCLEAN, VA 22101 703-356-1268 ZabaSearch
ELSA C ARNETT Sep 1967 09-01-2005 1503 MCLEAN CORNER LN, MCLEAN, VA 22101 703-847-0427
---------------------------------
John Yoo
University of California, Berkeley
Boalt Hall School of Law
890 Simon Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone: (510) 643-5089
Fax: (510) 642-3728
E-Mail:
yoo@law.berkeley.edu --------------------------------
Contact Information
John Yoo
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 510-643-5089
Assistant: 202-828-6027
Fax: 202-862-7177
E-mail:
JYoo@aei.org WHAT JOHN YOO DESERVES TO BE TRIED FOR:
Guantánamo's Lost Souls (Guardian). By American lawyer George Brent Mickum.
Excerpts: The day after tomorrow marks the confluence of two ignominious anniversaries. The first is the five-year anniversary of the opening of the notorious prison camps run by the US at the Guantánamo naval air station in Cuba. In the five years since the US started shipping prisoners from around the world to Guantánamo, approximately 99% have never been charged with any transgression, much less a crime. Approximately 400 prisoners, characterised by the Bush administration as "the worst of the worst," have been released without charge, many directly to their families. That any prisoners have been released is due almost entirely to the outrage of the civilised world.
Thursday is also the start of my clients' fifth year of captivity around the world: Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna...Bisher and Jamil have withstood various forms of physical torture during their five years as prisoners. Both have suffered numerous beatings (Bisher suffered broken ribs and perhaps a broken foot because of beatings by guards, though both injuries went untreated - despite Bisher's requests for medical assistance), stress positions, temperature extremes, extreme sleep deprivation, death threats, threats to family and, at various times, starvation and being denied water that was fit to drink.
It pains me to report that, at the start of his fifth year in prison, the once healthy and extremely articulate Bisher is failing. He is no longer able to withstand the most insidious form of torture being used by the US military: prolonged isolation combined with environmental manipulation that includes constant exposure to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation...
What the British government knows and the British public needs to know is that Bisher's treatment is designed to achieve a single objective: causing an individual to lose his psychological balance and, ultimately, his mind. Every aspect of Bisher's prison environment is controlled and manipulated to create constant mental instability. The damage to Bisher's psyche is not unexpected. The ravages of extended isolation and sensory deprivation leave no marks, but they destroy the mind...
Bisher al-Rawi is, slowly but surely, slipping into madness. British officials have long been aware of Bisher's treatment. To my knowledge, they have done nothing to intercede on his behalf. They have done nothing to end his torture and constant mistreatment. They have done nothing to address the constantly changing list of spurious, new allegations that the military is uses to justify continued imprisonment.
Among the latest new allegations: the military alleges that Bisher received terrorist training in Bosnia and Afghanistan. British officials know these charges are false beyond conjecture. Bisher has never been in Bosnia and has signed an affidavit to that effect. The only time Bisher has been in Afghanistan was when the CIA rendered Bisher and Jamil there aboard CIA Gulfstream V-N379P out of the Republic of the Gambia to Cairo, Egypt, where the aircraft refuelled, then went on to the notorious Dark Prison. The reports Bisher and Jamil have given us have matched exactly the flight logs of CIA flights we have obtained. In the Dark Prison, Bisher and Jamil spent weeks underground, encased in total darkness, chained to a wall and shackled in leg irons, starved, and assaulted 24 hours a day with cacophonously loud noise before being transferred to Bagram....
Until last March the British government adamantly refused to intercede on behalf of any of the British residents still interred at Guantánamo....That changed suddenly when the government asked for Bisher's return on non-humanitarian grounds, belatedly conceding that Bisher had worked for MI5. Unfortunately for Bisher, this long-overdue admission, and the British government's request for his immediate repatriation, coincided with Bisher being thrown into isolation. He remains there more than nine months later, with no end in sight.
Bisher's world is a cell 6ft by 8ft in Camp V, where alleged "non-compliant" prisoners are incarcerated. After all these years and hundreds of interrogations, Bisher finally refused to be interrogated further. Despite the fact that Guantánamo officials have publicly proclaimed that prisoners are no longer required to participate in interrogations, Bisher is deemed to be non-compliant and hence is tortured daily....
Solitary confinement is but a single aspect of the torture that Bisher endures on a daily basis. While in isolation, Bisher has been constantly subjected to severe temperature extremes and other sensory torments, many of which are part of a sleep deprivation program that never abates. Frequently, Bisher's cell is unbearably cold because the air conditioning is turned up to the maximum. Sometimes, his captors take his orange jumpsuit and sheet, leaving him only in his shorts. For a week at a time, Bisher constantly shivers and is unable to sleep because of the extreme cold. Once, when Bisher attempted to warm himself by covering himself with his prayer rug, one of the few "comfort items" permitted to him, his guards removed it for "misuse." On other occasions, the heat is allowed to become so unbearable that breathing is difficult and labored. For a week at a time, all Bisher can do is lie completely still, sweat pouring off his body during the day when the Cuban heat can reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature inside Camp V is even higher.
Bisher is allowed no contact with fellow prisoners. Bright lights are kept on 24 hours a day. Bisher is given 15 sheets of toilet paper per day, but because he used his sheets to cover his eyes to help him to sleep, his toilet paper - considered another comfort item by his beneficent constabulary - has been removed for "misuse." Accordingly, he is no longer receives his daily ration of 15 sheets of toilet paper. Imagine being in the position of having to make a choice between using your tiny allotment of toilet paper for the purpose for which it was intended or using it to sleep, and then having it removed altogether...
Changes of clothing take place at midnight when prisoners are given a single, thin cotton sheet. Prisoners are unable to sleep until close to 1am. They are awakened at 5am, when each is required to return his sheet. All of Bisher's legal documents and family photographs were seized from him last June and have never been returned.
If Bisher spends four more months in the conditions I have described, the man I met in September 2004, who was healthy, articulate, thoughtful and humorous, will in all likelihood no longer exist. He will probably slip into a madness that is permanent. If that comes to pass, Britain must recognise and accept the grave culpability it bears...
The Bush Administration, of course, continues to deny that the United States uses torture, prating endlessly about the Administration's humane treatment of the prisoners and its robust compliance with the Geneva Conventions. It long ago defined away torture in the now infamous "Torture Memo" commissioned by now Attorney General Alberto Gonsales. But thousands of pages of memoranda generated by FBI field agents at the prison camps in Guantánamo and released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act litigation belie the Administration's hollow assertions and paint a grim and accurate picture...
These memoranda expose in detail only some of the "torture techniques" employed by the military. They document abuses that include "strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings" (document 4911 entitled Urgent Report). Mamdouh Habib, a former prisoner at Guantánamo who was rendered first to Egypt for unmentionable torture before being transferred to Guantánamo, arrived there without fingernails and bleeding from the ears and nose where cigarettes had repeatedly burned him. Habib, one of the few prisoners actually charged by the military, was summarily released to his home in Australia once the extent of his abuse was exposed. But before placing Habib on the aircraft that would eventually take him home, military officials could not resist one last gratuitous torture: they told him he was being transferred back to Egypt! Among the horrors I have been exposed to in this case, this particular story haunts still.
These FBI memoranda also document efforts by the military to cover-up the abuses. Document number 3977 is a memorandum entitled "Impersonating FBI at GTMO." It informs FBI superiors in Washington, DC that military interrogators at Guantánamo are impersonating the FBI when torturing prisoners. It goes on to state: "These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralisation nature to date and [the Department of Defense, Criminal Investigation Task Force] believes that [the torture] techniques have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators. The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public."
If I alone were making these claims, I would expect at least some readers to doubt the reliability of my account. But FBI field agents wrote these documents. The FBI withheld them until a US court ordered their production. Notably, no one in the Bush Administration or the military has questioned the veracity of these FBI accounts. Thus, there is no debate regarding the authenticity or accuracy of the information contained in these documents.
But if corroboration is needed, the FBI accounts are confirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which reports that the methods used at Guantánamo have, over time, become "more refined and repressive" than those witnessed by the Red Cross on previous visits. Red Cross officials are on record stating that military interrogators seek to make detainees dependent upon them through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions." They confirm that prisoners are exposed to loud and incessant noise and music and were subjected to "some beatings."
The Red Cross also reports that interrogators not only used psychological and physical coercion, but also enlisted the participation of medical personnel in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics." Doctors and other medical personnel work directly with military officials at Guantánamo, conveying data about prisoners' "mental health and vulnerabilities." The Red Cross reports these medical professionals become part of the torture and interrogation machine. Their chief function is not the medical care of prisoners, but assisting interrogators in extracting information. As a result, prisoners no longer trust doctors and others to whom their treatment is entrusted.
It should come as a surprise to no one that the Red Cross concluded that "[t]he construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture."
...Almost a hundred prisoners that we know of have died in US custody; 33 of these deaths are formally classified as homicides by the military. Not since the second world war, when the US imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent, has this country experienced such a constitutional nadir. If the world is to fight this war on terror, morality must not be allowed to become collateral damage. The time is long past for the British government to demand Bisher's and Jamil's immediate return. Paradigms of innocent suffering, they will remain wraiths that hover above the political and moral landscape, constantly reminding us that the destinies of those who would wage just war and those against whom that war is waged are mingled.
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