Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Most enlightened one, I should have asked your lordly opinion before voicing an opinion/s but I'm not as humble as you demand, although a mere peasant from the edge of your illustrious world. As Confucius, you should know that the Chinese wrote on maps delineating the known word and its unknown boundaries, assigning to the latter to a nebulous uncertainty with the inscription "Here be dragons".
Yes, Good Celery is nice and crunchy but you, Confucius, belong to the plant family which is called "Deadly Nightshade" so you're probably an eggplant, although I prefer the more melodioud word "aubergine". It's purple and shiny, and has to be salted before cooking to extract some of its toxins. Btw, I'm sure you know that celery juice is very effective for detoxing, Oh Wise One.
There's a hard frost here this evening, Your Munificence and Magnificence, so I crave pardon for my brief absence while I go out to my garden to leave food - suet balls, no offence intended as that's what they are - to feed the birds. If you deign to consider my presence on this site again I'll be honoured beyond measure, prostrating myself before your digital gems, O Light of the Orient. As Hoo Shake Dungyspere once asked "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?".
I'm a bit shocked that Charles Graner's parents did not see fit to raise any kind of alarm about the abuse at Abu Ghraib, since they were briefed so closely on it by their son, including being provided with the photos we all saw eventually, thanks to Salon. Did they feel that this torture was morally justified? Or perhaps they felt they could not have an impact -- but to that I would say, only look at Mary Tillman, mother of Corporal Pat Tillman, to see what a parent can accomplish. Did the elder Mr. Graner serve in the military in any capacity? Surely he would have some familiarity with the UCMJ and the Geneva Convention. Perhaps we should not be so surprised that Charles Graner chose not to buck his own chain of command, a difficult (but sometimes necessary) task to be sure, when his own parents, outside of military reach, did not even voice their dismay.
Just because other guilty parties are not being punished does not mean that Graner's punishment is unfair. Every torturer belongs behind bars.
No end, and no apparent limit, to the bashing of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Still, no word from Mark Benjamin, supporting his allegation...
that there had been "orders" regarding torture/abuse.
Elephantman, I see that you're still adding to your extensive track record on denial and apologism on these matters.
It's like this, Elephantman. 1 + 2 = 3.
1
"...What has been documented?
There is plenty of documentation on what US interrogators have done. The FBI released a report last year in which FBI officials reported 26 cases of possible mistreatment by law enforcement or military personnel at Guantánamo Bay.
The report revealed captives were chained hand and foot in a foetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, where they urinated and defecated on themselves. Besides being shackled to the floor, they were subjected to extreme temperatures, with the air conditioning either turned close to freezing or turned off so that room temperatures topped 38C (100F).
In 2006, the vice-president, Dick Cheney, told a radio interviewer that waterboarding - the near-drowning of a captive - was used on the alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at Guantánamo. Cheney said the use of waterboarding on Mohammed was "a no-brainer for me. But for a while there, I was criticised as being the vice-president for torture. We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in."
The mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has also been well documented.
How does the US justify it legally?
Between 2002 and 2003, the US justice department issued several memos from its office of legal counsel seeking to justify interrogation tactics that are deemed by critics to be torture.
The notorious March 2003 memo, written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel, said Bush's wartime authority had priority over any international ban on torture.
"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," Yoo wrote.
The 81-page memo was rescinded nine months after it was sent to the Pentagon's top lawyer, William Haynes. The memo had to be withdrawn as it was so shaky legally, critics contend.
Who approved the interrogation techniques?
The decisions went right up to the White House.
Bush recently told ABC News in the US that he knew his top national security advisers in 2003 discussed and approved specific details of the CIA's methods.
"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people," Bush said. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."
According to ABC News, the national security team discussed in detail what methods should be used, down to the number of times CIA agents could employ a specific tactic. The senior officials signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al-Qaida suspects - whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to waterboarding.
Who were these officials?
They included Cheney; the former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice; the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld; the former secretary of state Colin Powell; the former CIA director George Tenet; and the former attorney general John Ashcroft.
Members of the national security council's principals committee, they met frequently to advise Bush on national security. Rice, who is now secretary of state, chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House situation room..."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/18/usa.terrorism
1 +
Continued
2
If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:
Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.
Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.
“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”
In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”
Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn’t say anything.” (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”
At best, Taguba said, “Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”
Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted on the CD. It said that approximately ten soldiers were shown, involved in acts that included:
Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging them with choker chains.
Taguba said, “You didn’t need to ‘see’ anything—just take the secure e-mail traffic at face value.”
I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said...
continued
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
