Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt

Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama

By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet
Posted on May 15, 2009, Printed on October 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140022/

 

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated … through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.

The force is officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force. Despite President Barack Obama's publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture -- and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces' actions illegal -- IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.

IRF: An Extrajudicial Terror Squad

The existence of these forces has been documented since the early days of Guantánamo, but it has rarely been mentioned in the U.S. media or in congressional inquiries into torture. On paper, IRF teams are made up of five military police officers who are on constant stand-by to respond to emergencies. "The IRF team is intended to be used primarily as a forced-extraction team, specializing in the extraction of a detainee who is combative, resistive, or if the possibility of a weapon is in the cell at the time of the extraction," according to a declassified copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta at Guantánamo. The document was signed on March 27, 2003, by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the man credited with eventually "Gitmoizing" Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons and who reportedly ordered subordinates to treat prisoners "like dogs." Gen. Miller ran Guantánamo from November 2002 until August 2003 before moving to Iraq in 2004.

( Read more... )

I will be blunt, for certain conclusions are now inescapable, even this early in the miraculous, transcendent Age of Obama. Insofar as those who regularly follow political matters are concerned, and especially with regard to those people who write about politics and foreign policy -- which is to say, insofar as commentators and reporters in the mainstream media and on blogs are concerned -- to continue to believe that Barack Obama represents any kind of "improvement" over the abomination of George W. Bush is not an innocent error. To persist in delusions of this kind requires that one intentionally and deliberately blind oneself to evidence that assaults us every day.  full post here

Meanwhile maxomai , bet $100 that two waterboarding enthusiasts couldn't last 15 seconds. 



"absolutely torture..."



Eric Mancow at least had the courage to put himself on the line---where's Sean Hannity and his neo-con friends?

STORY HERE: http://www.allgov.com/ViewNews/Cheney_Rumsfeld_Pushed_for_Torture_to_Find_Non_Existent_Saddam_9_11_Link_90424

• PDF | Senate Armed Services: Inquiry into the treatment of Detainees, part 1
• PDF | Senate Armed Services: Inquiry into the treatment of Detainees, part 2
• PDF | Aug. 1, 2002, Bybee memo to CIA regarding treatment of Abu Zubaydah
• PDF | May 30, 2005, Bradbury memo to the CIA on whether interrogation techniques violate U.N. Convention Against Torture (Part 1)
• PDF | May 30, 2005, Bradbury memo to the CIA on whether interrogation techniques violate U.N. Convention against Torture (Part 2)
• PDF | Office of Legal Counsel's April 15, 2009, repudiation of previous memos regarding harsh interrogations
• On the Web | Update: 2006 Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence gathering
• On the Web | Archive of McClatchy's Iraq intelligence reporting
• On the Web | McClatchy's investigation of Guantanamo Bay detainees

Congress was Briefed in Real Time on Bush-Era Torture Tactics. Is That Why They Prefer Whitewash Commissions and Closed Door Hearings?

Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

By JEREMY SCAHILL

There are not exactly throngs of Democratic Congressmembers beating down the doors of the Justice Department demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder appoint a special Independent Prosecutor to investigate torture and other crimes. And now it seems that whatever Congress does in the near term won't even be open to the public. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said this week that he prefers that the Senate Intelligence Committee hold private hearings. The chair of the committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has asked the White House not to take any action until this private affair is concluded. She estimates that will take 6-8 months.

"I think it would be very unwise, from my perspective, to start having commissions, boards, tribunals, until we find out what the facts are," Reid said Wednesday. "I don't know a better way of getting the facts than through the intelligence committee." It is hard to imagine other Democrats bucking Reid on this and there is certainly no guarantee that the committee will release an unclassified report when it concludes its private inquiry. While Representative John Conyers says he will hold hearings, that is not the same as the independent criminal investigation this situation warrants.

Then there is the deeply flawed plan coming from the other influential camp in the Democratic leadership. The alternative being offered is not an independent special prosecutor, but rather a more politically palatable counter-proposal for creating a bi-partisan commission. This is a very problematic approach (as I have pointed out) for various reasons, including the possibility of immunity offers and a sidelining of actual prosecutions. Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights has also advocated against this, saying this week it will lead to a "whitewash:"

   ( Read more... )

from http://jktarot.com/nosupport.html
x While criticism of the US war in Iraq continues to mount, even in circles, such as the US mainstream media, where it had been effectively censored up till fairly recently, one theme is continually promoted amongst critics: we may be against the war and Bush’s policies but we obviously DO support the troops. In the face of quite reasonable conservative attacks which equate opposition to the war with opposition to the troops fighting it, the war’s critics have allowed themselves to be bullied into an intellectually and morally contradictory position. “Thumbs up!” to torture and murder in Iraq signaled by US soldier at Abu Graib prison, Saddam’s torture den now under new American management but serving the same Saddamite menu to clients.
How can someone be opposed to the war, be convinced that it is in every way an illegal and immoral policy of the US government, and yet still claim to support the troops charged with carrying out the illegal and immoral policy? Some critics have responded by claiming the apparent paradox stems mainly from a disagreement about the true meaning of “support the troops”. They allege that conservatives have sought to equate that phrase with “support the war”, and that this is an unfair or unnecessary view, given that one of the things antiwar types wish to do is to save the troops by bringing them home and out of harm’s way. In other words, the war critics say, it is certainly possible to be FOR the troops, in the sense of being sympathetic with their plight of being ordered into a dangerous place, while still being opposed to what they’ve been ordered to do there. The problem with that view is that it ignores a basic premise of the duty of any soldier—to carry out his orders even if he should disagree with the political wisdom of them. Thus, if one thinks the policy of this war is bad, for example in that it has resulted in many Iraqi citizens, of all ages, losing their lives at the hands of the US military, and if on the other hand it would have been possible to spare some of those Iraqis by having some American soldiers die instead, how does one truthfully or consistently maintain that he supports the troops but not what they do? Aren't honest opponents of the war facing a choice of saying they either support American troops, or they support the Iraqi victims of those troops? Is there really room for a nuanced position when life and death are the choices being fought over? And if there was, somehow, room for nuance in one’s view of US troops and their actions, was that not destroyed forever by the revelations and the pictures from Abu Graib? One cannot any longer hide behind the fact that the US military and the US media have conspired to paint a picture of the war as mainly the effort of America’s “finest” to bring democratic virtues to the poor oppressed of Iraq. What the United States clearly intended on bringing Iraqis was a heavy dose of “do what the hell you are told or get ready to be tortured and killed.” In other words, as someone pointed out, we didn’t close the store of torture and murder in Iraq, we just changed its management. We now know that the war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq (and elsewhere) were not the acts of a few depraved soldiers, who somehow all ended up in the same unit and guarding the same cell blocks in Abu Graib, but that their acts were the end product of a policy, approved by George Bush and his top military leaders, of tossing out the “inconvenient” Geneva Convention rules and adopting the ones favored by Saddam Hussein. This is hardly surprising when one understands that the Iraq war was fought partly for the purpose of Bush obtaining personal vengeance upon Saddam and partly to give the US control over Iraq’s oil reserves, and had nothing to do with any moral problem on the part of US leaders—who after all left Saddam in power in 1991—concerning Saddam’s treatment of his people. Indeed, this minor rationale, of saving Iraqis from Saddam, was initially far down the list of reasons given by Bush for America to go to war with Iraq. Since subsequent to the “end of major hostilities” and Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished”, the claimed primary mission of finding stockpiles of Iraqi WMD was NOT accomplished at all, and nor was the secondary one of demonstrating any responsibility of Iraq for the 9/11 attack on the US, nor the related claim that Saddam had Qaeda links (an idea which the US government has constantly hinted was true but at the same time admitted had no factual basis), Bush was left with the least important mission of all—pretending to give a damn about bettering the lives of Iraqis.. In the end, if supporting the troops means supporting Bush’s dishonest and criminal war in Iraq, and if one is opposed to that war, he must not support the troops who fight it any more than he supports the appointed President who orders them to do so. If supporting the troops instead is held to mean getting them the hell out of Iraq as quickly as possible, that worthy goal has to be measured against the fact that for every day they are not liberated from their terrible unaccomplishable mission, American troops are serving the interests of a clearly unfit and probably insane commander-in-chief. We may pity the men and women forced into the service of such a leader. We should pity more the people upon whom their service is inflicted. May 31, 2004
©2004 by J. Karlin, all rights reserved

from Dissident Voice:

Stark images of spectral men — their appearance in bright orange jumpsuits belied by legal invisibility — have been seared into the minds of many Muslims as an index of America’s anger.

But for American Muslims, abuse and disappearance of detainees are not the defining features of the “war on terror.” Eyed by the national media with a mixture of fear, anxiety, and frustration, we face heated questions that implicitly place not just individual suspects but an entire community in the crosshairs.

The questions aimed at us fall into two broad categories: “Why aren’t more moderate Muslims condemning terrorism?” and “What is it about Islam that produces terrorists?”

As the latter question assumes an inherent relationship between Islam and terrorism, the best kind of “moderate” Muslim is apparently as far removed from Islam as Mecca is from Montana.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

full article

The apologists for torture can’t maintain their sense of themselves without their sense of being always everywhere the good guys, always everywhere free from human limitations, free from human imperfections, not just more powerful and richer but also better in every other way.

And that’s why no matter how many books and columns and essays lay out every trivial and monumental deception of this war, every deviation and delinquency, some people are never going to see things differently. Some people are going to see what they want to see because it justifies what they want to do. It’s not because they don’t know, or even that they don’t want to know. It’s that they can’t afford to know. Knowledge would destroy their sense of self.  full post