Jul 24 2009

Former Iraqi Weapons Monitor Describes U.S. Abuse For First Time

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING




From the Huffington Post

By Michael Bronner

… Amin’s story of his incarceration, related here for the first time, offers another instructive chapter in the scandalous history of detainee treatment — one that encompasses both physical torture and the more subtle moral quandary of leaving prisoners to languish indefinitely without any meaningful legal process, the status quo for prisoners at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. It again raises key questions the Obama Administration has yet to fully answer as it assumes control of America’s unconventional wars: How can it square urgent, real battlefield needs with the rule of law and the spirit of the nation’s ideals?

You simply MUST go read the rest. It has to be read to be believed. You don’t know how bad it got till you read it.

(Though I do have one bone to pick with Michael Bronner, the author of the piece, about the part I’ve excerpted: “…the more subtle moral quandary of leaving prisoners to languish indefinitely without any meaningful legal process???” Just what, exactly, is SUBTLE about that moral “quandary,” may I ask? Just, you know, wondering. But… I digress.)

And now the shame belongs to President Obama and his Administration, for as long as he refuses to do anything about it.

This will be a stain on him and his Presidency. No matter how much good he does, if he abrogates his Constitutional responsibility to allow the Attorney General to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed by Americans during the Iraq “War,” the shame is not only George W. Bush’s, but Barack Obama’s, as well.

(And frankly, once you’ve read the rest of the article, it’s rather difficult to understand how Obama didn’t already know this shit when he hired McChrystal. But… benefit of the doubt and all that rot.)

Pfffft.

14 comments

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  1. can’t say anything more about this. It’s… it’s just… too horrible.

    • Joy B. on July 24, 2009 at 01:38
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    Welcome, welcome! This shit is eventually going to wake the sheeple, or we’ve no business pretending to be human. I look forward to the day, whatever it brings!

  3. If you compromise your view and responsiblity towards the worst thing a government can do to people, what does that make you? If you are president it makes you complicit in War Crimes, among other things.

    Obama appears to be a morally compromised human being at a fundamental level.

    • Edger on July 24, 2009 at 03:14
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    is open and public. There is no way Obama didn’t already know this shit when he hired McChrystal.

    Tom Engelhardt:

    General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection.  For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of Vice President Cheney’s office.  (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement:  “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.”)


    McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.  The secret force of “manhunters” he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan:  “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.”  Since some of the task force’s men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn’t avoided.  


    In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.  The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld’s effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.    


    Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman).

  5. Thanks for this essay.

  6. Petreaus, etc., from me.  There is no doubt in my mind the imperialist agenda of whoever is running this country is just entering a new phase under Obama.  In fact, it appears to me, each successive administration, in either party, simply takes the agenda to higher levels each time.  Now the Obama admin is targeting Latin America.  

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