Rob Simmons was a torturer in VietNam

[Don1]

http://talknationradio.com/?p=53


Rob Simmons (R-CT) Ran a CIA Interrogation Center in Vietnam

Posted on Thursday 5 October 2006
Why didn’t Rob Simmons mention that he ran an interrogation center in Vietnam and did interrogations himself when he discussed changes to the way American forces would interpret the Geneva Conventions?

Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights, and the environment. I’m Dori Smith. Our guests this time are author Douglas Valentine and Attorney Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights

The US Military has been shifting tactics in Iraq in a chaotic war where reports from the media are erily reminiscent of Vietnam War reports of the early 1970s. In this two part special we look at failed U.S. policies in Iraq and Vietnam and talk about the disastrous consequences of America’s reliance on bad intelligence, of the use of physical and psychological torture in war zones and at the corruption and ever shifting alliances that led to long term crisis and instability for the U.S. Government and the Military.

We begin by looking specifically at the role of Republican Congressman Rob Simmons in Connecticut ’s 2nd Dist., the role he played in both Vietnam and Iraq . Rob Simmons has mentioned his credentials as a “soldier and spy” often but has never been pressed for the significant details about his own role in the treatment of detainees; that despite many public statements about new laws that would impact detainee treatment.

Journalist Douglas Valentine joins us to talk about his interivews with Rob Simmons for the book, The Phoenix Program, about a dark episode involving the systematic neutralizing of Vietnamese men and women accused of being Communist sympathazers. The author lays out hard evidence for war crimes in interrogation centers and as you shall hear one interrogation center in Phu Yung Province , was run by Rob Simmons.

Dori Smith: Doug Valentine welcome to Talk Nation Radio.
Douglas Valentine: Thank you for having me on your show Dori.

Dori Smith: I want to start with the impact of an article going back to a writer named Georgie Ann Geyer the CIA’s Hired Killers. (See the article Published in True Magazine, February 1970, see here Colby; “I might have met her, Mr. Chairman. I don’t recall it.”] You say in your book that it raised Congressional eyebrows and some in the CIA then argued for what was essentially the “few bad apples” argument about Vietnam . Talk about the overall process of discovery and what you learned from the people you interviewed about the Phoenix Program.

Douglas Valentine Well it took many years for me to understand what was going on and to discover the truth about that. It wasn’t something that happened quickly. I started around 1984 and I finished my book in 1989 so it was five years. I did read the Congressional hearings into the Phoenix Program and they helped and that was how I came across Georgie Ann Geyers about what were called, “counter-terror teams”. The softened the name and changed the name from Counter Terror Teams to Provincial Reconaissance Units. You know now a days nobody has a problem with the word “counter-terror”. It’s all over the place all the time.

But back then during the Vietnam War, that era, this was the late 1960s, the idea of terror and counter-terror were not concepts and ideas that the American public was familiar with, not the way they are now. So the idea that as Georgie Ann Geyer wrote about that the CIA actually hired mercenaries to go out and do its dirty work had a very sobering influence on a lot of people including the Congressional Committees that were looking into it. And it should still have a sobering effect on people though evidently the public has become somewhat desensitized to this whole subject.

Dori Smith: Well let’s turn to Congressman Rob Simmons and talk about what he was doing when Phoenix was going on. I’m going to be playing some audio that you shared with me of an interview you did with Simmons before writing your book about Phoenix . Why don’t you set this audio up and just explain what we are about to hear as an admission from Rob Simmons that he did interrogations for the CIA in Vietnam .

Douglas Valentine: When I wanted to find out about Phoenix I decided I didn’t want to be a writer who did document searches, that I wanted to go out and interview the CIA officers who participated in Phoenix and the programs that were incorporated into Phoenix . That decision led me down a very unusual path like I said from 2984 to 1989 when I went around with my tape recorder and I found CIA officers like Rob Simmons who had been in Vietnam working with counter-terror teams and in interrogation centers and doing those kinds of things for the CIA. And I interviewed them, many many of them. I don’t know that such a thing could be done anymore. I don’t know that anybody ever did anything like it before or after but that’s what happened and that’s how I got to know about this subject. And because I was interviewing so many CIA officers at the time many within their little secret society didn’t think it was such an unusual thing. And the more CIA officers I interviewed the more that became available to me to interview. So I got a very personal and intimate understanding of what was involved in all this. And Rob Simmons was one of the people I ended up talking with.

Dori Smith: So let’s listen to what Rob Simmons told you at one point:

Rob Simmons: …for particular types of information, and occasionally I would do the interrogation myself.
Valentine: OK.
Simmons: For somebody that seemed to be reluctant to work with the South Vietnamese or with any Vietnamese because you know if an American comes in and he’s alone and he speaks a little bit of the language maybe they’ll warm up to him. So I did some of it myself. The whole focus was to try to have good relations with the police, was to insure that prisoners were being properly treated because as far as I was concerned the PIC Program was an American program and if it didn’t run right it was gonna make us look bad.
Valentine: Well how many, did you have a special police officer who was your PIC Chief?
Simmons: Yes, but the PIC Chief worked for the, uh for the, you know, he was a policeman.
Valentine: A special branch policeman?
Simmons: Special branch, that’s correct.
Valentine: But he reports to the National Police Chief.
Simmons: That’s right. He reports up through the police structure but he also knows that the building was built; see they were built and then turned over.
Valentine: Yeah. I understand.
Simmons: OK. But he also knows that hey you know this building came from the guy in the Quonset Hut.
Valentine: Also, Special Branch salaries are paid by the Americans not by the Vietnamese.
Simmons: Special Branch, that’s right, and also the agents, if you’ve got a hot agent that you want to recruit the money comes…
Valentine: Yeah.
Simmons: Yeah. So.
Valentine: The informant network.
Simmons: The informant networks. And so so uh you know I was very interested in the informant network. I was very interested in some of the quality of interrogation that was going on and I had access to resources so that I could manage (phone rings) so that I could get what I wanted…(audio provided by Douglas Valentine.)

Dori Smith: You talked with a very different person from the one we see on FOX News and other networks.

Douglas Valentine: Well yeah, at that time he was working, I think at Yale University . He may have been doing something else at the same time. I don’t know that he had any political aspirations. Maybe he did. He certainly wasn’t running for office at that time. I think at the most he was doing was involved with local politics in Stonington or his church or something like that. He was something of a public figure but not to the extent that he is now so he let his hair down, very much so, and he was talking about a subject that was very deeply personal to him also. So for him to get to the point where he could discuss that was itself a pretty big break through because I don’t know that a CIA, a former CIA officer like Rob Simmons makes a habit of walking around talking to his neighbors or his business associates about the intimate details of his work in an interrogation center in Vietnam; but he did with me.

Dori Smith: In Chapter 5 you talk about PICS, PIC. And there’s a lot of discussion about torture. You interviewed someone named Johnson and he verified that torture was basically normal, that this was something the South Vietnamese were doing. Talk about what else you wrote about what was going in these PICS Rob Simmons discussed with you.

Douglas Valentine: Rob Simmons was in South Vietnam from November 1970 until 1972, I believe, around the middle of that year so he was there close to two years. The interrogation centers, of which he was an advisor, he was an advisor to an interrogation center, those were built starting in 1964 by the CIA as part of a program that the CIA had to build an interrogation center in every one of South Vietnam’s 44 provinces and the whole idea was to run these interrogation centers with the special branch of the South Vietnamese Police which is like our FBI. So when in his little excerpt paragraph there he said the PIC was run by a South Vietnamese policeman that was kind of disingenuous. It was run by the equivalent of an FBI agent and Simmons was that person’s advisor.

So that program, the Province Interrogation Center program, (PIC,) had been in operation for six years by the time Rob got there. And those interrogation centers were terrible horrible places and all sorts of awful things went on inside of them. The CIA had a policy of, if a CIA advisor to a PIC, somebody like Rob Simmons, saw torture they were obligated to report it but the operational reality was far different. Policy statements were issued and are issued all the time by the government in communiqués and internal memorandums to people, but in a war and in a place like South Vietnam, the policy is often diametrically opposed to what people refer to as the “operational reality” and the operational reality in those PICs was something almost unimaginable. One would actually have to be inside one of those facilities and see the squalid, horrible conditions that the prisoners lived in to understand the kind of traumatic impact that experience would have on a young man like Rob Simmons.

Dori Smith: Some of what you’ve written here on page 85 sounds oddly familiar and those of us who were watching news coverage about the Abu Ghraib Prison abuse scandal will remember that there were some wires that were evidently attached to genitals and wires attached to fingers and there was that awful picture of that man with his arms outstretched that we all remember, the hooded man. In your book you talk about electrical shock, the Bell Telephone Hour? And about these wires attached to genitals and other sensitive parts of the body like the tongue and you also talk about the water treatment or the airplane where a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling suspending the prisoner in mid air after which he or she was beaten. –Not to belabor the point but this is only one part of your book that sounds particularly awful. Comment on the degree to which it has been your understanding that this stuff went on and that it’s likely that most of the people involved in the program surrounding the prisons knew that there were abuses were going on.

Douglas Valentine: There’s no doubt that abuses were going on and that they were overlooked routinely. The CIA is not in the business of creating bad publicity for itself. It’s in the business of trying to polish up its image. But in fact the CIA is a criminal conspiracy and Rob Simmons as a member of the CIA was involved in a criminal conspiracy and that criminal conspiracy was to spy on people in foreign countries; and to hire informants in those countries, some of whom were informing on the South Vietnamese Government, the people that we were supposedly advising.

There was just a duplicitous situation and Rob Simmons as a member of the CIA was one of the people who was trained and highly skilled in that art of duplicity, of tricking people, of interrogating people and making them tell things that they didn’t want to tell. He was involved in setting up basically what was a hit team that went out and assassinated members of what they called the Viet Cong infrastructure. –Which was in effect, probably more so than the puppet regime that the CIA put in place in South Vietnam , the actual government of South Vietnam . And Rob Simmons was basically going around knocking those people off and putting them in interrogation centers and torturing them. He could say well they were the enemy but Rob Simmons was a CIA agent in somebody else’s country doing illegal things and that’s the bottom line there.

Dori Smith: I want to take a look at an interview with Rob Simmons that was published in a rather odd book by Mark Moyar called Birds of Prey.

Rob Simmons: When prisoners were wounded, we had a 50 percent better chance of getting them to cooperate with us than if they were not. These people knew very well that good medical treatment was scarce. Vietnamese hospitals were very primitive, and to get care you had to have money. If you were a peasant VC suspect, you wouldn’t get much there. I knew some American doctors who helped me out from time to time. I’d bring in an American doctor with a big bag full of pills and devices and everything, and he’d put his gear on and listen to a heartbeat and go through a fairly elaborate routine, which seemed quite sophisticated to a peasant. Then the doctor would look at the wound and say, “Oh, that looks very bad. It could get infected. You could lose that limb.” The prisoner would ask, “what can you do?” I’d usually let the doctor go,” Rob Simmons says, “and then tell the prisoner, “We’d like to help, but it’s hard to get the medicine. I can’t do anything to help you without getting some sort of help in return.” That tended to work well.” (Rob Simmons in Birds of Prey, Mark Moyar, “Intelligence” Page 105.)

Dori Smith: So, there’s a violation of the Geneva Conventions right there then?
Douglas Valentine: Well let’s assume that the person has a bullet wound. That’s pretty painful. These people aren’t being brought in with paper cuts. When we’re talking about wounds that these doctors and medical attention, we’re usually talking about wounds that occured while the person was being arrested. Because people did not go to these interrogation centers voluntarily. Counter-terror teams went out to snatch them from their homes at midnight. Or they were snatched up in Special Branch, FBI, or Police round ups.

Often times they were pretty well shot up. So these people were in a lot of serious pain. What Rob Simmons was doing is not only a war crime, it’s the epitomy of what’s called psychological warfare. It’s terrorizing people in order to get intelligence from them, information from them about their associates, their political associates; people that trusted them with their lives. And Rob Simmons was trying to pry that information out of them any way he can. So softening them up first by shooting them is a “good idea” –put them in a position where they’re going to have to betray members of their secret government.

He’s very good and in his conversations with Mark Moyar which you just read he’s very careful in his language to try and minimize what’s going on. You really have to understand what the operational realities were that he was dealing with to understand the immensity of the war crime that he committed.

Dori Smith: Douglas Valentine is author of the book, The Phoenix Program first published in 1990 by William Morrow Co. and again by Avon Books in 1992. It’s been hailed as the most definitive work on the Phoenix Program.

His other books are the Hotel Tacloban inspired by his father’s experience as a WWII prisoner of the Japanese. His latest book is The Strength of the Wolf, about “the secret history of the CIA’s War on Drugs.” You will find his work at VersoBooks.com and other major book sellers and you can find his web site at DouglasValentine.com. His articles appear in Counterpunch and other places. And we will be hearing part 2 of my interview with Douglas Valentine next time.

Dori Smith: We turn next to Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He works on Guantanamo related issues. I asked Wells Dixon if Rob Simmons was correct where he said prisoners in the war on terror are exceptions to the Geneva Conventions and other laws and regulations.

Smith: The Congressman has argued that suspects in the war on terror are exceptions to the Geneva Conventions and that rules that have been used in the past do not apply to them.

Wells Dixon : Well the Congressman is correct that the war on terror presents unique challenges that are unlike many of the conventional wars that we have fought in the past, however, he is wrong to state that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the detainees or to those involved in combat.

Dori Smith: Talk more about the Geneva Conventions, what specifically about them is going to be affected by the new law that Rob Simmons has just voted for in the House version.

Wells Dixon : There are many parts to the Geneva Conventions. The Third Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners of war. The Fourth Geneva Conventions apply to all other persons who may be captured during times of armed conflict. And Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions also apply to that exception to individuals who are captured during times of armed conflict; the Supreme Court said this in the Hamdan case in June. And the Geneva Conventions and Common Article Three are also part of U.S. Military Law and Military training. They are part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and they are also part of Army Regulation 190.8 which governs the treatment of prisoners. The Geneva Conventions, of course, have also protected our soldiers for more than 50 years and will continue to do so as long as we adhere to them fully ourselves.

Dori Smith: Rob Simmons was interviewed by David Lightman of the Hartford Courant and he told Lightman that unlike the war in Southeast Asia the war on terror is not a war against sovereign nations or organized liberation movements and that the rules of prisoner’s engagement are different, ill defined and even “non existent.” Simmons has argued in this way before and said that soldiers had told him that they couldn’t figure out how to treat prisoners in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib prison; he’s visted both places. Is what he is saying correct?

Wells Dixon : No he is not correct as I mentioned before the Geneva Conventions and Common Article 3 in particular have been part of U.S. Military law and training for more than fifty years. They are included and incorporated in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and they are included in Army regulations such as 190-8. I would also point out that the Supreme Court held in the Hamdan case that there was no basis for concluding that compliance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice was impracticable in the war on terror. That just is not the case.

Smith: Rob Simmons also visited Guantanamo and he said that conditions there were more open than at Osborn Correctional facility in Connecticut . He also argued that the food was good, medical care seemed good, in other words, what’s the problem here? And again, the Congressman was there on official business and his task really was to find out if some of the claims of abuses going on there were true.

Wells Dixon : Well again Congressman Simmons is incorrect. The conditions at Guantanamo are not fine. They are not more open than at Osborn Correctional facility. For one thing there is no question that the detainees at Guantanamo have been tortured and abused by U.S. Military personnel and intelligence agents. The Center for Constitutional Rights has documented this in a report issued in July that provides first hand accounts from current detainees and their lawyers of many of the abuses they have suffered while they have been detained in Guantanamo . That’s something that a lot of people have questioned and I would suspect that Congressman Simmons would question.

I can say that in December of 2002 Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of techniques that included among other things, hooding of prisoners, the use of stress positions, sensory depravation, isolation, and the exploitation of phobias. We know with total certainty that some of these techniques were used on our clients and we know that Secretary Rumsfeld also approved special interrogation techniques for some of our clients including one client who I can tell you was deprived of sleep for 49 out of 50 days, who was subject to an induced hypothermia and who was also subject to things like a false kidnapping; he was led to believe that he was in Egypt and he would be tortured unless provided information to the Government. And to a certain extent the detainees at Guantanamo are still subject to these kinds of techniques.

Now, as to whether or not these rise to the level of torture I think that under any sort of common sense or legal definition of torture they certainly would. But you certainly don’t need to take my word for it. The General Counsel of the Navy Alberto Mora said in 2004 in a memorandum that it was his opinion that these sorts of activities would be not only unlawful but also unworthy of military service. And that in his view they would rise to the level of torture. He raised a number of rhetorical questions such as, what does depravation of light and auditory stimuli mean? Can a detainee be locked in a completely dark cell? For how long? For a month, for a year? Another question he asked was can phobias be applied until madness sets in?

And I think that if you consider the conclusions of people like Mr. Mora I don’t think that there is any credible dispute at this point that the detainees in Guantanamo have been subject to torture and abuse.

Smith: One of the points that he made in this interview with Lightman was that the bill would offer the judicial system a series of steps to follow about excluding some statements that were obtained through torture; providing defense attorney’s to suspects, having an independent Military judge presiding, and allowing classified evidence to be shared with suspects unless that evidence would be detrimental to national security? Do you feel that these steps would add more workability to the law?

Wells Dixon : Certainly not. For one thing to be precise the law prohibits the use of secret evidence but only to the extent practicable. As the Supreme Court said in the Hamdan case there is no basis to argue that the Uniform Code of Military Justice which establishes a series of court martial procedures is inadequate to try terrorism suspects. That’s just not the case.

Smith: Now again, Rob Simmons is arguing that we need a new handbook, a new manual, a new set of laws, because soldiers at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib don’t know what to do with these prisoners. Can you comment on that in terms of what’s already happened to prisoners at these facilities? I mean in essence what else needs to be done with these prisoners other than to hold them, investigate the evidence against them, try them, and then take proceedings accordingly right?

Wells Dixon : Absolutely. The United States Government has held more than 400 people in Guantanamo for nearly five years. At this point in time none of those people can possibly have any intelligence value or pose a threat to the United States . The CIA concluded in a 2002 report that most of the people who are in Guantanamo are there because they were captured at the wrong place at the wrong time. They had nothing to do with terrorism. This is a statement that’s been echoed by many former Military officials including the former Guantanamo Commander Jay Hood who said, look, sometimes we just didn’t get the right folks. So I think it’s important to remember that.

But to the extent that there is any confusion about whether certain techniques are permissible or legal. US soldiers only need to consider two things. First, whether if those techniques were applied to their fellow soldiers would they think that those soldiers had been abused? And if so, those procedures should not be employed. It’s a really very simple test.

Smith: You have some law suits in mind to challenge these laws and really challenge Congress. What is going on?

Wells Dixon : Well there is another very troubling provision in the Military Commissions Act that suspends Habeas Corpus for any alien detained by the United States . This would include lawful immigrants picked up on the streets of New Haven or Hartford . And it therefore deprives them of any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention. So as a result of this provision we expect that the United States will move to dismiss a number of the pending Habeas cases and we will then challenge the law on the ground that it’s an unconstitutional suspension of Habeas Corpus.

Smith: Earlier in the program I mentioned a statement by Rob Simmons that he would withhold medical care from wounded prisoners when he was running an interrogation center in Vietnam . That was a violation of the Geneva Conventions wasn’t it?

Wells Dixon : Absolutely. The denial of medical care to someone in the custody of the United States certainly would be illegal and unconscionable and it would violate the Geneva Conventions. No question about it.

Smith: Do you think that he should have been more open about this when he argued for changes to US law and the way we interpret the Geneva Conventions?

Wells Dixon : I don’t know that I could comment on his particular circumstances. I would comment I guess in one respect. In September, on the same day that President Bush transferred the 14 so-called “high value” detainees to Guantanamo . The United State ’s Army issued a new Army Field Manual, to govern in part the interrogations of detainees. And the Army Field Manual which doesn’t apply to the CIA said that torture is not only illegal but it also yields poor performance and is unreliable. This is a statement that was then echoed by LT. General Kimmons who is the Army General Chief of Staff for Intelligence who said, quote, “I’m absolutely convinced that no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

And I think that he is exactly correct and I would point to two instances in which evidence obtained by torture has proved to be extremely unreliable and in fact extremely dangerous. One instance involves the rendition by the United States of Mahar Arar to Syria where he was tortured and then confessed. The Canadian Government has just cleared Mahar Arar of any wrong doing. And so I think that you can see from that example that coercion and torture really is not useful for interrogation practices. The other instance that I would point to is the case of a man named al-Libi (Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi) who is a suspected Bin Laden associate who was captured a few months after September 11th in Afghanistan . He was rendered by the CIA to Libya where he was tortured and under torture provided information concerning the connection between Iraq and Al Qaida. This information formed the basis for Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations in February of 2003 in which he said essentially that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaida. –We now know that that’s not the case, that that information was false, and we now know what the unfortunate results are of that information. So to the extent that Congressman Simmons or any other interrogator would employ coercive or other means to obtain information I would be very very suspicious and very cautious about the quality of that information.

A number of former Military interrogators said in a statement of July of this year that prisoner and detainee abuse and torture are to be avoided at all costs because they can degrade the intelligence collection effort. I think that that’s particularly poignant and should be considered by Congressman Simmons and other members of Congress when they’re considering whether or not torture is permissible; whether or not we as a nation will as a matter of policy or a matter of law allow that kind of misconduct.

Wells Dixon is an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights online at CCR-NY.org. For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. This program is produced at WHUS, Radio for the People, at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, CT. WHUS.org to listen live Wed. at 5 pm. Talknation.org and talknationradio.org for transcripts and discussion.

Music in this broadcast was by Fritz Heede Scott Gibson and locally the Known Unknowns with “Tell The Truth.” for more information, see Music Director.

Related links:
http://talknationradio.com/?p=52
Interview with Rob Simmons who denies CIA wrongdoing during the Vietnam era that was investigated by the Church and Pike Committees and calls their findings, “hogwash”.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=50 Rep. Rob Simmons and Former President George HW Bush Complain about Efforts to Hold the CIA Accountable for Torture, Accountability, Illegal Surveillance

http://talknationradio.com/?p=51
http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=19777
http://www.douglasvalentine.com/Van%20Bergen%20and%20Valentine.pdf
The Dangerous World of Indefinite Detentions: Vietnam to Abu Ghraib, Jennifer Van Bergen and Douglas Valentine

The Center for Constitutional Rights read with concern the misguided decision issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on July 15, 2005. Mr. Hamdan, a detainee designated by President Bush to be tried before a military commission in Guantánamo Bay , Cuba , had filed a lawsuit challenging the President’s authority to establish military commissions in the absence of specific congressional action and the military’s authority to try him in violation of the Geneva Conventions. http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/report.asp?ObjID=yEQ7q0XA0N&Content=600 Center for Constitutional Rights, report on Mr. Hamdan.

Withholding Medical Care
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Q9se3mAT1NsJ:www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32567.pdf+geneva+conventions%2Bthreatening+to+withhold+medical+care%2Btorture&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=8 CRS Report for Congress, Received through the CRS Web, Order Code RL32567, Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques, under the Geneva Conventions.]

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Report_on_Guantanamo_torture_released_by_0710.html
http://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/items/guantanamo
http://www.chelseagreen.com/about/politicsandpractice/news/july12b
http://hrw.org/press/2003/02/powell-ltr020303.htm
http://www.house.gov/mckinney/20050722transcript.pdf
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/25/AR2005112501552_pf.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0512-06.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1754348,00.html
http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2525
“I did some interrogation work when I was assigned to Vietnam and these types of activities don’t work.” Rob Simmons, see Rumsfeld Testifies, AntiWar, May 7, 2004

http://connecticutlocalpolitics.blogspot.com/2005/07/simmons-on-guanatanamo-bay-try-rice.html Connecticut Local Politics, Wednesday, July 13, 2005, Simmons on Guanatanamo Bay : Try the Rice; “Detainees at Guantanamo Bay are treated well, the food is good and the medical care seems decent, Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd District, said Tuesday. He and nine other members of Congress took a half-day trip Monday to the Cuban military prison to see for themselves if harsh criticism leveled at the base was justified.”
…
“Guantanamo had a lot of openness I have not seen in penitentiaries in my own state,” Simmons said, recalling that he felt “claustrophobic” during a recent visit to Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers.”
…
He also said the food was surprisingly good, including “the best institutional rice I’ve had.” (AP)

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:x3ELlWX7l5YJ:www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/
ethicsbook_files/Ethics2/Ethics-ch-23.pdf+new+legislation%2BMlitary%2Bgeneva+conventions
&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
Torture in wartime is usually used to extract in-formation from the enemy. However, it may also be used to merely punish an individual physically or damage him psychologically. Torture may include acts of abuse ranging from cruel and degrading treatment to physical assaults leading to death. Physician participation in torture has occurred throughout history. The most recent, glaring examples were revealed in the war crimes trials following World War II. Unfortunately, torture and physician participation in it have frequently been given legal respectability by governments that lacked moral integrity. A physician may participate in torture by administering a drug to an individual to facilitate interrogation, or by evaluating whether a prisoner is physically capable of undergoing torture for purposes of interrogation. A physician may participate in torture by wrongly applying psychiatric diagnosis and treatment to fulfill a political goal. A physician may even participate in torture by using his medical skills to devise new methods of torture, even though he is not directly involved in administering that torture. Whether or not physician participation in capital punishment represents participation in torture is still an open debate.

“If Lieberman sees supporting the Warner/McCain/Graham bill as a way to take an election year stand against Bush while posing as protector of our historical international obligations, he is dead wrong. As J. Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights said, “The Administration and Warner bills…would authorize the life-long detention of more than 450 men who have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for nearly five years without ever having been charged with an offense or receiving a fair hearing. This is unconscionable. Every person detained by our nation must receive a fair hearing–one that does not rely on secret evidence or evidence obtained by torture or coercion–because fairness and due process are what America stands for.”

In Connecticut , and across the nation, as candidates are forced to take a stand on such issues as torture, habeas corpus, and the separation of powers, we will learn who represents our finest traditions, and who would settle for a poor imitation which will further erode our historical role as a beacon for human rights.” BLOG | Posted 09/19/2006 @ 5:02pm, The War on Torture, Katrina vanden Heuvel, quotes J.Wells Dixon, see The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?mm=9&yr=2006

Unusual, of interest: MTV: The Geneva Conventions for dummies.http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1470867/03312003/id_0.jhtml “In the case of war, actually, many things are not fair.”

[NewJeffCT]

1. Please write the CT papers

The Manchester Journal-Inquirer in Connecticut has been pretty strongly anti-Simmons.

[e-mail]

Managing Editor
Chris Powell
[e-mail]

News Editor
Ralph Williams
[e-mail]

You can reach us by phone at [phone] or 1-800-237-3606


The Hartford Courant endorsed his opponent last time, even though they endorsed Bush in '04 and '00.

http://www.courant.com/about/hc-contactus,0,6309677.story

[femmedem]

2. I live in Simmons' district.

Amazing as this is going to sound, most people here know about Simmons and the Phoenix project and consider it ...I don't know..bad manners to talk about it. :shrug:

But maybe, given Simmons' vote for the torture bill and given that everyone has seen the Abu Ghraib photos, now is the time to bring the subject up again.

[Don1]

3. I think so.

I think this should be done.

[kohodog]

4. Holy Shit, I live in the 2nd CD

Jerrymandered in a few years ago. But I never knew this about Simmons. It only confirms my opposition, but I think this needs to get out. Any suggestions how? Can it be condensed into a flyer we can hand out?