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

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

CNN is claiming that the China may misrepresented the age of some members of its Olympic gymnastic team. 

Meanwhile, let's look at some of the lies told about the current occupant of the U.S. Presidential Palace::

1) The massive stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons allegedly possessed by the Iraq government

2) Saddam Hussein's alleged direct responsibility for the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

3) "We don't torture" (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/06/eveningnews/main1979106.shtml)- while Bush was operating torture chambers at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, and a whole chain of franchised CIA prisons across the globe.

4)  and 935 more lies about the war against the people of Iraq - see http://projects.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/?gclid=CN7byvT2opUCFQNvHgodAm2skQ

Compared to Bush's lies, which amount to war crimes according to the Nuremburg Charter, China's fudging of a few birthdays seems pretty minor.

from Alternet:

Michael Moore Dares to Ask: What's So Heroic About Being Shot Down While Bombing Innocent Civilians?

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on August 21, 2008, Printed on August 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/95906/

The noise and pageantry of the Presidential election makes it easy to forget some of the basic issues.  Beyond the fluff about "change" and "experience", there are the basic facts of the criminal occupation of Iraq - racism, greed, and brutality...

April 28, 2004

The Consequences of Colonization in Iraq

We Are the Barbarians

By M. JUNAID ALAM

A significant thing: it is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.
-Aimé Césaire

Jaw agape and fangs unsheathed, American colonialism has lashed out with severe brutality against the newly-unified Iraqi resistance, counting on its military might to crush the aspirations of Iraqis who seek to liberate their country from foreign control.

Relying so heavily on the force of arms against a people it claims to liberate, the US has inverted Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means; our policy now is politics as a continuation of war by other means.

But it so happens that this is a double-edged sword ­ with both edges thrust firmly into the heart of the occupation. For no matter how many Iraqi patriots America kills, ten more will spring forward for each who has fallen; and no matter how many are silenced by American bullets, the viciousness and arrogance with which those bullets were fired will speak loudly and convincingly to thousands of Iraqis who will be inspired to resist.

To illustrate our point it is necessary only to direct our gaze upon that great unfolding tragedy of Fallujah, the epicenter and icon of Iraqi resistance. US forces surrounded and attacked the city on the grounds of pursuing Iraqis who killed and then mutilated the bodies of four American mercenaries. The massive assault was carried out with the usual concern for civilian life: namely, none.

'Precision' weapons such as 2,000 lb. bombs and the massive Specter gunship, armed with four high-powered machine guns, were brought to bear against the town, as were attack helicopters and 60-ton tanks. Our troops employed such life-saving tactics as lobbing 18 tank shells into one house to kill one person and firing helicopter missiles at a rebel wielding a slingshot. (1) One Fallujah resident explained to the press, "As soon as the Americans see a group of people in the streets, they shoot at them, people venture out only if their homes risk being bombarded or if they must carry the dead or wounded to the city's clinics." A young Iraqi member of the US-created Civil Defense Corps saw "heavy bombings" with the town market hit, and "tanks ringing the town." (2) US snipers in the city, perhaps the only precision weapons deployed, have put their uniqueness to good use: shooting through ambulance windshields and killing their drivers. (3)

What were the broad consequences of this operation for the people of Fallujah? Thousands have fled and over 600 have been killed; the main hospital director said "most of the 600 dead in Fallujah were women, children, and elderly." (4)

McClatchy Washington Bureau

In case you forgot, it was 5 years ago yesterday that George W. Bush declared, "major combat operations in Eye-rack have ended."



image from the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane