Feb 22 2008
cross posted from The Dream Antilles
A Map
Today UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband apologized to parliament. He admitted that US “special rendition” illegal extradition flights had landed on British soil despite earlier assurances that they hadn’t.
Join me in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Feb 11 2008
There are some things one never forgets. I’ll never forget my brief encounter with torture 40 years ago. Our patrol engaged some VC hidden in a tree-line and a firefight ensued. The tree-line held a small hamlet. Predictably the village people fled in our direction. They fled because they knew their village would most likely be shelled, strafed or bombed. It was.
Our Viet counterparts detained a young lady they suspected of being a VC, a nurse they claimed. We brought her back to our dilapidated compound where they bound her, stripped off her shirt and attached wires to her nipples and proceed to use a crank operated electrical device to shock her. Needless to say it was thoroughly disgusting. Through it all she refused to talk. I admired her courage. I don’t know where they sent her but I hope she survived.
In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military personnel”…
Feb 09 2008
(Hat’tip to Marisacat’s Cats… They give good thread.)
U.N. says waterboarding should be prosecuted as torture
…
“I would have no problems with describing this practice as falling under the prohibition of torture,” the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told a news conference in Mexico City.
Arbour made her comment in response to a question about whether U.S. officials could be tried for the use of waterboarding that referred to CIA director Michael Hayden telling Congress on Tuesday his agency had used waterboarding on three detainees captured after the September 11 attacks.
Violators of the U.N. Convention against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’ which allows countries to try accused war criminals from other nations, Arbour said. …
Feb 08 2008
There are some things one never forgets. I’ll never forget my first, and only, encounter with torture some 40 years ago. Our daylight patrol, some 4 or 5 Marines and probably the same number of Vietnamese Province level militia troops engaged some unseen VC hidden in a tree-line and a firefight ensued. The tree-line held a small hamlet and predictably the village people carrying with them their most valued possessions fled in our direction. The fled because they knew their village would most likely be shelled, strafed or bombed. As it turned out the village was strafed by a couple of passes of a fighter jet spraying the area with 40 mm cannon fire.
Our Vietnamese counterparts detained a young lady they said was a VC, a nurse they claimed. We brought her back to our ragged compound where they bound her, stripped off her shirt and attached wires to her nipples and used a crank operated electrical device to shock her. Needless to say it was thoroughly disgusting. Through it all she refused to talk. I admired her courage. They took her off to the District Hq and we never heard any more about her.
In April 2004, the American public was stunned by televised photographs from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly assured Congress that the abuses were “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military,” whom New York Times columnist William Safire soon branded “creeps.”
Most Americans became aware of torture when Seymour Hersh broke the story about Abu Ghraib. Where did it all begin? I witnessed torture 40 years ago and have come to wonder why, where and when it all started.
After French soldiers used the technique on Henri Alleg during the Battle for Algiers in 1957, this journalist wrote a moving description that turned the French people against both torture and the Algerian War. “I tried,”
Alleg wrote, “by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me.”
Let us think about the deeper meaning of Alleg’s sparse words–“a terrible agony, that of death itself.” As the water blocks air to the lungs, the human organism’s powerful mammalian diving reflex kicks in, and the brain is wracked by horrifically painful panic signals–death, death, death. After a few endless minutes, the victim vomits out the water, the lungs suck air, and panic subsides. And then it happens again, and again, and again–each
time inscribing the searing trauma of near death in human memory.
Jan 28 2008
I’m sending a letter off to the American Psychological Association (APA) explaining my decision to resign membership from that organization, stimulated by APA’s failure to address the torture issue. The text of the letter follows below (with hypertext links added here to assist the reader with context).
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
January 27, 2008
Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.
President, American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4232
Dear Dr. Kazdin,
I hereby resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA). I have up until now been working with Psychologists for an Ethical APA for an overturn in APA policy on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations, and I greatly respect those who are fighting via a dues boycott to influence APA policy on this matter. I hope to still work with these principled and dedicated professionals, but I cannot do it anymore from a position within APA.
Jan 17 2008
The story of the Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz that supposedly threatened U.S. warships has been pretty thoroughly debunked by now. Now Asia Times has an article that details how the disinformation was created and spread by the Pentagon, as the Pentagon planted stories with the press, starting with CBS and CNN. Even though the encounter at sea was “not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade,” the Pentagon timed the news about the supposed provocation to a trip by Bush to the region.
The key line in the Asia Times piece is right at the beginning (my bold emphasis):
Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran’s military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.
Jan 02 2008
No, this isn’t a conspiracy theory diatribe. This is from an editorial in the NY Times by the two lead investigators of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton.
I’m sure this won’t get much press because it’s SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING to sit around and speculate about who’s going to win the Iowa Caucuses tomorrow.
But here’s the deal: Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton have written an op-ed in the New York Times accusing the CIA of nothing less than obstruction of justice in their 9/11 investigation.
Why? Because the CIA lied to them, and they know the CIA lied to them. Maybe I should let them explain it:
Dec 31 2007
The kids in my classroom don’t remember the Cold War, most of them having been born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The only enemy they’ve ever known are a few tens of thousands of religious fanatics; they don’t remember the days when entire nation-states aimed nuclear missiles at one another in pursuit of foreign policy goals that extended past the 24-hour news cycle. This makes it hard to explain that the threat posed by the Soviet bloc was the type that could cause a country to do some pretty extreme things to “protect” itself – not that it rose to the sort of “terrorists made me do it” waterboarding that we see today, but back in the heady days of the Iron Curtain, for example, the thought of surgically implanting a live cat with eavesdropping equipment wasn’t considered outside the realm of ethical behavior.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a short romp through the CIA’s litter box of secrets. Among the “presents” we’ll unearth: a Frankensteinish feline, paranoia-induced stupidity not equaled until recent times, and $20 million turd of an idea.
Dec 20 2007
In a turnabout, the CIA said “it would begin handing over documents to Congress about the destruction of videotapings showing the harsh interrogation of two terror suspects after the House Intelligence Committee threatened to subpoena two agency officials,” according to a breaking story from Associated Press.
This comes after the bombshell revelations earlier yesterday that at least four administration officials, including David Addington, Harriet Myers and Alberto Gonzales, were involved in discussions about what to do with these incriminating videotapes. dday had an excellent diary on this earlier.
The turnabout also comes after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said he was going to subpoena former and current CIA officials and attorneys if they didn’t agree to appear before the committee. The agreement by CIA apparently also includes agreement on the testimony of CIA general counsel John Rizzo, the official who is said to have ordered the destruction of the tapes, though CIA won’t commit him to a specific date.
Dec 18 2007
Crossposted at Invictus
Blogger Deep Harm over at Daily Kos did a nice job of writing up a review on Mark Benjamin’s recent article at Salon.com, Inside the CIA’s notorious “black sites”. Benjamin’s article details the case of CIA Yemeni prisoner (now released), Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah.
Mr. Bashmilah was held for 19 months in a succession of prisons, trapped inside the CIA’s secret worldwide gulag. Now the one-time CIA torture victim has filed a declaration as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company, and implicated in secret CIA rendition flights.
According to Mark Benjamin, Mr. Bashmilah — a businessman who had travelled from his home in Indonesia to Jordan to help arrange a surgery for his mother — was subjected to extreme psychological torture and physical maltreatment, first by the Jordanians:
Dec 15 2007
Fact is I don’t buy his story.
The reasons he’s out in public giving this story are my suspicions, and not yet based on facts, may never be, but than again all it takes is total honesty, by someone, to get the real story.
The whole debate, to date, revolves around one form of Illegal Torture, Waterboarding.
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou was a member of the team that captured and questioned al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002. The interrogation is one of two CIA interrogations at the heart of the current controversy surrounding destroyed videotapes.