While you are dickering over whether to pass legislation with teeth or to pass legislation that won’t work at all, the United States is detaining and torturing thousands of people in gulags around the world
While we want you to shut down this kleptocracy, while we want you to change course in bankruptcy law and we want you to start fixing public education and while we want you to bring the troops home, keep something in mind.
There is something we cannot wait another two years for. It is the single biggest mistake we have ever made and if we cannot fix it, then this country doesn’t deserve to survive.
Stop.
The.
Torture.
As a matter of fact Congressmen, turn on your computer, click on Google. Then type into the little window "US + torture". You will get 22,100,000 entries.
There shouldn’t be even one of these.
While you’re out there in Beltway Land letting the Republicans filibuster you on every single item, US officials or surrogates are waterboarding people. We beating them. Keeping them from their families. Not allowing them to be represented or have a trial.
While you put all your attentions on stopping this madman, his henchmen are breaking every principle of civilization, every law in the Constitution and in fact, every law of God.
If you can’t make it to your laptop, I did a little work for you.
It took three minutes.
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
link: http://www.newyorker.com/...
GENEVA (AFX) - Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.
The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.
'They are no longer trying to duck this and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,' the Committee member said.
link: http://www.forbes.com/...
The United States of Torture
By MIKE WHITNEY
How did we stoop so low?
As if Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo weren't bad enough, the Bush administration has added another layer of shame to our national disgrace.
Dana Priest's article "The CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons" paints a sobering picture of an administration that has abandoned any trace of integrity and completely run amok. The United States has become the number 1 exporter of torture in the world today with Bush serving as its foremost champion.
The article provides a window into the constellation of CIA prison camps that dot the globe like the myriad islands in the Pacific. Thousands of Muslim's have been swept up in a global dragnet and dumped in secret gulags where they are subjected to the grueling regimen of beatings and torture. The camps were authorized by President Bush in an executive "finding" 6 days after Sept 11, that's when, as one high-ranking official said, "The gloves came off". It "gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world."
Link: http://www.counterpunch.org/...
WASHINGTON - The United States has failed to meaningfully change its policies on the treatment of prisoners, opening the door to repeats of abuses like those at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and making an independent probe into torture by the U.S. military essential, says a leading human rights group.
Link here: http://www.antiwar.com/...
Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney about a new set of US Defense Department guidelines for interrogating suspected terrorists. The debate over an anti-torture bill is a sad moment for a country that once stood for human rights.
As someone who has spent decades representing clients who have been tortured under dictatorships, in dirty wars and by lawless governments around the world, I'm having a rough week here at home. My friend Sister Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun whom I represented after she'd been abducted, raped and tortured by security forces in Guatemala, told me she was having a hard time too. "Torture destroys trust," she said. "Since my torture, 16 years ago, I've tried to rebuild that trust, but now my government has shattered it yet again. Fear returns..."
For Sister Dianna and other victims of torture, this moment represents what she calls "a choice between courage and cowardice, human decency and depravity." Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney and some of his aides about a whether a new set of Defense Department guidelines for interrogating suspected terrorists should prohibit the "cruel, humiliating, and degrading" treatment of prisoners. In the Congress, Sen. John McCain, with support from 89 colleagues, is pushing a separate measure to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody -- against veto threats from the White House and fierce opposition from Cheney and his new chief of staff, David Addington, who are maneuvering to exempt clandestine CIA activities from oversight. And reporters have uncovered a network of "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere -- secret detention camps run by the CIA, where suspects are being held and brutally interrogated.
Link :http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,384163,00.html
A high court judge yesterday delivered a stinging attack on America, saying its idea of what constituted torture was out of step with that of "most civilised nations".
The criticism, directed at the Bush administration's approach to human rights, was made by Mr Justice Collins during a hearing over the refusal by ministers to request the release of three British residents held at Guantánamo Bay.
The judge said: "America's idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations." He made his comments, he said, after learning of the UN report that said Guantánamo should be shut down without delay because torture was still being carried out there.
Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
So there you have it Congressmen. One more fucked thing you’re going to have to fix. For my vote, whatever a vote is worth in America, this has to be on your top five list.
Stop the torture.
Find the torturers.
Prosecute and punish every single one of them.
Apologize to the world.
And if you fail to stop the torture, history and posterity will paint you in the same hues as it will paint the Republicans and the Rubber Stamp 109th.