Tag: crimes against humanity

Crime Against Humanity: Forced Pregnancy

The United Nations defines “forced pregnancy” as a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY. It’s right there on the first page of the official UN page. The United States is a signatory to this treaty on human rights and the Constitution defines the Constitution, then ratified treaties, then federal statutes as the supreme law of the land. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-humanity.shtml …

Continue reading

CCR: Bush Torture Indictment

The Center for Constitutional Rights has released the Torture Indictment against former President George W. Bush!

Done In Our Names

The blowback will be felt for the coming decades, he on the other hand just wants to sell his book and reap more wealth from speaking, if one can call what he does when mouth opens speaking!

Torture: Known and Unknown

Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accused of torture

from Global Research, January 14, 2011 Press TV  

A US rights group has filed a lawsuit charging former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with involvement in torturing former prisoners in American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) catapulted the torture case into prominence on Thursday after it lodged an appeal to a court in the District of Columbia, alleging that Rumsfeld and some senior US military officials were quite aware of a torture case involving nine detainees between 2002 and 2004 in American prisons in the two countries, AFP reported.

The case initially was brought forth in December 2006, but later on was withdrawn by a federal court in March 2007 on the grounds that the ex-defense secretary and other top American military officials were immune from prosecution.

The US-based human rights group stated that under the Constitution and international law, torture is strictly prohibited and commanders are obliged to act when they know or should have known of such abuses.

The ACLU argued that the 78-year-old Rumsfeld and other military officials were repeatedly notified of abuse and torture at detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan by the International Red Cross and other reports as well as complaints by human rights organizations, thus they are directly responsible for the abuses.

The group further touched upon a case involving a prisoner identified as Ali.V, adding that prisoners, who were later released without charge, “were beaten, tortured, and sexually abused.”

Meanwhile, three judges at an appeals court in the District of Columbia said the case has a little chance to succeed.

The remarks came as a group of activists, each wearing black hoods and orange jumpsuits representing the prisoners at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay staged a rally in front of the court room on Thursday to protest against negligence over the torture case.

Rumsfeld is currently putting finishing touches on the release of his memoire book titled “Known and unknown”, which is due to hit bookshelves in the US on 8 February.

 

Christian “Blackwater” values…

Selling children into prostitution

The latest horror show from the Blackwater saga illustrates how absolutely dangerous white supremacy is when empowered with federal dollars and the power to kill.

Instead of being run out of all civilized society, Erik Prince’s huge donations to the GOP earned him massive federal contracts and the backing of the US government as his employees raped children under the banner of an American flag.

White power politics is not a matter of free speech when used by the state as a tool of war. It is a war crime. Erik Prince is a war criminal…………..Rest Here

POV: “The Reckoning.”

Please take a minute to mark your calendar for this coming Tuesday, July 14th, so you can watch PBS’s new documentary on the International Criminal Court, “The Reckoning.” The documentary should air at 10 pm in most areas, but check here to see your local listing.  

“HE KEPT US SAFE”

THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN CHARACTER

THE “CRINGING WIMP” GENERATION

For years we hear little else, “But he kept us safe.”  The “but” refers to bankrupting the country, stealing elections, suspending Constitutional Rights, poisoning the air and water and turning the country over to racketeers from oil, drug, insurance and crooked financial services……….

Lying about Torture (II): The Problem with Ticking Dick.

Dick and Liz Cheney tell us that enhanced interrogation is not torture and that it made the US safer by providing actionable intelligence. They say it was unwise to make the US techniques public, because the terrorists can now train to them. Both of these claims are hogwash. More importantly, though, they expose a flaw in the Cheney mindset. The Cheneys adhere to The Rambo Myth: Subjects of torture will grant a true confession in order to avoid the pain of more torture. If we are just sadistic enough, we will get the truth out of those bastards.

Cheney et al. provided pressure to waterboard several high value prisoners to obtain information in short order. While there is some disagreement about whether or not waterboarding was used to forge a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, it is clear that we waterboarded one prisoner 83 times and another 183 times in one month. What did this likely accomplish?

Let’s have a look at the ticking bomb.

Prosecuting: Moving Beyond the Mancow Redux.

We watched Christopher Hitchens and Erich “Mancow” Muller spend a few seconds on a waterboard and emerge convinced that waterboarding is torture. While I welcome their conversions, their stunts really did not teach us anything new. Though the initial panic of having water come at them was suffering enough, they both quit before the real effects of waterboarding kicked in: they have no idea what would come if the torture did not stop when they cried “uncle.”

Torture is the systematic use of trauma to provoke a change in consciousness: the only goal of torture is to drive a person to unbearable madness. The purpose of the torture — interrogation, extortion — immaterial. Mancow and Hitchens spent a short time on the waterboard and saw that rabbithole in the distance. They bailed before any of the real terror kicked in…

But what if ending the torture at will was not an option? What if they would have undergone waterboarding as Bybee prescribed?

The DRC, Sudan, and Looking Forward.

Dave Waldman writes on Obama’s reluctance to prosecute for torture:

That poses an extraordinarily broad array of difficulties, not the least of which is that it’s an open an ongoing threat to the greater Obama agenda, which is itself often invoked as a reason for not dabbling in the “distraction” of “looking backward.” But unless we can demarcate Cheneyism — the “anything goes” philosophy as explicitly illegal, unconstitutional and illegitimate, its continued existence (and threatened practice by future administrations) calls into question the value and durability of the whatever parts of the Obama agenda are ultimately implemented, on detainee policy or anything else.

Last week, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had a hearing entitled Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones: DRC and Sudan. The US Senate wishes to tackle rape as a weapon of war. Barbara Boxer feels we are in good position to affect the atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan.

The waterboard, which inflicts no pain.

The new news is that there is a mounting body of evidence that Dick Cheney ordered waterboarding to produce the connections necessary to wage a war on Saddam Hussein. (See diaries by dday for a primer, and buhdydharma for a link to Rachel Maddow.) Our knowledge of Dick Cheney’s penchant for torture now grows and convolves with the dubious War on Iraq. While the Bush team is morally reprehensible for creating evidence to strike, it is not clear that lying to wage a war is actually illegal in the United States. We do know that torture is illegal — we signed the Geneva Convention. The Bush team must be breaking the law by ordering prisoners to the waterboard…

…except there is a contemporary controversey in the United States about whether or not waterboarding qualifies as torture…

What follows is not for polite company — it is a graphic description and analysis of waterboarding.

Heads, sticks, and prosecuting torture memo authors.

Ladies and gentleman, if I may have your ear.

The DoJ is making noises like they will not prosecute the people who wrote the memos that “rationalized” using torture. (See Edger’s diary.) This is tragic because, with the exception of the high-ranking Bush officials who conspired to make these opinions the rule of law, the memo writers are the most complicit criminals on the list. They were the sleight-of-hand smiths who made the torture program possible. There are few involved who can approach the vulgarity that these lawyers attained.

We cannot take these prosecutions off the table and self-consistently seek justice.

Exposing two important myths about torture.

Torture apologists are shouting desperate arguments from the rooftops to justify their support for enhanced interrogation, and it is common to see people in liberal and progressive circles take a “no harm done” position regarding many of the techniques the US used on their political prisoners. Here, I want to discuss flaws in two common statements:  

Myth 1: It isn’t torture if the technique is psychological.

Myth 2: It isn’t torture because our techniques have no long term effects.

If we want to fight pushback — if we want to make sure that our country does not torture again — we need to understand what is wrong with these memes. In particular, we need to understand the popularized fiction that was created by the people who tortured in your name.  

Load more