"You can't handle the truth!" I answered, "I can't handle the lie." - Shannyn Moore
Those making a mockery of the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Convention treaties, and U S Law.......do you want the truth?
Islamists were apparently more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom Americans fought and defeated without resorting to torture. -Andrew Sullivan.
Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation"
The Nazi defense of the techniques is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration...Bush’s torturers follow where the Nazis led: Bush decided that Islamists were apparently more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom Americans fought and defeated without resorting to torture. The decision to enter what Dick Cheney called "the dark side" was made. This decision was and is illegal, and violates America’s treaty obligations, the military code of justice, the United Nations convention against torture, and US law.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...
Although America has allied itself over the decades with some unsavoury regimes around the world and has come close to acquiescing to torture, it has never itself tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from the evils of Nazism and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done more than any other nation to banish torture from the world.
Obama on Record, or Obama's Record to Date:
http://www.youtube.com/...
Art. 5 of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945
In Norway, in a 1948 court case in whether "enhanced interrogation" using the methods approved by President Bush amounted to torture. The Nazi defense of the techniques is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration. In deciding the degree of punishment, the Court found it decisive that the defendants had inflicted serious physical and mental suffering on their victims, and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment in accordance with the provisions laid down in Art. 5 of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945.
The Court came to the conclusion that such acts, even though they were committed with the connivance of superiors in rank or even on their orders, must be regarded and punished as serious war crimes.
Doctrine of Command Responsibility
The doctrine of command responsibility, formalized by the Geneva Conventions of 1949: it is the idea that officers must shoulder the blame when they know their troops are committing war crimes and fail to take "all feasible measures" to stop them, the principle linking the Nazi trials at Nuremberg.
http://www.congress.gov.ph/...
"No meaningful insistence on accountability has been discernible from either the Gonzales Justice Department or the Rumsfeld Defense Department. It has been left to human-rights organizations to piece together the alarming history of the CIA and U. S. Army's illegal descent into torture." - Retired General David R. Irvine
Acts of Conscience- John H. Richardson
Because Al Qaeda was not a High Contracting Party to the Geneva Conventions,
Bush said, "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world." He especially rejected Article 3, the clause that forbids torture and other insults to human dignity.
On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized twelve new methods of interrogation, including stress positions, hooding, nudity, and the use of threatening dogs — and also four harsher methods that were "legally available" but did not have blanket approval, including exposure to cold, mock executions of prisoners (or their family members), and the sense of drowning suffocation caused by the method known as waterboarding.
Camp Nama - they were making a daily mockery of the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions. "You kind of got the sense that some people thought it was fun. And I think kind of an underlying thing was it was fun for people, but they had this guise of like it was always, you know, for the information." they were saying things like we didn't have to abide by the Geneva Conventions because these people weren't POWs.....the JAG lawyers told them that blame would never get down to their level. "It would go through us first," they said. "You will never have any culpability whatsoever." That's the last thing the interrogators heard from the colonel, too. "It will never come down to you. You guys have nothing to worry about. You're not doing anything wrong."
http://www.esquire.com/...
The Pentagon denies that the now not to be released photos (which are from 60 different criminal investigations between 2001 and 2006) show military personnel systemically abusing prisoners. But ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said "The disclosure of these photographs serves as a further reminder that abuse of prisoners in U.S.-administered detention centers was systemic."
"You can't handle the truth!" I answered, "I can't handle the lie." - Shannyn Moore
War crimes. If a picture tells a thousand words, the pictures now being held back by Obama, scream volumes. Their testimony demands the light of day much like the men in our containment. The argument of "inflaming the terrorists" is out of touch at best. They already know. To deny justice while exporting "democracy" has fueled the flames of hatred and painted our hypocrisy like graffiti across the Constitution. The opposite of truth is cover-up.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
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If I ever stop feeling anything about naked prisoners beaten and left for long periods of time in frozen cells, or slammed against walls, or turned into mental cases, then I will cease to be the human I am. You can no more torture your way to the rule of law than you can destroy a village in order to save it. - Andrew Sullivan.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...
Republicans did not and will not call it torture, but whether torture is referred to, as the Nazis did, as Verschärfte Vernehmung, or enhanced interrogation as the Bush Regime did, this is the reality, the blood and guts, of torture in all of its horror
.
http://images.google.com/...
We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. What we know now is likely the least of it.
http://harpers.org/...