This is the action item for the breaking story of the year so far. What must be remembered is:
a) Most of those tortured were innocent (Jack Bauer Tortured the Wrong Guys)
b) The unreported level of brutalities. Forget waterboarding, that was mild.
The Right Wing will be deploying in force now foaming that "we don't need no permission slip from these Euros to perteck ourselves!" But this had nothing to do with protecting ourselves. We made new enemies, and lots of them. Call your congressperson and leave a weekend voice mail saying "Shame for letting the Europeans do our dirty laundry on torture of innocent men! Appoint a special prosecutor!" Then forward the below descriptions of the tortures through your congressman's email form. This is the judge who prosecuted Pinochet.
Yes, you know the story, it's burning up the Net. Now do something.
Spanish Court Considers Trying Former US Officials.
Congress switchboard: Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121
LINK TO CONGRESS EMAILS.
LINK TO EMAIL WHITE HOUSE.
JUSTICE JACKSON CENTER (DEAN LAWRENCE VELVEL)
Sen. Leahy? Tell the "Truth", Jack Bauer Tortured the Wrong Guys
by Ralph Lopez
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at
the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described
as "the worst of the worst."...The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's
Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew
something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.
"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the
government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy.
Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information
that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.
It is vitally important to remember that isn't about individual
sadistic soldiers. You will always have those, and isolated incidents.
This is about widespread, systematic abuse, and who gave the license
to allow it to happen: the Bush administration.
"Truth Commission" lib Senator Leahy, please read this New York Times report about the taxi driver who did the dumb thing of driving past Baghram air base with two paying fares a few days after a rocket attack:
The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as
Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram,
Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack
on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an
interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably
in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by
the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two
interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large
plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the
interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the
water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then
grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into
Mr. Dilawar's face.
"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"
The National Journal has done an excellent report which lays bare the kind of evidential standards which would land you in Gitmo, Baghram, or Abu Grahib. Mohammed al-Tumani, a prisoner at Gitmo, had an American representative who began looking into his case:
"Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified
evidence against the [Tumani] and found that just one man -- the
aforementioned accuser -- had placed Tumani at the terrorist training
camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager
had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the
classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and,
suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had
placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in
Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.
The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway."
The McClatchy report affirms what most people already knew by 2002:
"The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S.
custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and
Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged
importance of the men they handed over.
The Justice Jackson Center is preparing a criminal complaint against Bush officials, which in a way competes with your Truth Commission, which alleges:
· Savage Beatings. Prisoners were severely and regularly beaten with
clubs, rifles and fists. They were beaten to the point that bones were
broken, ribs were fractured, and prisoners sometimes were killed.
· Peroneal Strikes. Peroneal strikes are a specific form of savage
beating, consisting of blows to the soft tissue and nerves just above
the knee. The falsely accused prisoner beaten to death at Bagram had
been given so many peroneal strikes that a coroner testified that his
leg tissue had ‘"basically been pulpified.’"
· Hanging By The Arms. A highly excruciating "stress position"
torture used on many prisoners, sometimes every day for two to three
months, is hanging them by their arms, often or usually on tiptoe.
· Slamming A Prisoner’s Head Into Concrete Walls. In this torture a
towel is wrapped around a prisoner’s neck and is then used to propel
the prisoner head first into a concrete wall. This torture was so
fraught with risk of serious injury to or death of a prisoner that the
CIA kept a doctor on hand at all times to guard against death or
crippling injury.
· Additional "Stress Positions" And Electric Shocks. "Palestinian
hangings," they were hung by the arms with their feet on a drum through
which electric shocks were applied to their feet; the shocks would
cause the feet to "dance."
The world is watching, Mr. Leahy. Will you dare remind folks that
men we did this to had done nothing to us? Or will you stay this side
of the Jack Bauer political firewall? This is important. You see,
because the dirty little secret of Bush's conduct of the War on Terror
is that Jack had the wrong guys all along.
FORWARD TO Senator Pat Leahy's email: senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
http://www.dailykos.com/...