When should it have been clear to a reasonable person that torture was Bush policy?

[EFerrari]

I was thinking about the threads last week, debating what Congressional Democrats knew or didn't know. Is there any way to know that right now? It seems unlikely. We can ask, though, at what point did we suspect or wonder if BushCo was torturing as a matter of policy? Is there an event that should have raised a red flag? A media report or an image?

Looking back, I remember that footage of those people being transported to Gitmo. They were shackled and hooded. Rumsfeld called them "the most dangerous terrorists in the world", remember? A big show was made of them shuffling into the detention center. Now we know most of those people never aimed a weapon at a US troop and that the parade of these prisoners was theater for our consumption.

But, those hoods should have raised some questions. I know there are people here and in Congress that know much more about torture than I do. Someone should have asked what the hell those hoods were for.

That flight from Afghanistan to Cuba was a rendition flight. It had all the features of a rendition flight. These people were hooded and shackled and drugged, iirc, and rendered to a place where they were abused and tortured. And, we all watched it on television and read about it in the press. Cheney and Rumsfeld made sure we did.

Who can possibly say that they didn't know BushCo was torturing? They made us all complicit from Day 1.

[msongs]

1. when? the day barbara bush gave him to the planet? nt

[yardwork]

2. The photos and tapes from Abu Ghraib were a moment of certainty for me.

Those photos were released in the spring of 2004 - before the election. Congress was given many more photos, as well as audio and videotapes, to review. Sy Hersh was published in Vanity Fair that spring stating that there were records of children being sodomized in front of their mothers, of children screaming in agony, of women being raped and committing suicide, of Iraqi people being tortured to death.

At that point everybody on the planet had the evidence right there before them. Anyone who claims that they didn't know that torture was U.S. policy by spring 2004 is either lying or deliberately stayed ignorant.

[EFerrari]

6. Was it about a year between that rendition flight to Gitmo

and the Abu Graib photos? I had the same reaction. No small town kids could come up with those methods on their own. The suggestion was absurd.

[TahitiNut]

3. Even earlier, the treatment of John Walker ("Johnny Taliban") was a BIG red flag, imho.

I still believe his capture and treatment is a travesty of justice.

[EFerrari]

4. That's right. That was even earlier. It's likely that he was one of

the very first victims of prisoner abuse. And, we WATCHED it on tape. :shrug:

[TahitiNut]

9. Yup. And the prison rebellion in which the CIA agent (Spann) was killed clearly suggested torture.

That kind of uprising at the fortress near Mazari Sharif doesn't happen without severe provocation, imho.

[EFerrari]

11. And, get this: this didn't start in Afghanistan. It started in NEW YORK

right after 9/11 when they rounded up God only knows how many people, hid them from lawyers, held them incommunicado, beat them and used many of the same techniques we saw at Abu Graib, and TAPED it. I believe these people were held at Rikers Island. The information didn't come out until 2003.

[EFerrari]

26. The Mazari Sharif rebellion was 11/2001. Here's one report:

Friday, Nov. 30, 2001
Afghan Prison Bloodbath Prompts Calls for Inquiry
By Tony Karon

Even as medical workers picking through carnage Thursday came under fire from two surviving holdouts, prominent humanitarian organizations raised concerns over the confrontation in which 400 or more Taliban prisoners held at the Qalai Janghi fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif were killed in a three-day onslaught of Northern Alliance artillery and machinegun fire and U.S. air strikes. United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson on Thursday added her voice to calls by Amnesty International for an urgent international inquiry into the bloodbath, while the International Committee of the Red Cross questioned whether the rules of war had been properly observed.

Some human rights alarm bells appear to have been triggered by the scale of the carnage, by reports alleging massacres of captured Taliban fighters in other centers and by reports from a number of Western journalists who claim to have seen a number Taliban corpses with their hands tied behind their backs. Alliance leader General Rashid Dostum insists his men never tied up the prisoners. And both he and U.S. and British officials insist that what transpired at Qalai Janghi was a pitched battle in which the prisoners had elected to die fighting, leaving the anti-Taliban forces no choice but to eliminate them as swiftly as possible. "We had no intention of maltreating them," an Alliance spokesman reiterated Thursday. "They got killed because of their own stubbornness." And one British official insisted that under the circumstances, there was no room for squeamishness.

The rules of war

Even so, the humanitarians, contend, there are rules of war, and they want to investigate whether those rules may have been broken. Article 42 of the Geneva Convention states that "the use of weapons against prisoners of war, especially against those who are escaping or attempting to escape, shall constitute an extreme measure, which shall always be preceded by warnings appropriate to the circumstances." According to most accounts of the circumstances, many of the prisoners were trying to kill their captors. Human rights advocates responding to the events at Qalai Janghi also point to a 1977 protocol to the Geneva Convention prohibiting an "order that there shall be no survivors, to threaten an adversary therewith or to conduct hostilities on this basis." But what if the prisoners themselves had elected to fight to the death? That claim itself is worthy of examination, a Red Cross official suggested to a British newspaper: "How many of the prisoners were armed and how many had a real combat role?" he said. "If 700 prisoners were heavily armed then it may be argued that the fortress became a legitimate combat target. But nobody knows the answers to these questions."

The Qalai Janghi prisoners were foreign Taliban volunteers who surrendered with the Taliban at Kunduz, and had then been separated from their Afghan comrades and brought to General Dostum's fortress. The Northern Alliance had promised amnesty for Afghan Taliban fighters; the foreigners were a problem. The U.S. had made clear during the siege of Kunduz that it would not accept any outcome that allowed Al Qaeda operatives to escape to other countries — they should, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said bluntly, "either be killed or taken prisoner." Dostum had taken the captives to his fortress, announcing that he would hand them over to the United Nations after processing. Exactly how he planned to do this was unclear, since there is currently no UN security presence in Afghanistan.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,186403,00.html

[yardwork]

33. I was very concerned about the photos of him with his hands tied.

Yes, I was very concerned at that point. But honestly, I had expected atrocities to come of the war - atrocities accompany every war.

Abu Ghraib was the first hard evidence that it was systemic.

[EFerrari]

35. I feel so stupid now. Remember that he seemed disorganized?

Drugged? At the time, I thought that was a result of THERAPEUTIC drugs -- given in order to treat his injuries.

We let this kid be railroaded right in front of our eyes.

[yardwork]

37. Well, we didn't let it happen - we were protesting like hell.

I know that you were protesting right from the beginning.

[EFerrari]

39. What I remember (and this thread is very much about re-collecting memory)

is thinking, when that kid went to Afghanistan, the Taliban were allies that we were negotiating with. What was he supposed to say, "Hey guys, looks like we're going to war. Anyone have a ride to the airport?"

Seriously, what was he supposed to do?

Not to mention, this kid managed to "infiltrate" al Qaida. Makes our pros look pretty bad. Of course, they had to fuck him up. They couldn't let him embarrass them with their inattention. The way he was treated was payback for humiliation.

[EFerrari]

43. Wiki link for John Walker Lindh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_Lindh

[in_cog_ni_to]

5. Yes they did and I resent the hell out of it (them making US complicit) and the minute Sy Hersh's

article was published and the Abu Ghraib torture pictures released, the thugs should have been IMPEACHED. How many years has it been since Sy's first article and the Abu Ghraib pictures were released? The public got the most palatable pictures. I can only imagine the ones not fit for public consumption.:( Congress knew LONG before we knew and they never stopped it. Shame on them all.

[EFerrari]

8. I'm not trying to make everybody feel guilty but to show, it was

under our nose all the time.

[NC_Nurse]

7. A LONG time ago, first obvious with the Abu Gahraib

evidence...but even before then, the whole way they have run Gitmo was clearly a clue.

[EFerrari]

17. It they meant well, why did they need to hide what they were doing?

:shrug:

I called Feinstein's office after it was obvious and in the press that BushCo had lied about WMD. Her staffer was offended that I even brought it up -- she said a version of "Who could have imagined that Bush would lie?". And, I remember thinking, millions of people all around the world.

This is exactly the same thing. We saw it, we watched.

[NC_Nurse]

21. Yep. Not a popular position back then.

I remember talking to folks at work in the run-up to the war about how they
seemed to be FOS to me. The shifting "reasons" for the war, the lack of evidence of WMD,
the fact that inspectors were in Iraq and they still seemed so determined to strike...
I was not given the time of day. ONE other nurse agreed with me.

None of them have ever come back and said I was right. They just don't talk about it at all anymore. :(

[EFerrari]

22. I lost friends over that invasion. And even some of my lefty friends

were afraid to raise the question or qualified it with, "I know this isn't a popular position but".

BushCo had us right where they wanted us. :grr:

[NC_Nurse]

24. .

:hug:

[EFerrari]

30. Thank you, NC_Nurse. This really has been every bit as bad

as we think it's been. Maybe worse, because our systems try to defend against trauma. :hug:

[spanone]

10. the msm question now is....is torturing a good thing...it's so sick

[EFerrari]

12. The Guantanamo Senate hearing is on CSPAN 2 right now.

If you want to see evil, turn it on and listen to Lindsey Graham and the DOD attorneys arguing for torture.

[Blarch]

13. Well...

We were getting reports out of Iraq and Afghanistan that sounded very similar. This meant the cover story of "a few bad apples" was a lie.

Not sure what year that was, but it seems like decades ago.

[EFerrari]

15. Welcome to DU, Blarch. I think that was early 2004.

BushCo started abusing prisoners in 2001 right after 9/11. That three year span is what interests me.

[spanone]

14. it is clear to the rest of the world that torture is America's policy...

[EFerrari]

16. It was probably self evident when those prisoners were taken to Cuba.

I want to know who knew about the round ups after 9/11 because that's when it started. It took nothing flat for these criminals to go straight to abuse and torture. Cheney and Rumsfeld had probably been waiting all their life to do just that.

[L. Coyote]

18. At the very latest, April 28, 1987, when Ben Linder was shot in the head.

And George Bush Sr. said "He was on the wrong side." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Linder

George Bush Sr. May Face Charges: Conspiring to Kidnap and Murder Political Activists
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2459135

Trust me, those tortured before April 28, 1987, knew all too well.

It is time to place the current junta's actions into the continuum of human rights violations by this cast of characters. Putting Junior in charge is not some sort of cut-off point, as if nothing happen before that.

[EFerrari]

20. I agree. But there is a point at which even in the limited context

of the War on Terra, it was visible. I don't remember Linder.

[L. Coyote]

23. Another American killed was Linda Frazier. Remember La Penca and Ronald Reagan?

From a legal perspective, it is easier to prosecute murders than torture:

========================
Costa Rica and Nicaragua; Remember La Penca and Ronald Reagan
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/47/460.html

Former US President Ronald Reagan died just days after the 20th anniversary of the bombing at La Penca, a place inside Nicaragua on the Costa Rica border. The bombing, an act of terrorism almost entirely forgotten in the US, is well-remembered in a region that was once the focus of Reagan's foreign policy.

The May 30, 1984, explosion at a press conference called by Eden Pastora, the famed Sandinista Comandante Cero of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, left four dead, three of them journalists. Since then, books have been written and lawsuits launched, but no one has ever been tried for a multiple murder that Costa Rica still treats as an active case that is seriously stalled.

Attorney General Francisco Dall'Anese has blamed US obstruction in the form of blocked access to classified documents. In a Feb. 27, 2004, letter to Costa Rica's Defensor de los Habitantes Jose Manuel Echandi, he enumerated the reasons for the deadlock:

* Exhaustive investigations in Costa Rica have not yielded sufficient results to bring a case to trial.
* Documents in the possession of the Senate of the United States of America have been declared secret by the US government and are therefore inaccessible.
* It has not been possible to identify the material author of the crime, not even through Interpol, and efforts to extradite US citizen John Hull and Miami-based Cuban-American Felipe Vidal have been fruitless.

Of the three reasons, Dall'Anese said in the letter, The second point is the major obstacle to terminating the investigations because the identity of the author of the deeds could be established and linked to Hull, and, without evidence, it is impossible to found an accusation.

Costa Rican authorities have attempted to extradite two alleged CIA collaborators, Hull and Vidal, from the US, but to no avail. Hull operated a ranch on the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border identified by resupply pilots as a transshipment point for military supplies and drugs. ...............

[EFerrari]

25. Frasier I remember. I was really focused on the Miskitu Coast

at the time, and how they were being manipulated, bullied and even kidnapped and forced to bear arms by the thugs.

[EFerrari]

19. Here is a short article on the post 9/11 immigrant round up

(Notice how briefly this thing mentions prisoner abuse?)

Post 9/11 immigrant round-up backfired, group says
By IPS/GIN
Updated Jul 9, 2003, 07:59 pm


WASHINGTON (IPS/GIN)—Measures taken by the U.S. administration against Arab and Muslim immigrants after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon have not only failed to protect U.S. security, but may have made it more vulnerable, according to a major report released here June 26.

The round-up and detention of more than 1,200 immigrants after the attacks were particularly abusive, says the report by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI), an influential think tank.

It said that the government’s efforts to depict some of those who were detained as terrorists were simply wrong. "The only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or ordinary crimes," concludes the 165-page report, "America’s Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties and National Unity After September 11."

"Many of the policies that have been adopted in the wake of Sept. 11 are an attempt to use immigration as a proxy for anti-terrorism," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior counter-terrorism official in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who is on MPI’s board of advisers and helped prepare the report.

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_890.shtml

[dailykoff]

28. Yep the round-ups started right after 911

and nobody in congress made a peep that I can remember. Arrests and attacks on American Muslims were the news every day. Of course Congress had other problems to deal with like anthrax and the beltway sniper.

[EFerrari]

29. We're going to look back at this time as the Bush Crime Spree.

I only hope that one of us has the guts to write it all down.

[dailykoff]

31. Or reign of terror.

And I have a feeling it won't be Americans who get to write this particular chapter of history, and it isn't going to be pretty.

[EFerrari]

32. War of Terror, not on terror, that's right.

I hope it's clear I'm not looking for a reason to tar Congressional Dems. More closely, I'm trying to figure out how we managed not to know what we could have known about our government's torturing for so long. Congressional Democrats are just people, as we are. They have some better information, more power and better resources. But, not THAT much more.

[EFerrari]

27. WaHo Guantanamo Timeline begins JANUARY 11, 2002.

That means, only four months after 9/11, BushCo was implementing a plan to render prisoners en mass.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/guantanamo/timeline/

[L. Coyote]

34. MUST READ: "The President’s Coming-Out Party" == Okay, Yes, I Tortured!

REC this thread ==== Found this MUST READ early today from:
Mukasey's Litmus Test-1) Cover-up Torture 2) Block Criminal Investigations (Scott Horton)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2473859

The President’s Coming-Out Party
BY Scott Horton - Dec 15, 2007 - http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001917

This has been an important week in the torture debate in America. It has been the week of the President’s coming-out party. Up until this point, torture has been something that “a few rotten apples” do. When evidence of it erupted in the media, a few grunts were quickly rounded up and scapegoated. Never officers, mind you—after all, they generally knew where the orders came from, and if you prosecuted them, they might just tell.

But this week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. .......

[EFerrari]

36. Great catch.

I think it's important to sift this issue, to apply the seat of our brains to it. It's difficult and counter intuitive. But if we are ever to turn this around, this is the first step: to know it.

[L. Coyote]

49. Horton is prolific. Check him daily, 1000 blog posts ... Siegeman, USAs, more...

I sent him an alert, basically my post on Independent Counsel, and baaammm, just like that this was up.

MUKASEY, Torture, and a Special Prosecutor. A Conflict of Interest Conundrum.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2465527

[Eric J in MN]

38. By 2004: The combination of the Abu Ghraib photos and news of Torture Memos by the Bush Admin

...descriptions of which were available before the 2004 election, should have let anyone who makes a decent effort to follow the subject to put things together.

[EFerrari]

41. That was nearly four years ago. We have a reality problem.

Seriously. There are still people who seem not to know our government has been torturing for years -- and taking very little trouble to hide that fact when they're not putting it in our faces as with the parade of goat herders into Gitmo in 2002.

Qui bono?

[flashl]

40. Learning about the School of Americas was my turning point.

The level of brutality that the U.S. would use was made clear shortly after 9-11. In the run-up to bombing the Talibans a newcaster made a comment about the prize for *, returning Osama's head in a box. I've verified that someone other than me heard that comment.

[EFerrari]

42. J Coffer Black originated it, iirc. He's now a main player at BlackWater. n/t

[flashl]

44. Wow. That speaks volumes.

[EFerrari]

45. He ran the rendition program before he left CIA.

Jose Rodriguez winked at Ollie North and came out of the Latin America death squad ops. Blackwater has been actively recruiting torturers from South Africa and Colombia and god knows where else.

Why?

[muriel_volestrangler]

46. After the Yale coathanger brandings, it was inevitable from when he was selected

Anyone who'd defend branding pledges with hot coathangers as 'no worse than cigarette burns' in a national newspaper was going to have people tortured as President, whether or not he had a 'war on terror' as his excuse:

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau '70 said he thinks a little-known fact about President George W. Bush '68's past -- that his first mention in The New York Times occurred in 1967 when, as former president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter at Yale, Bush defended the fraternity's practice of branding its pledges with a red-hot coat hanger -- deserves more national attention.

On Sunday, Trudeau's cartoon "Doonesbury" featured fictional character Mark Slackmeyer explaining the President's position against current anti-torture legislation by revisiting a series of 1967 Yale Daily News articles that exposed DKE's rush activities, which at the time included brandings and alleged beatings. Soon after these stories were published, the University's Inter-Fraternity Council fined the fraternity for performing "physically and mentally degrading acts," and the Times published an article in which Bush defended the brandings, comparing them to cigarette burns.

"At the time, it caused quite a stir on campus, even generating some national attention," Trudeau said.

The News article, published Nov. 3, 1967, featured a photograph of a half-inch high "D" burned into a pledge's naked backside. Trudeau drew his first cartoon for the News for the story -- a picture of smiling pledges, naked and bent over at the waist, with a figure holding a DKE branding iron standing over them.

In a News story the next day, Bush is quoted calling the branding "insignificant." He said he did not understand how the News "can assume Yale has to be so haughty not to allow this type of pledging to go on."

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/15856

Bush thinks other people's pain is funny.

[EFerrari]

47. I think he does think it's funny.

Forgot about these brandings.

[havocmom]

48. When Geneva Convention was dubbed as 'quaint', any & all thinking people should have been sure

No excuse for cutting bushco any slack after that. No excuse for not coming down hard and fast with oversight and corrective measures for an administration obviously bent on breaking any law they wanted to.

[Disturbed]

50. Busholini & his Regime are War Criminals.

We know it & so does all of Congress.
Will he & his Regime be held accountable for the many crimes
that have been committed?

No.

[EFerrari]

51. I think a lot of us saw that and thought Bush was CYAing but

didn't put it together with consequences to bodies. ;(

[havocmom]

52. To not put it together was wishful blindness. You are smart enough to know what it was about.

Ya don't dis' laws unless you have already broken them. They were conditioning the judges and juries (that'd be us) to give them a pass owing to the fact that it's just some old law that nobody thinks about anyway....

We all knew. Nobody wanted to face facts. Especially those in positions to actually DO something about the lawlessness.

[EFerrari]

54. Yep. At some level, we all knew even if we didn't formally "think" it.

The Unthought Known.

From now on whenever a public figure prevaricates, I'm going to know that it's sheer, willful irresponsibility.

[proud patriot]

53. when they needed a place not on american soil AKA

Guantanamo and Rendition .

perhaps a more Skeptical person needed the
Abu Guriab pictures.

[EFerrari]

56. I worry that we're becoming so inured to hearing about suffering

that we just ignore it or justify it or in some way defend ourselves from taking it in.

Everyone does that to a degree -- it's a survival mechanism. But, there comes a point where avoiding the fact that your government is homicidal is a threat to survival in itself. :shrug:

[Rex]

55. GOP policy.

Since Nixon.

[EFerrari]

57. Rendition and torture is only an abbreviated form of what

was done to African and Native American slaves, when you think about it. The habit precedes Nixon.

There was a moment when real reform was at least attempted.

Wiki entry for the Church Committee:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

/oops