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If our kids and grandkids ever ask us what we did to fight against our country torturing people I hope we can tell them that made a lot of ‘phone calls, sent e-mails and burned up our fax machines. Please call your Senator today! Robert Parry writes today, on “Consortiumnews.com” “The United States is following the lead of “dirty war” nations, such as Argentina and Chile, in enacting what amounts to an amnesty law protecting U.S. Government operatives, apparently up to and including President George W. Bush, who have committed or are responsible for human rights crimes. “While the focus of the current congressional debate has been on Bush’s demands to redefine torture and to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, the compromise legislation also would block prosecutions for violations already committed during the five-year-old ‘war on terror’ ”
The compromise legislation bars criminal or civil legal action over past violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, according to press reports. Common Article 3 outlaws “violence to life and person,” such as death and mutilation as well as cruel treatment and “outrages upon personal dignity.”
The United States, for a long time, has been a dirty war nation. A.J. Langguth wrote about this in a July 11, 1979 New York Times article entitled “Torture’s Teachers.” Langguth notes in his article that “… the C.I.A. sent an operative to teach interrogation methods to SAVAK, the Shah of Iran’s secret police, that the training included instructions in torture, and the techniques were copied from the Nazis.”
But let’s put a human face on what torture is, shall we? The faint hearted should read no further.
Let’s recall the comments of former CIA Station Chief and National Security Council Coordinator John Stockwell about the CIA Contra Manual and actions promoted by the U.S. Military in Nicaragua at the end of the 20th century: “They go into villages. They haul out families. With the children forced to watch, they castrate the father. They peel the skin off his face. They put a grenade in his mouth, and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch, they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes, for variety they make the parents watch while they do these things to the children.”
Now, let’s fast forward to Feb. 16, 2006 AP report: “ Yesterday, Australia’s public broadcaster, SBS, aired some 60 unpublished photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison on its show Dateline at 8:30 PM. The images were rapidly re-broadcast on Arab TV and other news outfits and have been condemned immediately as violations of international law by the International Red Cross.
The new detainee diorama -- a world exclusive, apparently -- includes pictures of bleeding and hooded prisoners bound to beds and doors, of naked men handcuffed together or in a pile, of corpses, of dogs snarling at the faces of prisoners, of cigarette burns on buttocks and wounds from shotgun pellets, and of even more graphic sexual torture.
And how about those renditions, folks! Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and many other countries who are partnered with the US in the so called war on terror who have dismal human rights records.
Uzbekistan has recently been in the news about just that. Craig Murray, the former British ambassador there, told 60 Minutes that Uzbek citizens, captured in Afghanistan, were flown back to Tashkent on an American plane operating on a regular basis. Uzbeki torture techniques include drowning, suffocation, rape, and immersion in boiling liquid.
And here’s another fun fact: An internal report from the 1st Cavalry Division, obtained by the Washington Post, states that "electrical shock and choking" are "consistently used to achieve confessions" by Iraqi police and soldiers. So open is the use of torture that it has given rise to a hit television show: Every night on the TV station Al Iraqiya -- run by a U.S. contractor -- prisoners with swollen faces and black eyes "confess" to their crimes.
We need to remember that Javier Zuniga, Amnesty’s program director for the Americas, wrote, “Most of the torture and ill-treatment stemmed directly from officially sanctioned procedures and policies including interrogation techniques approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
We need to remember that Washington Post reporter Dana Priest won a Pulitzer Prize last for her articles exposing a network of CIA prisons in Europe where victims of “extraordinary rendition” were transported for interrogation that included torture.
We Need to remember that Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said about four months ago that he knew of more than 70 "questionable deaths" of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90.
OK, down to business: The Bush administration authorized the use of torture and abuse in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law and domestic constitutional and statutory law. The small list of the people who have violated international humanitarian and humans rights are: George W. Bush, President of the United States, Dick Cheney, Vice President, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Alberto Gonzales, formerly White House Counsel and now Attorney General of the United States;. Jay S. Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, and Dick Addington, Vice Presidential Counsel.
In 2001, Bush ordered torture by authorizing Tenet to order the Special Access Program that led to the secret detention of Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rushul, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaida and dozens of other detainees without any contact with the outside world in secret prisons around the world and ordering them subjected to tortures including water-boarding, severe beatings, subjection to extreme temperatures, suspension in painful positions, denial of pain-killing medicine after gunshot wounds, severe burning by hot metal, asphyxiation and by threat of death and sexual assault against themselves and members of their families. During such torture an unknown number of detainees died, including Manadel al-Jamadi, Abdul Wali and Abid Hamad Mahalwi.
Beginning in September 2003 many detainees at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere in Iraq were tortured pursuant to the directives of Rumsfeld, Miller and Sanchez, authorized by the August, 2002 memorandum. During the commission of the acts of torture that the defendants conspired to commit, at least 28 detainees died.
For more extensive information go to the web site “Not In Our Name.”
Indeed, the United States is following the lead of “dirty war” nations, such as Argentina and Chile, in enacting what amounts to an amnesty law protecting U.S. Government operatives, apparently up to and including President George W. Bush, who have committed or are responsible for human rights crimes.” There are a whole bunch of folks, including the Bush Gang, who ought to be indicted in civil courts and maybe be brought before an international tribunal some day. But it looks like they’ll be let off the hook.
Don't let them get away with it. Again, please call your Senators. There can't be a compromise on torture!!
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