Deep Blade Journal

Rear Adm. Harry Harris: “An act of warfare waged against us”

Broken (CCR image)

This is sad beyond belief. After four years of vicious US assault at the Guantánamo Bay camp on living, caged human beings–subjected to the cruelest, most maniacal, most hideously efficacious methods of psychological torture ever invented–three of the prisoners have finally succeeded in killing themselves.

This ruination of life and soul gives me a gut-wrenching sickness. My country has committed unconscionable acts against these helpless detainees that no notion of revenge can justify. Every rule designed to protect prisoners of war or criminal defendants has been denied them, or only weakly restored after monumental legal struggles. Most of them were rounded up after their names were sold by bounty hunters, not necessarily on anything resembling a “battlefield.” But only a few have had any opportunity to challenge their detention in something other than a military monkey court.

So, it is incredible that a high-ranking US military officer would describe these same helpless detainees who killed themselves as some sort of dangerous enemy attacking him. But that is exactly what the commander of Joint Task Force-Guantánamo did.

Rear Adm. Harry Harris: They are smart. They are creative. They are committed. They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own… I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.

Of course! These animals want to kill themselves just to hurt us.

See what you think you might do yourself, dear reader, if you experienced the kind of treatment men like Adm. Harris issued to the 100% innocent Tipton detainees, released in 2004, described in testimony from a document found at the Center for Constitutional Rights:

I started to suffer what I believe was a break down. I couldn’t take it any more. I asked to speak to a psychologist but all they said was that I should be given Prozac which I didn’t want to have. The other prisoners who had this were just like zombies and put on loads of weight. I was having flash backs and nightmares about the containers and couldn’t sleep at night. I was in this block for 3 months. While I was there I was interrogated three times. I kept telling the interrogator that I was about to crack up and I’m sure it was obvious that I was in a bad way. All he would say to me was that I should `behave on the blocks’ which made it clear to me that they had thought carefully about the best way to punish me and break me and decided that as I am quite sociable and like talking I should be kept with people I couldn’t communicate with. I began to behave in the way they wanted. I would not make jokes in the interrogation and just answered their questions. At the end of my third interview the interrogator told me to ‘hang in there’ because he could see how distressed I was. I was moved from the Chinese block three weeks later……the ERF team would come into the cell, place us face down on the ground then putting our arms behind our backs and our legs bending backwards they would shackle us and hold us down restrained in that position whilst somebody from the medical corps pulled up my sleeve and injected me in the arm. They left the chains on me and then left. The injection seemed to have the effect of making me feel very drowsy. I was left like that for a few hours with my legs and arms shackled behind me. If I tried to move my legs to get in a more comfortable position it would hurt. Eventually the ERF team came back and simply removed the shackles. I have no idea why they were giving us these injections. It happened perhaps a dozen times altogether and I believe it still goes on at the camp. You are not allowed to refuse it and you don’t know what it is for.

Now, imagine doubling the time the Tipton detainees suffered in this dungeon. Is there a chance your mind might break down too?

Update (22:35): I knew Zeynep at Under the Same Sun would blog on this topic. Check it out. She picks out the term Adm. Harris uses–“asymmetrical warfare”. How odd that the overlord of Gitmo, with total domination over his prisoners, would suggest that the power of the suicides is so unbalanced, so “asymmetrical”, over him. Zeynep has it right, “Everything is warfare against us. We do nothing. We are victims of everything.” Maybe the quivering shell of a child whose body a US grenade smashed is “warfare against us” too. Fascists view themselves as victims of those they dominate.

US enlists Europe in outrageous practices

“Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”

–President Bush, before Congress & the world on September 20, 2001

On 911, terrorism inside the United States became all too real. Our country was justifiably aggrieved. In the interest of justice, it is the responsibility of government at a time like this to make choices that are morally right.

President Bush and the US government have failed completely in the pursuit of justice for the 911 attacks. “Justice” must have moral and ethical meaning rooted in law. I learned in school that 800 years of jurisprudence following the Magna Carta has established a fair, public system for trying suspects of crime. But when “justice” becomes a show put on by a leader like President Bush–who decides to tear up the old rulebook and write a new, secret one–tyranny is the result.

To transform the Terror War into something other than the tyranny the American administration has made it, persons accused of terror involvement must be punished in public trials where real evidence is presented. The usual excuse is that such evidence must be secret for reasons of national security. This excuse cannot cut it if there is an interest in justice.

Now, the latest report on the unjust American practice of “extraordinary rendition”–the kidnapping from one country of a person determined by unknown means to be a “terror suspect” and removal to a secret prison in another, possibly for torture–asks, “Are human rights little more than a fairweather option?”

Just before all of the hoopla concerning the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Mr Dick Marty of Switzerland issued this report for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on “Alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states.”

The story of rendition is now very long and complex. An overview of the practice in February 2005 by Jane Mayer was published in The New Yorker magazine, concluding with a quote from a CIA official that the US can conduct renditions because it is “the strongest animal in the jungle.” Washington Post reporter Dana Priest later revealed that gulags in Eastern Europe were destinations in the “spider’s web” of secret sites to which Marty now refers. The countries with these facilities were named to be Poland and Romania.

Strong world reaction followed, including the hounding of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her fall 2005 travels. A good summary of published stories after the Priest article is here.

Marty laments that there is “no formal evidence at this stage of the existence of secret CIA detention centres in Poland, Romania or other Council of Europe member states.” Official denials (in my opinion worthless denials) and the “circumstantial” nature of evidence available so far is what the New York Times chose to emphasize. Of course the evidence is circumstantial, because neither the Americans nor the European PACE members chose to cooperate by supplying hard evidence.

So Marty has harsh words for European states that assisted the American kidnapping program:

even though serious indications continue to exist and grow stronger. Nevertheless, it is clear that an unspecified number of persons, deemed to be members or accomplices of terrorist movements, were arbitrarily and unlawfully arrested and/or detained and transported under the supervision of services acting in the name, or on behalf, of the American authorities. These incidents took place in airports and in European airspace, and were made possible either by seriously negligent monitoring or by the more or less active participation of one or more government departments of Council of Europe member states.

The report is long (92 pages, not 67 as the Times reported) and worth reading. But for now I’m just going to pick out one major point, quoting Marty on the American conception of justice in the Terror War:

It is significant that, to date, only one person has been summoned before the courts to answer for the 11 September attacks: a person, moreover, who was already in prison on that day, and had been in the hands of the justice system for several months4. By contrast, hundreds of other people are still deprived of their liberty, under American authority but outside the national territory, within an unclear normative framework. Their detention is, in any event, altogether contrary to the principles enshrined in all the international legal instruments dealing with respect for fundamental rights, including the domestic law of the United States (which explains the existence of such detention centres outside the country). The following headline appears to be an accurate summary of the current administration’s approach: No Trials for Key Players: Government prefers to interrogate bigger fish in terrorism cases rather than charge them.

This legal approach is utterly alien to the European tradition and sensibility, and is clearly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As was again amply illustrated on Thursday with the extra-judicial killing of Zarqawi, justice in the Bush-era Terror War will be hard to come by.

Another deluge

Broccoli row

With 125 mm of rain so far this week, and at least 25 mm more on the way by the end of the weekend, we’re pretty close to drowning again. The broccoli seedlings finally went in on Tuesday, the only decent day here in the last eight. They actually seem to like this cool, wet weather. The tomatoes, on the other hand, would prefer something much hotter and sunnier.

Meanwhile, the sump came on yesterday afternoon. This indicates we are nearing soil saturation. Yikes. I don’t know if we’ll be able to keep the next storm off of the basement floor.

“Bloodbath Beyond the Green Zone”

Patrick Cockburn is truly indispensable for learning the truth about Iraq. No US news sources present the situation in terms anything like this:

The Shia, 60 per cent of the Iraqi population, won two elections last year but the US has fought to deny them complete control of the Iraqi state. ‘So far,’ one high ranking US official was quoted as saying, ‘the Shia have not demonstrated that they can govern, and they have to demonstrate that now.’

Cockburn goes on to describe the realities making Iraq ungovernable after the US invasion not only removed the regime of Saddam Hussein, but unleashed a security nightmare for the great majority of the Iraqi population–from brutal occupation practices, from indiscrimminant bombings carried out by some of the anti-occupation resistance, from criminals, and from marauding militias conducting ethnic cleansing.

He writes of a bomb killing 19 set off in the Baghdad Shia district of Sadr City, “in retaliation for attacks by black-clad Shia gunmen, probably from the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, on two Sunni districts in west Baghdad the previous day.

Cockburn now reports from Arbil in the Kurdish region. In a town called Khanaqin in this northern part of Iraq, Cockburn writes about “refugees who are desperately seeking refuge here as Sunni Arab death squads and assassins drive out Kurds and Shia Arabs from the rest of Diyala” Province.

Cockburn quotes a police lieutenant about people arriving in Khanaqin who were forced to leave their homes in other parts of Iraq after, “They all got warnings telling them to go within 24 hours, or be killed.”

“Baghdad is paralysed by terror. In Basra one person is being murdered every hour according to an adviser to the Defence Ministry,” writes Cockburn.

Meanwhile, as I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, Tony Blair and George W. Bush live in an Orwellian world of delusion, where up is down, black is white, and war is peace:

Tony Blair arrived the day after Maliki announced his cabinet. Blair’s statements at a press conference were useful only as a check list of what is not happening in Iraq.He praised the formation of ‘a government of national unity that crosses all boundaries and divides.’ But that is precisely what it does not do….

As government, US, and UK control over Iraq deteriorate, the almost totally unreported response of Iraq’s neighbors is stunning:

Intervention by neighbours of Iraq is generally invisible, often taking the shape of money flowing to favoured parties and militias. But high up in the snow-streaked Kandil mountains on the Iraq-Iran border in north-east Kurdistan it is easier for Iran to send cruder signals to Baghdad and Washington without provoking a military response. Here, on the night of 31 April to 1 May Iranian artillery fired 2,000 shells into Iraq signaling to the US and its Kurdish allies that Tehran is not intimidated by any threats against it.

Here we begin to see why the Bush propaganda offensive against Iran and its nuclear program is rather toothless. Iran is in a position to increase greatly the misery of the US occupation.

Cockburn concludes by arguing persuasively that the occupation has increased, not suppressed, the level of violence in Iraq.

Note: This posting was delayed by problems with Blogger.

Bloggers Against Torture

Look for this logo in Deep Blade Journal and in many other blogs, like those listed way below on the left in the anti-torture blogroll. It means that we all support the Blogger Alliance Against Torture, formed in support of Torture Awareness Month, June 2006.

Check out some of the links in that blogroll. There are people from many points on the spectrum united in opposing torture. Hell, even President Bush, Secretary of State Rice, and other administration figures (perhaps not so much Vice President Cheney) all say they oppose torture, and insist the US actions are “legal.”

Of course, for reactionary administration officials to be saying these things is a canard of the worst degree, born of their evidently concealed desire not to appear to have completely ripped up the rules, perhaps with an eye towards future defenses in their richly-deserved war crimes trials. But at least it is a point of reference in language that can serve to unite many of us across the spectrum in the notion that torture is wrong, international law is right, and not even President Bush is above the law as much as he may think he his.

When forced to justify these frankly un-American policies on torture, the president and his supporters inevitably invoke the threat from Islamic terrorists. Sure, this threat is real. And it is currently being enhanced as people opposed to US policy throughout the world begin to engage in more actions designed to harm the power that they see as a threat to their own existance. The Terror War and its torture component nakedly is a total failure in its stated goal, and serves much more to destroy the core values of America than it does to protect Americans.

So let’s put this notion of fear of terrorism in perspective, as former Vice President Al Gore did in a stunning speech on January 16, 2006:

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment’s notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march—when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

As an anti-torture blog, Deep Blade Journal stands to do its part to protect those core American freedoms and values from the much bigger threat now posed by the Bush presidency run amok.

I want to thank the always-interesting, always-valuable Rodger Payne for putting me on to the link for this campaign.

Torture readings
Deep Blade Journal has since 2004 given extensive coverage to the outrageous mendacity of President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and Secretary of State Codoleezza Rice. These now-infamous actors and their underlings have led a worldwide campaign of dungeon creation as they have usurped dictatorial power to kidnap, rendition, humiliate, and torture–in a manner any reasonable person would believe to be contrary to US and international law–on highly dubious claims of “unitary” executive power.

Here is a selected list of some postings in Deep Blade Journal and elsewhere that help tell the Bush torture story so far:

Sadly, this list probably will grow as time goes on. Torture stories will continue to post in Deep Blade Journal this month, and beyond…

US military can’t stand to admit there are more atrocities than one on its hands

I blogged the Haditha massacre story here in March when Time magazine first published it. Not only that, I pointed out the nature of the intentional “rampage” of the whole US military operation in west-central Iraq during many months of 2005. The idea, it seems, was to break the infrastructure and break the back of the entire population in order to exact a “cost” for it’s widespread support of armed opposition to the American invaders and their domination of Iraq’s constitutional and electoral process.

Now the US military has exonerated itself for yet another war crime that I discussed–the March 15 massacre of a family in the town of Ishaqi, near Balad, north of Baghdad. Photos showed dead children with bullets in their brains, killed execution style. Later, Knight Ridder reporters dug up an extensive police report detailing the horrific nature of the massacre:

The villagers were killed after American troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers’ animals and blew up the house, the document said.

Contradicting the plain evidence found in the police report and accompanying video, the US now wants to say that,

Allegations that the troops executed a family living in this safe house, and then hid the alleged crimes by directing an airstrike, are absolutely false.

Furthermore, the raid was legitimate under the “rules of engagement” because troops had tracked a “cell leader for Al Qaeda” to the home.

That’s handy. If the military can say it was looking for “Al Qaeda”, anything goes, even the slaughter of a 6-month-old child, as was one of the Ishaqi victims. It’s little wonder that Iraqi reaction to this US self-exoneration has been outrage:

Issa Hrat Khalaf, whose brother was killed in the ensuing air strike, demanded an independent investigation and said the U.S. forces responsible for the killings should be executed.“Where are the terrorists? Are they the old lady or the kids?” he said in a telephone interview, referring to the fact that women and children were among the victims. “It looks like the lives of the Iraqis are worthless.”

Heirloom tomatoes in

Brandywine and purple brandywine planted this year

With any luck, they’ll look like this in August.

Meanwhile, Pandagon has garden blogging with a message from the zone maps: global warming is real.