"Doctors Claim Torture of Detainees"

[AGBF]

The title of this thread is not my own, but that given to one of its articles by AOL. (Someone in this house decided to use an AOL page as our homepage although we do not have AOL.) It is hardly news to me that the United States is torturing prisoners, although it prefers to use euphemisms for "torture". When AOL, not just, "The New York Times" reports the torture, however, I figure that perhaps American people may be waking up and realizing that barbaric acts are being done in their names, right under their noses. I would like to help any of them that are not yet aware of the torture (and the hideous abuses of the Constitution by the Bush administration) to become aware of it (and them). And may the Democrats win the next presidential election lest the right of habeus corpus be lost. (The Supreme Court just affirmed it in a 5-4 decision. If one more conservative justice is appointed we may lose that right.)

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/doctors-claim-torture-of-detainees/20080618074209990001

Deborah

 

[ksinger]

Date: 6/18/2008 2:00:16 PM
Author:AGBF


The title of this thread is not my own, but that given to one of its articles by AOL. (Someone in this house decided to use an AOL page as our homepage although we do not have AOL.) It is hardly news to me that the United States is torturing prisoners, although it prefers to use euphemisms for ''torture''. When AOL, not just, ''The New York Times'' reports the torture, however, I figure that perhaps American people may be waking up and realizing that barbaric acts are being done in their names, right under their noses. I would like to help any of them that are not yet aware of the torture (and the hideous abuses of the Constitution by the Bush administration) to become aware of it (and them). And may the Democrats win the next presidential election lest the right of habeus corpus be lost. (The Supreme Court just affirmed it in a 5-4 decision. If one more conservative justice is appointed we may lose that right.)

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/doctors-claim-torture-of-detainees/20080618074209990001

Deborah

What''s more sad to me is the number who think it''s no big deal. We may be able to rationalize these acts - there is never any lack of rationalization of evil acts - acts that in anyone other than ourselves, we would allow ourselves to see clearly and would outrage us, but the rest of the world sees our staggering hypocrisy quite clearly. It''s the finger-pointing at other countries'' abuses, real though they may be, when our own hands are filthy, that makes me ashamed. I''m a big fan of cleaning my own house before I point out how dirty yours is.

 

[Rank Amateur]

"One Iraqi prisoner, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected to electric shocks three times and being sodomized with a stick. His thumbs bore round scars consistent with shocking, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press. He would not allow a full rectal exam."


"Another Iraqi, identified only as Rahman, reported he was humiliated by being forced to wear women''s underwear, stripped naked and paraded in front of female guards, and was shown pictures of other naked detainees. The psychological exam found that Rahman suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had sexual problems related to his humiliation, the report said."


That''s IT? That''s the smoking gun proving TORTURE? Most of the stuff in the "news" story is just what the prisoners reported. The wouldn''t LIE would they? Oh wait, they HATE the United States! Sworn Enemies of the Great Satan!

Hardly enough to get excited about and hardly worth starting a thread over.

 

[ksinger]

Date: 6/18/2008 11:00:02 PM
Author: Rank Amateur
''One Iraqi prisoner, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected to electric shocks three times and being sodomized with a stick. His thumbs bore round scars consistent with shocking, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press. He would not allow a full rectal exam.''


''Another Iraqi, identified only as Rahman, reported he was humiliated by being forced to wear women''s underwear, stripped naked and paraded in front of female guards, and was shown pictures of other naked detainees. The psychological exam found that Rahman suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had sexual problems related to his humiliation, the report said.''


That''s IT? That''s the smoking gun proving TORTURE? Most of the stuff in the ''news'' story is just what the prisoners reported. The wouldn''t LIE would they? Oh wait, they HATE the United States! Sworn Enemies of the Great Satan!

Hardly enough to get excited about and hardly worth starting a thread over.

Yes. Indeed it is. That''s the sum total of all this hoo ha about torture. Except of course for the reports from FBI agents that were ignored, the misgivings of military lawyers, the torture memos by John Yoo, the OIG report out in late May of this year, and the pictures of Abu Ghraib, and the Bush administration''s admission of secret prisons, oh and rendition of suspects like Maher Arar, to places like Syria. Other than that, not much though....

 

[AGBF]

Date: 6/18/2008 11:00:02 PM

Author: Rank Amateur

Hardly enough to get excited about and hardly worth starting a thread over.

Before we even get to the torture, let's look at the habeus corpus issue. By what right are we even holding these people? Should they not be considered prisoners of war and be held according to the laws covering prisoners of war? If they are not prisoners of war, then they are civilians. If civilans have committed crimes, should they not then be considered criminals and be charged with crimes and tried according to civilian law? If so, do they not the the right to trial and the right to an attorney?

I mean, either they are soldiers or they are civilians. They cannot be both.

The Supreme Court just affirmed the right granted explicitly in th US Constitution to habeus corpus. The state must produce a body for trial. It cannot lock someone up secretly forever without charging him. The founding fathers made it explicit because in Europe many rulers had managed their affairs by throwing their enemies in dungeons or otherwise making them disappear.

This link leads to an article in, "The New York Times" on the man who may have been the influence behind the recent Supreme Court decisions on legality of the military tribunals held at Guantanamo. He is not a kind and gentle man, as you will see if you read about him. He is an insider who saw that the confessions produced by the interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere were giving false intelligence because of the way thhey were being conducted.

There is plenty of evidence about torture, much of it freely admitted by the United States. We can discuss that, too, if you like. The prisoners don't have to lie since the US admits to waterboarding, which we called torture when it was used by the Gestapo during World War II.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/us/23gitmo.html?pagewanted=print



Deborah

 

[AGBF]

Below is an excerpt from the article mentioned in my posting above. You must sign up at, "The New York Times" website to read the article for which I provided a link since it is somewhat old, so I thought I would post a bit of it and give you an incentive to read on .

July 23, 2007
Unlikely Adversary Arises to Criticize Detainee Hearings
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. —


"Stephen E. Abraham’s assignment to the Pentagon unit that runs the hearings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, seemed a perfect fit.

A lawyer in civilian life, he had been decorated for counterespionage and counterterrorism work during 22 years as a reserve Army intelligence officer in which he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. His posting, just as the Guantánamo hearings were accelerating in 2004, gave him a close-up view of the government’s detention policies.

It also turned him into one of the Bush administration’s most unlikely adversaries.

In June, Colonel Abraham became the first military insider to criticize publicly the Guantánamo hearings, which determine whether detainees should be held indefinitely as enemy combatants. Just days after detainees’ lawyers submitted an affidavit containing his criticisms, the United States Supreme Court reversed itself and agreed to hear an appeal arguing that the hearings are unjust and that detainees have a right to contest their detentions in federal court.

Some lawyers say Colonel Abraham’s account — of a hearing procedure that he described as deeply flawed and largely a tool for commanders to rubber-stamp decisions they had already made — may have played an important role in the justices’ highly unusual reversal. That decision once again brought the administration face to face with the vexing legal, political and diplomatic questions about the fate of Guantánamo and the roughly 360 men still held there.

'Nobody stood up and said the emperor’s wearing no clothes,' Colonel Abraham said in an interview. 'The prevailing attitude was, "If they’re in Guantánamo, they’re there for a reason." '

The curtain on the hearings had been pulled back a bit previously, when the Pentagon, under pressure, released some transcripts. But by stepping forward, Colonel Abraham gave the Supreme Court and the public a look from an insider at a process that remains heavily shielded.

He expanded on that account in a series of recent conversations at his law office here, offering a detailed portrait of a system that he described as characterized by superficial efforts to gather evidence and frenzied pressure to conduct hundreds of hearings in a few months.

Most detainees, he said, have no realistic way to contest charges often based not on solid information, but on generalizations, incomplete intelligence reports and hints of terrorism ties.

'What disturbed me most was the willingness to use very small fragments of information,' he said, recounting how, over his six-month tour, he grew increasingly uneasy at what he saw. In the interviews, he often spoke coolly, with the detachment of a lawyer, but as time wore on grew agitated as he described his experiences.

Often, he said, intelligence reports relied only on accusations that a detainee had been found in a suspect area or was associated with a suspect organization. Some, he said, described detainees as jihadist without detail.

(snip)

His road to notoriety, he says, is entirely of a piece with his biography. A political conservative who says he cried when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency, he says he has remained a reservist throughout his adult life to repay the country for the opportunities it offered his family. His father is a Holocaust survivor who emigrated after the Second World War.

'It is my duty,' Colonel Abraham said of his decision to come forward."


You can read more by going to the article.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/us/23gitmo.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin


Deborah

 

[ksinger]

Date: 6/20/2008 9:04:15 AM
Author: AGBF

Date: 6/18/2008 11:00:02 PM

Author: Rank Amateur

Hardly enough to get excited about and hardly worth starting a thread over.

Before we even get to the torture, let''s look at the habeus corpus issue. By what right are we even holding these people? Should they not be considered prisoners of war and be held according to the laws covering prisoners of war? If they are not prisoners of war, then they are civilians. If civilans have committed crimes, should they not then be considered criminals and be charged with crimes and tried according to civilian law? If so, do they not the the right to trial and the right to an attorney?

I mean, either they are soldiers or they are civilians. They cannot be both.

The Supreme Court just affirmed the right granted explicitly in th US Constitution to habeus corpus. The state must produce a body for trial. It cannot lock someone up secretly forever without charging him. The founding fathers made it explicit because in Europe many rulers had managed their affairs by throwing their enemies in dungeons or otherwise making them disappear.

This link leads to an article in, ''The New York Times'' on the man who may have been the influence behind the recent Supreme Court decisions on legality of the military tribunals held at Guantanamo. He is not a kind and gentle man, as you will see if you read about him. He is an insider who saw that the confessions produced by the interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere were giving false intelligence because of the way thhey were being conducted.

There is plenty of evidence about torture, much of it freely admitted by the United States. We can discuss that, too, if you like. The prisoners don''t have to lie since the US admits to waterboarding, which we called torture when it was used by the Gestapo during World War II.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/us/23gitmo.html?pagewanted=print



Deborah

Good articles, both of them.

And don''t you just love how people apply a double standard, a different yardstick of behavior? Hey waterboarding and holding people without charges are evil war crimes when other countries do it, but when WE do it, well we''re the good guys, so by definition those things become OK and justifiable. Besides, OUR reasons for becoming the monster are so much more noble than others''. The rationalization is just staggering, and the rest of the world doesn''t have the vested interest in maintaining our (self) image, so they can see they hypocrisy clearly. I just hope that even a few non US folks realize that not all of here are thrilled by our government''s policies. I''ve always been a big believer that the means ALWAYS become the ends. You can justify anything in the name of whatever, and sell your soul and ideals for whatever. And in the end you become the thing you say you hate. And so we see happening here. We torture, we "disappear", we intimidate. I wouldn''t be surprised if one of our secret prisons was a leased gulag somewhere...

 

[strmrdr]

My thoughts on this subject is that no one should be held without a fair trial.
I believe that is a fundamental human right that transcends all other matters.
If they have enough evidence to hold them then there is should be enough for a trial or they were improperly taken in the first place.


As far as torture goes it is wrong and anyone caught doing it should be given a trial and if found guilty jailed.

 

[movie zombie]

what most people don''t seem to understand is that we''ve been in a state of constitutional crisis for some years now with the administration purposely failing to abide by and support habeas even though it is a constituional guarantee for not just citizens. i''m glad the court has finally come to its senses and ruled in favor of habeas [notice i said in favor of habeas, not in favor of the detainees].

movie zombie

 

[ksinger]

To both Strm and MovieZombie: Word and word, ditto, thritto, and what they said.

 

[ksinger]

Honestly, is anyone actually still clinging to the fantasy that the US isn't torturing people? Hey! And now we see we got pointers from communist China!! Fifty years from now, this era will probably be one of the most shameful in American history. Provided of course the history books haven't been purged and all the historians shot....maybe we'll end up taking that pointer from the Chinese also. It worked there...

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

For the full article, take the link above, but here's a clip...

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.