Deep Blade Journal

“Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.” –Vice President Richard B. Cheney, May 26, 2007

Lately the notion that America is on the “moral high ground” no matter what it does to its “killer” enemies–who are always doing worse things–is making the rounds through wingnuttia. Glenn Greenwald dissects the phenomenon in a typically smashing post today. Here he studies how reactionary outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Professor Instapundit have picked up on the theme that weak-kneed liberal media is failing to properly position tales of “discovery” of al-Qaeda torture manuals.

GREENWALD: But now this “Al-Qaeda-does-it-too” song has become a little cause cèlèbre among our brave, pro-torture, right-wing warrior class. This “idea” — that something sinister is going on because the media reported America’s torture so extensively but is giving little coverage to Al Qaeda’s torture manuals — is now spreading rapidly among Bush followers….

Greenwald sarcastically questions the mentality of the “Epic, Existence-Threatening, Unprecedentedly-Dangerous” Islamophobic war where torture supporters are “resorting to the third-grader mentality that ‘Al Qaeda does it, too.’”

So far, the American public largely has been willing to accept “techniques such as hypothermia and waterboarding (for which some Gestapo defendants were convicted and sentenced to death at a 1948 war crimes trial).” It’s a truly disheartening situation. From Cheney on down, America has lost sight of what is supposed to make us different than the Gestapo, or al Qaeda for that matter. Instead, the wingnut justification that because they may not observe the Geneva Conventions, we don’t have to either seems to carry the day.

Accessible law blog: Balkanization

I find the arguments written by the stable of lawyers at Balkanization to be cogent and readable. These recent posts tell a lot about what is happening in our govenment while it rapidly engorges itself with wartime powers.

Read here about the “unconscionab[le] attempt to insulate such Executive `interpretations’ [of War Crimes statutes] from any effective judicial and legislative review”

Read here about how, according to FOX/White House mouthpiece Tony Snow, on the Military Commissions Act, “[T]here won’t be a written signing statement! Because, you know, unlike all those other bills that have prompted hundreds of objections and `constructions,’ this one is entirely pellucid and unambiguous, and doesn’t raise any constitutional questions.”

Read here about “termination of the writ of habeas corpus with respect to the claims of detainees and its sweeping grant to the Executive of rights to label persons enemy combatants and thereby leave them without legal rights which can be vindicated in courts.”

Finally, read here about “Rights against torture– without remedies… Any CIA official who acts in good faith will probably conclude that waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, and related techniques violate one or more of these features of American law.

“What the new Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) did, however, was to make these legal norms effectively unenforceable.”

Tyranny and impunity under the guise of Terror War

Dark Lords: Bush, Gonzales (peeking in background), and Congressional henchmen celebrate the destruction of human rights and justice.

Let’s get one thing clear right away, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 signed yesterday has not one thing to do with “Protecting America.” This entire episode is about acquisition by the president of heretofore illegal tools designed for intimidation and domination of both foreign and domestic opponents, regardless of the likelihood of these opponents to commit acts of violence.

President Bush says that, “The Military Commissions Act will also allow us to prosecute captured terrorists for war crimes through a full and fair trial.”

But he leaves out the following: The Act, along with other post-911 travesties like the Patriot Act, allow the president to declare any person an “enemy combatant” merely on his own suspicion. That person may then be arrested and permanently disappeared into a dark system of dungeons, in perpetuity, without the legal right to file a petition of habeas corpus.

Bush says that, “These military commissions will provide a fair trial, in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them. These military commissions are lawful, they are fair, and they are necessary.”

And he says that, “this bill complies with both the spirit and the letter of our international obligations.”

This is all nonsense. Not one word was mentioned by Bush yesterday, nor does one appear in the accompanying White House fact sheet about the elimination of habeas corpus, the legality of “coerced” evidence (obtained through techniques any reasonable person would consider torture), legality of evidence that can be spun from whole cloth and then be immune from “hearsay” rules, and the ability of evidence to be declared secret if a senior US official says so.

Furthermore, to great effect, Bush explains how the Act, “provides legal protections that ensure our military and intelligence personnel will not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists simply for doing their jobs.”

This is an unimaginable travesty of justice. These provisions grant impunity to CIA torturers and senior officials who have designed, promoted, and executed horrendous acts upon human beings. Details of these acts are well known to readers of this blog:

· involuntary injection of a prisoner with a tranquilizer

· prisoner put in sensory deprivation garb and blackened goggles

· prisoners shackled in uncomfortable positions for many hours

· prisoners left to soil themselves

· prisoners wrapped in humiliating positions while exposed to blaring music or incessant meowing

· forcible enema

· sleep deprivation

· flashing lights in prisoners’ eyes

· preventing visits by the Red Cross

· sexual humiliation, including squeezing of testicles, sexual taunts by female interrogators, sodomizing with a rifle muzzle, forced public masturbation, and piling prisoners into naked human pyramids

· shackling in fetal positions for 24 hours or more

· deprivation of food and water

· forcing prisoners’ heads into the dirt

· prisoner placed in a sleeping bag and tied with an electrical cord

· strangulation

· beatings

· burning, including placing lit cigarettes into prisoners’ ears and dousing a prisoner with alcoholic liquid and setting on fire

· terrorizing prisoners with military dogs

· rape of a juvenile male prisoner

· chaining in a cold room/hot room

· striking a prisoner with an empty 5 gallon plastic water jug

· administering electric shocks

· use of Taser guns on prisoners

· killing through dragging by the neck and other unknown means

· mock executions

· cuffing and pouring cold water on a subject in an act called the scorpion

· prisoner photographed with a pistol being held to head

· dragging of feet over barbed wire

· hooking wires on the hands and feet of a hooded prisoner who was told to stand on a box or else be electrocuted

All of this violates the “spirit and letter” of international law. To wit, the follwing principles embodied in The Universal Declaration for Human Rights:

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.Article 6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 8: Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10: Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11: (1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Everything about the Military Commissions Act is contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Arrest in the Terror War largely is arbitrary, based on bounty or hearsay. Hundreds of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay open-air dungeon have zero evidence against them, as this blog has discussed before. The tribunals cannot be “impartial”. Mostly the president speaks like the guilt of his suspects in the 911 horror is already established, and he offers no evidence for his examples of supposed instances where “lives were saved”.

The US administration has at no point in the last five years taken one step to insure any sort of just, internationally-recognizable verdict against a surviving 911 criminal can ever be entered. They have rounded up lots of people who had nothing to do with 911. They have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, they have tortured and murdered and granted themselves impunity for these acts. It is a sad, dark time in America.

The wholly-owned US subsidiary in Iraq has more torture there than ever; President to get blank check to define torture techniques and keep them secret

UN Envoy: More Torture in Iraq Today than Under Saddam

The United Nations’ leading campaigner against torture has issued a grim assessment of Iraq under US occupation. Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, says more Iraqis are being tortured today than when Saddam Hussein was in power. His comments come one day after the UN said more than sixty-six hundred Iraqi civilians were killed in July and August.

Funny how in all the recent protestations from President Bush–“The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it — and I will not authorize it”–there is no longer much of his once-common campaign talk of how the Iraqi people are free of torture.

Torture/Geneva fix: make it secret
The new Republican “deal” on detainee treatment allows President Bush “to write secret rules on how to treat suspected terrorists during interrogations.” Furthermore, according to the Washington Post, the “abuse can continue” because President Bush will be able to write “his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order.”

The list of “techniques” used on detainees will be kept secret under the dubious argument that the detainees do not know what they are, so we don’t want to let them know how to prepare for them.

Well, we do know what the methods and techniques are. They fall under the misnomer of “psychological” techniques. And contrary to common wisdom, they are effective in destroying a human being–these offenses are torture.

Historian Alfred McCoy explains this in his book A Question of Torture, and in this article on TomDispatch

…thanks to recent revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we are now all too familiar with these methods, even if many Americans still have no idea of their history. Upon careful examination, those photographs of nude bodies expose the CIA’s most basic torture techniques — stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation.For over 2,000 years, from ancient Athens through the Inquisition, interrogators found that the infliction of physical pain often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information — the strong defied pain while the weak blurted out whatever was necessary to stop it. By contrast, the CIA’s psychological torture paradigm used two new methods, sensory disorientation and “self-inflicted pain,” both of which were aimed at causing victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and so to capitulate more readily to their torturers. A week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly in Guantanamo), offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase torture. “We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees,” the general said. “We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations.”

Under field conditions since the start of the Afghan War, Agency and allied interrogators have often added to their no-touch repertoire physical methods reminiscent of the Inquisition’s trademark tortures — strappado, question de l’eau, “crippling stork,” and “masks of mockery.” At the CIA’s center near Kabul in 2002, for instance, American interrogators forced prisoners “to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled,” an effect similar to the strappado. Instead of the Inquisition’s iron-framed “crippling stork” to contort the victim’s body, CIA interrogators made their victims assume similar “stress positions” without any external mechanism, aiming again for the psychological effect of self-induced pain

Fools in the media paint this as just some sort of fun and games, Geneva shmeeva. These are minimum just deserts for those who the president says want to kill us. But they miss the point.

It’s impossible for any human being with an ounce of soul to not see how these techniques so dear to Bush are not humiliating, degrading, cruel, and inhuman tortures. They are the tools of domination, not of protection. And therein lies the reason why President Bush wants to rewrite the rules for his own benefit and not tell the damning secrets.

US-sponsored/approved torture is my beat

Elendil is the blogger who began signing up the Torture Awareness Month blogroll. This sad but appreciated effort is one in which I’m happy to participate. I carry the full roll below to the left.

On Sunday, Elendil posted asking the question, “Who are we missing from the blogroll?” It’s a fair question. Opposition to torture on principle should cut across all political lines. Torture should be opposed, no matter who does it.

Elendil is concerned by criticism that some points of view against torture are not represented in the blogroll. The focus of many in the blogroll is torture under American auspices. The criticism generally runs along the lines that this is “anti-American” or that an anti-torture position is seen as a “convenient way to attack America”, often supported with the accusation that “human rights abuses elsewhere are being ignored”.

It’s rare, but Deep Blade Journal occasionally catches feedback with some similarities, “I agree that you have every right to your opinion, but I think loading your site with one-sided pathos arguments only makes people less-inclined to believe your remarks.”

My response to the notion that Deep Blade Journal is one-sided, anti-American is simple: Yes, the focus of this blog is on America, my own country. But it is completely wrong to assume that I am “anti-American”. I love America every bit as much as any of my neighbors or other fellow citizens. There is nothing I want to see less than harm done to my country.

I abhor killing. I abhor torture. Where I choose to start with my opposition is torture and killing being done in my name by the leadership of my own country. Does this not make sense to be the very first place for me to work on stopping the killing and the torture? And I’m finding so much of it–cases of war-mongering and domination against other people around the planet by my own government–that full-time examination of the American world footprint is a plenty-big job.

My own country is my responsibility. Clearly, it is in America where an American citizen has the most influence. It is my responsibility as a citizen to say when the leadership of my county is wrong. And nearly every single policy of Bush’s America is wrong. No good case can be made for these wars and systems of torture, even on their own merits. If the aim is to protect the country Bush is totally and completely wrong. The immediate moral and eventual financial bankruptcy of doing it through the Bush approach of war and torture has the main effect of ushering in a debilitating and potentially catastrophic “long war”.

For many years, I have taken to heart the response of Noam Chomsky to similar needling about why his criticism chiefly is directed at US policy. In response to hostile questioning at a talk in 1991, Chomsky spoke of two perfectly valid ways to oppose atrocities and torture in the world. One is to take the in-principle even-handed institutional approach of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Their mandate with respect to torture is to report it everywhere, without political deference. The other way to oppose torture and support human rights, according to Chomsky,

is to focus on your own responsibilities. So if you’re in Russia, say, take like, say, [Andrei] Sakharov. Sakharov never said a word about US atrocities. That’s fine. I wouldn’t criticize him for a minute for that… What made sense for Sakharov was to discuss Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan, which he did. Now of course the party hacks continually denounced him. They said things like… “What about Vietnam? What about Chile? Why’re you concentrating on Afghanistan?” and so on…Party hackery is understandable and you have party hacks everywhere. But if you’re a particular human being, …if you have some moral principles at least, you ask yourself, “Well look, what am I responsible for? What can I affect?”

So I ask myself, what can I affect? The answer for me at this time is torture and killing of the US-sponsored variety.

Meanwhile, I will support others who wish to focus from a humanitarian perspective on other areas of the world, perhaps where there is no American involvement. I even believe American involvement sometimes (rarely, unfortunately) can be a plus. For example massive US-supported humanitarian aid to displaced populations in Darfur, and much greater security assistance than currently is being provided could be of great help in that particular tragedy.

It is a big world. In order for me as an American to help my country be a moral and effective humanitarian force, I insist that we set a better example than we have been setting and get our own house cleaned up after the awful excesses of our recent governments.

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.

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…

Veto talk gave the president more power to torture than if the ban had never even been discussed

Before the current one concerning the Dubai ports deal (see previous post), what was the one other major veto threat issued by President Bush? Back in October, what brought it on was,

The [US Senate’s] 90-to-9 vote to ban “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in U.S. government custody was one of the sharpest political rebukes in Washington of a system under which abuses occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan and at the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba.

Seems that the only time the Bush veto pen comes out is when there is some kind of challenge to the radical statist power the president wishes to reserve for himself beyond all reach of law.

Despite what was reported just before last Christmas–that the president relented on the McCain anti-torture amendment, backing the torture ban because the “McCain proposal had veto-proof support”–Mr. Bush got his way.

Here is how Alfred McCoy described the failure of the McCain anti-torture effort in the highly-rcommended Democracy Now! interview from last Friday:

Most Americans think that it’s over, that in last year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act 2005, which in the language of Senator McCain, who was the original author of that amendment to the defense appropriation, the author of that act, it bars all inhumane or cruel treatment, and most people think that’s it, that it’s over, okay? Actually, what has happened is the Bush administration fought that amendment tooth and nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Cheney went to Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A. McCain refused. The National Security Advisor went to McCain and asked for certain kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. He refused.So then they started amending it. Basically what happened is, through the process, they introduced loopholes. Look, at the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration ordered torture. President Bush said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the nation, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.”

Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles. One, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties. Two, that there was a possible defense for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture, and the defenses were of two kinds. First of all, they played around with the word “severe,” that torture is the infliction of severe pain. That’s when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, “`severe’ means equivalent to organ failure,” in other words, right up to the point of death.

The other thing was that they came up with the idea of intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty. The third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts. Now, in the process of ratifying–sorry, passing the McCain torture–the torture prohibition, McCain’s ban on inhumane treatment, the White House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key principles. In his signing statement on December 30, President Bush said …

“I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do to defend America.”

Okay, that was the first thing. The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a C.I.A. operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that’s a defense. So they got the second principle, defense for C.I.A. torturers. The third principle was – is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory. . .

In other words, the veto threat acheived for President Bush policy that, from his point of view (desire to use torture), is better than if the McCain amendment had never been proposed.

See also here and here.

Two kinds of sick: US torture theory and the ignorant media mouthpieces who support it

“You know, if you look at — if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I’m — yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City — the movie. I mean, I don’t — it’s just me.” –Rush Limbaugh, on his radio program, May 3, 2004. (SELF-INFLICTED PAIN and SENSORY DISORIENTATION: Alfred McCoy has a very different interpretation of what is going on here.)

Following public releases last week of large new batches of Abu Ghraib photos and a devastating UN report calling for the closure of the Pentagon dungeon at Guantanamo Bay, the US has once again dismissed any criticism. Mealy-mouthed Scott McClellan once again was sent out to dissemble.

McClellan (Feb. 16 briefing):I think that what we are seeing is a rehash of allegations that have been made by lawyers representing some of these detainees. We know that these are dangerous terrorists that are being kept at Guantanamo Bay. They are people that are determined to harm innocent civilians, or harm innocent Americans. They were enemy combatants picked up on the battlefield in the war on terrorism. They are trained to provide false information. And al Qaeda training manuals talk about ways to disseminate false information and hope to get attention.But the International Committee for the Red Cross has been provided full access to the detainees. The military treats detainees humanely, as directed by the President of the United States. And the United Nations should be making serious investigations across the world, and there are many instances when they do, when it comes to human rights. This was not one of them. And I think it’s a discredit to the U.N. when a team like this goes about rushing to report something when they haven’t even looked into the facts. All they have done is look at the allegations.

However, the stalest old news here is the notion that these are just the unfounded allegations of dangerous terrorists.

At this point, we could expect a skeptical press corps to point out to McClellan that his assertions are entirely false. A brief perusal of the UN report shows that it is based on voluminous amounts of evidence found in various documents released by the Pentagon itself, and observations recorded by US law enforcement personnel. Not only that, the UN report attacks the notion that all or even most of those persons housed at the dungeon are inhuman monsters picked up in the course of a gallant battlefield effort to stamp out terrorism. In fact, the UN says, US detention practices are arbitrary:

25. Many of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay were captured in places where there was – at the time of their arrest – no armed conflict involving the United States. The case of the six men of Algerian origin detained in Bosnia and Herzegovina in October 2001 is a well-known and well-documented example,[24] but also numerous other detainees have been arrested under similar circumstances where international humanitarian law did not apply. The legal provision allowing the United States to hold belligerents without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities can therefore not be invoked to justify their detention.

But it was way too much to expect that US media would care to look under these covers, even though the path is well worn by the ACLU and CCR.

Media Matters has an excellent analysis of an example of sickening failure of skepticism on torture by NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, who “provided McClellan’s dubious defense of Guantánamo without challenge,” despite the fact that “McClellan’s claims had previously been undermined by both the International Committee of the Red Cross and internal U.S. government emails.”

This is a superb Media Matters post that refutes fully McClellan’s falsehoods.

Meanwhile, the ignorance just piles up at the news channels. An example there was MSNBC’s Scarborough Country for Feb. 16. The host stood up against the tainted UN and for all the American lives being protected by US humanity-robbing torture techniques in the “gloves off” Terror War:

And I have just got to say to all you, friends, the reason that I don‘t understand why anybody listens to the United Nations anymore is, you just look at their track record over the past 10 years. A million people killed in Rwanda, the U.N. does nothing. Two million killed in Sudan, the U.N. does nothing. Kosovo, the U.N. stays on the sidelines.Bosnia, U.N. stays on the sidelines. Torture in Iraq, more people killed in Iraq than any other country in the Middle East, under Saddam Hussein, the United Nations does nothing.

And these people are going to come to us and lecture us about trying to figure out what happened on 9/11 and what is happening right now with people that are trying to kill you, your families, and your neighbors in America today. They‘re trying to do it. And because we‘re trying to get information from these terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, we are the target of attacks from a corrupt bureaucracy that shouldn’t even be able to stay in New York City another day.

Sadly, this passes for a reasonable argument in America today. Well gee, they’re the worst of the worst, so whatever we do to them is okay. Scarborough just dodges the very serious issues of law and basic rights to a fair trial raised by the report, and makes the issue about some unspecified general failings of the UN, rather than the inhumane policies of the UN’s most-influential member.

My news for Scarborough is that there is nothing American about imprisonment without trial–the main point of the UN report. And what on Earth can guys kept in a tiny box for four years still be telling that can protect anyone?

Alfred McCoy and history of US-sponsored torture
Sickening media mouthpieces like McClellan, Limbaugh, Scarborough, and the pussy-cat reporters like Miklaszewski enable the Bush Administration to lie about US engagement in torture without challenge. Yes, you better believe it. This is torture the US is perpetrating.

Read this astonishing book and you’ll understand much about the torture photos

University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred McCoy explains much about the roots of this torture in his new book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Here’s the flavor of it from a striking Feb. 17 Democracy Now! interview:

McCoy: …if you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, okay? In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture. It’s very simple. He’s hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous cost.

There you have it. The US-sponsored torture illustrated by the photos is clearly, most certainly not just the work of a few deranged pranksters on the night shift playing out harmless Britney Spears fantasies. Rather, it is the product of the entire history of the CIA throughout the Cold War, and now the Terror War under the orders of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.

Also go here for additional segments with Alfred McCoy. (Look for Feb. 14 and Feb. 16 Flashpoints programs.) I implore all readers to listen to the interviews cited. McCoy describes a sickening history. It’s understanding is essential for any chance for future redemption of America’s soul.