US interrogation policy condemned
The White House said the mistreatment of detainees had never been a policy A US Senate committee has criticised military officials for the manner in which they developed interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. Pentagon lawyers testified to the Armed Services Committee that methods such as water-boarding were based on training given to soldiers on resisting torture. Chairman Sen Carl Levin said they had then "twisted the law to create the appearance of legality". The lawyers' comments on the development of the controversial interrogation techniques employed by the US military and security services were released as part of the initial findings of a report by the Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon's general counsel, William Haynes, sought information as early as July 2002 - nine months after the 11 September 2001 attacks - about training given to US military personnel on how to resist enemy interrogation. The Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (Sere) programme is based on the experiences of US prisoners of war in previous conflicts. Sere trainers provided Mr Haynes with a list of techniques, including sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, water-boarding and stress positions. Several were approved by the then Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in December 2002 despite objections by military lawyers.
So it’s official, America has become the United States of Torture, with the School of the America’s torture class taken as an all encompassing foreign policy. To torture another human being demeans the torturer and the tortured to a base humanity that strips away every single step of progress we’ve made from the cave. The information becomes invalid as anyone will tell you anything to stop being tortured and it robs you of any moral high ground, when Leaders make evil decisions, evil is done and America is responsible for a lot of evil all in the name of freedom and democracy – who’s freedom and who’s democracy?
Democracy
ReplyDeleteA social entertainment where the registered population get to select, by majority vote of others, the dictator they will serve for the next three to five years - depending on the State involved.
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
ReplyDeleteWinston Churchill.
Give me democracy over royalty any day.
It would be preferable if you did not lump in all Americans, including the 49 million who voted against Bush in 2004, with the Bush administration on the subject of torture. Other than some Fox commentators and right-wing pundits, the majority of Americans, and now the Supreme Court, have expressed unease and distaste for the use of torture in interrogations. That is strictly a Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld operation, aided and abetted by some (but not all) senior military officers, Justice Department lackeys and Defence Department ideologues. The fact that you cite the objections of military lawyers to the proposed use of certain coercive techniques is proof that these procedures were imposed on, rather than supported by the military intelligence community (who run interrogations in most instances). The fact that the Bush administration made liberal use of private contractors to do most of the harsher interrogations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo also demonstrates the lack of support by the uniformed ranks for such practices.
ReplyDeleteBottom line: Bush and his minions are to blame. The US is no more the US of torture than NZ is because of the Labour governments callous disregard of Ahmed Zaoui's human rights in keeping him confined, in solitary, without charge for nine months, then in jail for another 18 months before allowing him home detention with the priests (before dropping the case against him entirely after 4 years of wasting taxpayer money). The scale may be different, but the blame is on the government, not the country as a whole.
BTW--the School of the America's never taught "torture" and revamped its entire curriculum in the mid 1990s to include courses on human rights, civil liberties and the rules of proper engagement in the wake of public outcry about the activities of some of its more notorious graduates. That too shows a capacity to reform in accordance with popular demands for moral accountability.
Detain them without charge. Lock em up indefinitely and torture them regularly. Kangaroo court sham trial.
ReplyDeleteGod bless America.
I wish NZ would make some new laws allowing women to cut men's balls off and use them for Christmas Tree decorations.
ReplyDeleteOMG I can think of nothing worse than shrivelled up testicles hanging from my Christmas tree ... ooooooh
ReplyDeleteNS