Wow, that is some interesting stuff. I seriously learn something new each and every day.
Facial Hair Removal

Thank you, Robert.  Sodium,I tried to remember where I read the piece on Israeli torture, vut I can’t so far. I read a lot. It emphasized that torturing children was routine, like torturing adults.

This Zionist torture, like the whole War on Terrorism has been imported into the US.  There was a children’s wing in Gitmo and it was official US policy that age was no bar to punishing Terrorists.
Israel exports torturers to the US, who use them partially because they do not have enough Arab speakers.  Israeli torturers were also used in Iraq.
A defendant was tried on capital charges at Gitmo in a rigged trial for a crime he was supposed to have committed when he was 15. It was aborted because of objections of participating legal officials.

I am relentless because Zionists have been successful in concealing, disguising and diverting attention from the barbarism they support in defending the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And in concealing that it has being imported in the US.

This is true of liberal Zionists and TD truthers as well.  Inherit continually states that what Robert prints isn’t true and Sepharad justifies her Zionism by her care of her children and horses.  Her last commnet on Israeli prisons was that they were like universities, where prisonerss could read, etc. 

What Israel and the US are doing is absolutely barbaric, and it is essential that the American people understand that Zionists defend it in one way or another.  They have largely hijacked US policy, especially now that they have helped put Obama in office.  they support war, neoliberalism and civil despotism, both in Israel and in the US. 

And they support the policies of the political gangsters currently in power, however embarrassed they are to have them visible.  Both Jewish and Christian Zionism is evil, and leads to gibbering deranged truthers like Trith who identify with torure and oppression.  Zionistss are turning the US into another Israel, and we will be the Palestinians.

By Sodium, April 27 at 7:32 pm #

“I have known that Israel has been torturing Palestinians adults,men and women,but I have not known that it has been TORTURING CHILDREN. I need help here.

Since TORTURING CHILDREN is a new information to me,can you,somehow,provide me with some proof for that? Any references? Haaretz or any other Israeli newspapers will do,for my files.”
======
Prisoners

Palestinian Children Do Not Have the Right to a Fair Trial Under the Israeli Military Court System

Defence for Children International/Palestine Section
April 18, 2007

“In the 40th year of Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories, Tuesday 17 April 2007 marked Palestinian Prisoner’s Day.

Currently there are approximately 380 Palestinian children in Israeli custody, many of whom are awaiting trial or sentence, and others who are serving lengthy periods of imprisonment for such minor offences as stone throwing.

Article 40 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which the State of Israel is a signatory and State Party, gives children the right to a fair trial, the right to liberty while awaiting trial, the right to be heard, the right to privacy, the right to be informed, to have access to a lawyer and support from family and to be treated with dignity during the trial process.

Israel arrests, detains, interrogates, prosecutes and sentences Palestinian children pursuant to a set of Military Orders issued by commanding officers of the Israeli occupying forces, a system which has existed since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. Palestinian children who are arrested by Israeli military personnel are deemed by Israel to be offenders against the “security” of the Israeli State and are subsequently prosecuted under the Israeli military system in Military Courts; a system which also prosecutes Palestinian adults.

The Military Court system and procedure, on the surface, can be compared to that of a jurisdiction of criminal prosecution however the specific rules and Military Orders which operate within the Court are conducive to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and cancel out any opportunity or right a Palestinian may have to a fair trial.

Israeli Military Order 132 defines a Palestinian child as a person under the age of 16 and those children over the age of 16 are sentenced as adults and imprisoned with adults. Palestinian children are subjected to the same arrest, interrogation, trial and imprisonment procedures as adults, by the Israeli State.

Palestinian children, when under the arrest of Israeli soldiers, are not advised of their rights, are not given immediate access to a lawyer or contact with a parent, guardian, other adult relative or an independent support person. Palestinian children are deprived the right to a family visit while held in a detention centre for interrogation, which can last several weeks but even after the conclusion of interrogation, a Palestinian child may remain in a detention centre for an indefinite period where family visits are not allowed. Palestinian children can be deprived a visit from a lawyer while under interrogation for security reasons and under Israeli military law, this can last up to 90 days. In some circumstances, a Palestinian child may only meet his lawyer for the first time at the first court appearance in the Military Court.

Most Palestinian children are detained from the moment of their arrest until the end of legal proceedings. They are usually arrested in their homes in the middle of the night by numerous armed Israeli soldiers and are rarely granted bail by the Military Court.

Palestinian children are interrogated in detention centers and in many circumstances are assaulted, beaten and tortured during the interrogation process. Torture methods include psychological threats of harm to or imprisonment of family members.”

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/nofairtrial.html

RE: ...  Why didn’t they just say, “Prisoner A admitted to X, Y, and Z”? I still don’t get it.”

Right, makes no sense. The CIA/MI6/MOSSAD nexus authors the Global War Of Terror, is literally 6 moves ahead of every situation on the board, nourishes the patsy schools, builds the legends, executes kidnappings, every sort of false flag provocation imaginable (from suicide bombings to 9/11) and spins the media from the inside out. So, this begs even further the question: why torture anyone?

The only conclusion that makes any sense is this: To terrorize everyone! The message: Don’t nobody mess with us! Nobody stops us! Not unlike Al Capone beating his betrayers’ to death with a baseball bat at a banquet in their honor. The rest of the boys got the message.

The legitimation of torture has been imported from Israel with the War on Terrorism.  Israel has been torturing thousands of Palestinians for decades, including Palestinian children.  This is an estential tactic if you are going to occupy a population, especially if you are going to ethnic cleanse them over years.

The Gops initiated this torture which was approved by leading Dems.  Obama is continuing the wars of the War on Terrorism, and consequently the torture necessary to it.  Along with the bombing of people’s homes, weddings, funerals and public buildings.

It appears, however, that he now turning the torture over to client states so he can continue to say, “America does not torture.”  Under rendition, the US merely pays the people to do it.  He is maintaining rendition, which Obama cheerleaders have sanitized.  He continues to support Isaeli torture along with its continued ethnic cleansing.

As elements of the Jewish population begin to side against the oppression of the Palestinians, Israel is now teargasing, beating and shooting Jews as well as everyone else.  Those of us who find Israeli barbarism a disgrace to the Jewish people, and its policies self defeating, are all considered self-hating Jews by Zionists, who identify with Jewish power rather than the Jewish people.  Inherit and Sehpahrad are among those, as well as the other Jewish and Christian Zionist lemmings.

Prof. Marjorie Cohn has been on the case for a long time. http://www.marjoriecohn.com

This morning, on a WBAI radio show, that he is one of the producers, Michael Ratner, Pres. of the Center for Constitutional Rights (which has a long history of fighting for the Guantanamo torture victims, and first group of lawyers to do so, I think), “Law and Disorder”, noted that the media is doing a lot of coverage of the torture, not almost nothing about the Afghanistan war.  He asked where is the peace movement on fighting for getting the US out of Afghanistan?

Bagram is being enlarged and was the template for Guantanamo abuses.

The show was taped for WBAI http://www.wbai.org, “Law and Disorder” before the weekend, but aired this morning.  (Archived, free. Also on their own website.)  Ratner had not heard Press Sec’y Gibbs say his bit, I suppose yesterday, on the torture investigation, prosecution, “Pres. Obama wants to move forward not look back.”.  (My paraphrase but the main phrase is correct.)  Obama seems to be moving back and forth on aspects of it and it’s very “parsed”, but ever moving back and forth….

Folktruther, April 27 at 11:29 am #

Oh, I see, Inherit, you just raise some distractive gibberish when reality intrudes on your comments. I hate Obama, I hate Jews, etc. 
****************************************

You do hate Obama. You’ve been attacking him since before he won the election and continued while he was President-Elect and haven’t let up. I can’t remember one policy he’s enacted that you agreed with and did NOT attack him.

Plus, you are clearly a self-hating Jew—a very sad thing.

**********************************
Actually that never occurred to me, I just always thought you were dumb. Well, live and learn.
*************************************

“Thought” and “FolkTruther” should never be in the same sentence without a negative connecting them.  “Live and learn” is only for those who are willing to learn, which you are not.

Still, you cannot and will not address my view on Obama’s play on prosecuting the torture advocates and practitioners—you were too busy inventing stories about me as a red herring.

Maybe in a week or two you’ll come up with something…....ridiculous.

Oh, I see, Inherit, you just raise some distractive gibberish when reality intrudes on your comments. I hate Obama, I hate Jews, etc.  Actually that never occurred to me, I just always thought you were dumb. Well, live and learn.

Sorry, FT—I’m wise to your game. 
Since you are a total Obama hater, clearly you can’t think of answer to my analysis, so you are attempting distraction instead.

No revolution today!  Just repairing more and more the damage Botch did to the Constitution, despite what Chris Hedges thinks.

But Inherit, you said that you agreed with Fadel 100% and Fadel, possibly faciously, argued for the torture of torturers.

And I didn’t say, and certainly didn’t mean to imply, that you were anything like Dershowitz.  I know you are barbaric but I never thought that you would sink that low.

I confess I don’t fully understand you, and you aren’t even female, which would explain it.  Probably it’s the effect of Alycia, which takes years to wear off.

Ed Harges, April 26 at 10:34 pm #

FT: It’s true; in fact, as I recall, ITW heartily despises Dershowitz.
******************************

I never thought I’d say this but…Thanks, Ed! I hope someday to find myself sticking up for you, too.  I mean that.

I’m beginning to think FolkTruther makes up this outlandish shit about me to get me so angry I leave off challenging his absurd propaganda so he’s free to spout it.  It’s a wonderful Republican/Rovian technique he’s picked up. Used by Ann Coultergeist all the time.

Does your significant other know you’re modeling your political “arguments” on Annie-the-Hun?  What a defender of freedom.

Back on topic:
I actually think Obama is either a) backing off from a goof, or b) giving cover to allow Holder to seriously go after torturers while giving himself the APPEARANCE of being dis-interested in the party of the torturers.

Think about it. (It blows all of FT’s crappy theories out the window). 
It’s simple.
It’s elegant.
It’s legal.
It’s politically savvy.

1) Say you aren’t going after the torturers, just stoping the torture.  Makes the Right think you aren’t going to simply make political hay out of it—the way Botch used 9/11 against America.  You aren’t interested in retribution, merely readjusting the path ahead.
2) Holder says: Wait a minute. As Chief Law Enforcement Officer I’m bound by honor and duty to go after high-level criminals who violated some of our most serious laws and laws we are bound to uphold by international agreement.
3) Obama says or infers he cannot interfere in a criminal investigation—that’s Obstruction of Justice and as a Harvard law professor he knows that.
4) Holder then goes after the torture monsters and (well, we ALL know most of ‘em, if not all of ‘em are neo-con GOPers) it’s NON-POLITICAL!

SHAZAM!  Truly brilliant.  I LIKE this President!

re: By Inherit The Wind, April 26 at 10:21 pm:

FT: It’s true; in fact, as I recall, ITW heartily despises Dershowitz.

Folktruther, April 26 at 3:12 pm #

Fadel, torturing anyone is a bad idea.  What greater proof do you need than Inherit approves of it.  Israel routinely tortures Palestinians which is why Zionists like Dershowitz want to legalize torture in the US, to legitimate it.

***********************************

Dammit Folktruther, stop lying about me and ascribing to me positions precisely 180 degrees from what I’ve stated.

It’s a nasty, shitty, libelous habit you have.

In fact, I agreed TOTALLY with Fadel on this one. 

You are either deliberately lying about me out of a malicious need to cause a battle.  Or you are just an idiot incapable of reading the English language.

I do not accept Dershowitz’s view. I do NOT advocate torture.

Though, in your case, I may be willing to make an exception, but not to EXTRACT information, but, rather, to INSERT it through that thick, warped skull of yours!

You really need to figure you why have this schizo need to deliberately lie about me.  Deliberately.

Ed Harges I think we’re in furious agreement that these misfits enjoyed the torture but the confessions were another matter. A confession is a legal document and even if the contents are a tissue of lies the signature at the bottom has to be genuine because forging the signature would be a crime. They can stonewall and say what they did wasn’t torture (even though it was)and therefore not illegal but if even one of the signatures was found to be fraudulent it would undo all their efforts in the torture chamber. And people are amazingly stubborn when it comes to signing a document they know frames them for a crime they didn’t commit.

Maher Arar, after ten months of false imprisonment and torture in Syria was a terrified and broken man but he still refused to sign one last lying document that they wanted him to sign before he was sent back to Canada -not because the Canadian government did anything to help him of its own accord but because Arar’s wife had conducted a one woman campaign for his release. His Syrian torturer solved that problem by kicking Arar until he signed, and also put his fingerprint on the final page. The 9/11 Commission relied almost totally on the ‘evidence’ contained in tortured confessions like these for its manufactured pre-9/11 scenarios. There is no evidence for example that Ziad Jarrah (alleged rogue pilot of United 93) was ever in Afghanistan with Mohammed Atta - apart from the tortured evidence of Ramzi Binal-Shibh who, due to extraordinary rendition, was in the hands of the U.S. secret service and had not been seen for years. When Arar got back to Canada he had to go to court to clear his name, presumably at his own expense, which he did and received a large compensation payout from the Canadian government, which broke international law by allowing the US to send him to Syria in the first place.

The torture is done by the muscle, because they’re good at it. But the questions put to the person being tortured come from others,the brains of the organization who know what they need them to confess to. It’s a perfect system. What a shame it’s against the law.

Way to go, Ed.  I made a mistake once two or three dcades ago I thought I was wrong about something. Obama can’t investigate or even stop torture while maintaining his mainstream position of continuing Bush’s policies.

The Bushites had to torture prisoners to make them confess to 9/11 or whatever because otherwise they would deny it to their lawyers, guards, other prisoners or whoever if they were not killed.  And killing them would lessen the credibility of their truth assertions.

Fadel, torturing anyone is a bad idea.  What greater proof do you need than Inherit approves of it.  Israel routinely tortures Palestinians which is why Zionists like Dershowitz want to legalize torture in the US, to legitimate it.

Ed,

Good on you for both looking deeper into the matter and being willing to change your mind when the facts presented themselves.  It’s not often that i see someone actually follow through with the motto of “trust but verify”.

He may have no problem with bringing Bush/Cheney to justice, but he certainly doesn’t want a full blown investigation that would almost certainly implicate ranking Democrats.

What’s most clear in all of this is that the Obama WH has played the issue about as well as they can.  Now they’ll just have to hope that the swine flu gets everyone’s mind off of it.

Threat of prosecution is as detrimental to obtaining Actionable intelligence as torture. These low ranking operatives will Miranda Up. Thus essentially giving US no info or distorted info about what really happened and who ordered it.
Obama didn’t just release those to ‘clear the air’ he released those to push congress to get off it’s ass and to low rankers to line up to testify.Those who have nothing to hide in Congress are calling for investigation- those who have the most to hide are calling it a ‘Witch Hunt’ ( How did McCain “know” with in 3 days the ‘Anthrax came from Saddam’???).
Same goes for those who were forced to abid by these ‘legalized’ methods. Better to be the first to testify than the last.Lets not forget there are Miltiary laws against going against orders too- esp when they have been Deemed legitmate by the Commander in Chief, insubordination, mutiny, Treason?Obama’s release of the documents is basically the question ‘Want to play ball Scarecrow?’.They want to play ‘Wheres his Birth Certificate’, “he’s a socialist”...He’s going to throw the Fireball ‘Are you a Traitor and a Criminal’ right back at them. Theres a good number of Repugs (and some Dems) who should be looking for their own spider holes to crawl into- much like W.Cheney should heed the wise underlying Advice of the Adage ‘Thou Protest too much’, He’s after You and your lil’ Dogs Rummy and Wolfie too. Cheney should be exercising his Miranda Rights, Because everything he says ‘Can & Will be used against him in a court of law.‘Revenge a dish best served Cold. Oh and How Sweet it is!

Fadel Abdallah, April 25 at 12:32 pm #

Those nuts who are trying to belittle and downplay the seriousness and gravity of torture should be rounded up and subjected at least once to one of each of these torture techniques, so they would know how they fare! We should start with those fascists whose names appear in the following piece From Media Matters for America!
************************************

This isn’t going to change the fact that you hate my guts, but…

As very rarely happens, I agree with this post of yours 100%. 

Without commenting on your post directly, as I think it doesn’t need a comment, I’d like to answer the right’s idiotic assertion that they have PROOF that water-boarding isn’t torture. 

They argue that the anti-torture training special troops go through is the same stuff.  Of course they leave off a few obvious points.
1) Most importantly, the trainee can stop it at ANY time—he/she simply backs out or washes out of that particular program, but they have the FINAL control over their abuse and their willingness to accept it. The torture victim does not.  Look, reality show idiots let themselves be locked in coffins full of spiders and other creepy unpleasant stuff.  Key—They LET it happen.
2) The trainees KNOW that their tormentors cannot go beyond certain limits to actually injure them—there’s a confidence of that limit.  A torture victim never knows when the NEXT level of torture is going to be inflicted—ripping out fingernails and teeth, putting out eyes, etc.
3) As has been pointed out, after WWII we EXECUTED Japanese who tortured Americans with water-boarding during the war.

I think about my black-belt test. After hours of tough, hard trials, a late hour was spent fighting, round after round until I thought my guts would come up—and they nearly did.  I was kicked in the stomach, repeatedly, when I was too tired to block, kicked in the head, and pounded and pounded and pounded. (I did get some licks in, though).  Then there was an hour of ground-fighting—which takes even MORE out of you.  But I didn’t HAVE to do this—I had it WITHIN MY CONTROL to stop it.  Had I not, it WOULD have been torture.

And it’s just that simple.

Ed Harges, April 24 at 7:49 pm #

I still don’t get it.

**********************************************

I think this may be the single most insightful post I’ve ever seen you make. 

I can’t answer your question, I can only make a guess: The neo-cons surrounding Botch were SO hung up on their desire to “get” Saddam (remember: they were planning it when Botch was still only the President Elect in Dec 2000), and their belief that he was a threat that they would do and justify ANYTHING to prove it. 

So…torturing these victims wasn’t out of sheer sadism (though I’ll bet the chickenhawks enjoyed it) but because they CONVINCED THEMSELVES Saddam MUST have been connected.  Like a religious belief.

But that’s just a guess on my part.  As has repeatedly been pointed out: While the Botch team was brilliant at getting their clown elected and re-elected (granted by illegal means) they were TOTAL MORONS at governing. 

Even if what they were doing was part of “the Plan”, they still f***ed up at it—they didn’t even have the Mussolini moment of “He made the trains run on time”—they just had Limbaugh and Delay and Coultergeist to attack “liberals”.

Still, it’s just a guess on my part to answer EH’s insightful question.

I have a bit of an apology to make. After reading up on the actual conference process that led to Obama’s release of the memos, I am no longer certain that he’s “on our side”. It seems to me that he may have made a calculation that fighting the FOIA requests for the memos would generate too much unwanted controversy, and so for this reason alone he released this material — not because he’s a principled “good guy” who wants Bush and Cheney and others brought to justice.

So: I’m sorry. I think I goofed.

We shall see about Obama and torture. I read ‘On Bullshit’ a couple of years back, by the way. It struck me as bullshit. Princetonian philosophical bullshit is is bullshit of the highest order. It’s the kind where one speaks in such a convoluted way that the very effort to understand the trivialities or tautologies being stated makes them seem profound.

It appears that the Obama cheerleaders are content to follow Obama in whitewashing past and present torture.  Ed Harges states that Obama is lying when he opposes prosecuting it, Tony Wicher says he is transparantly supporting prosecuting it, and Cyrena states that the law is so unclear that it is better if the UN prosecutes it. All of this is bullshit.

Since Israel routinely tortures to fight resistence to ethnic cleansing, the Zionists also proclaim their opposition to torture, and support Obama in not proscecuting it.

That being the case, the threat is that torture will be legitimated in the US, as spying was, and as targeted assassination and the 9/11 homicide was.  The torture that is now done sporadically, as in the pre-emptive raid on the demonstrators at the Gop convention, is in danger of being done systematically.  And just as Jane Harman, a Zionist shill, was wiretapped under the law that she helped pass, Obama shills will be in danger of the same violence that they now tacitly support.

By Folktruther, April 25 at 2:29 pm

On the contrary, by releasing the memos, Obama has really kept his campaign promise to restore transparancy in government and has really put an end to this nation’s use of torture. That was not rhetoric, but decisive action. I’m hoping we will see Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in the dock by the end of the year.

Torture was used because we had a party of psychopaths in the whitehouse.

Re: By diamond, April 25 at 5:27 pm:

Good lord, Diamond, I’m not saying that I doubt that they tortured people!

It’s just that I can’t believe they did it because they “needed” confessions. They didn’t need confessions — all they had to do was lie to the public and say these people had confessed! When did they ever hesitate to lie to us?

I just think they must have tortured these people for some other reason - out of sheer sadism, perhaps.

Ed Harges you’re ignoring some important facts. First of all they had NOTHING ELSE. There was no actual evidence linking KSM to 9/11, any more than there was any actual evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks - the director of the FBI has admitted on at least two occasions that there is not one shred of evidence linking Osama bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks. They had to manufacture evidence because ultimately they would have to put these people before some kind of kangaroo court (they planned to hold military trials where they had total control and none of that habeus corpus, magna carta stuff would intervene) but they still had to produce something, anything that would give a veneer of legality to the proceedings. It’s the reason presidents build libraries, however many crimes they took part in or ordered, they like to leave the impression that they cared about learning and civilised discourse and behaviour. These trials would be nothing more than political theatre but they liked to have a confession: like the libraries, it looked good, however their real target was the court of public opinion. And the simple fact is, fascists torture. It’s what they do. They do it to prove their superiority to those they torture and they do it because it’s their particular form of pornography. The link between fascism and sexual sadism is well established. The rapes of the little boys in Abu Ghraib (now confirmed by both Seymour Hersh and General Taguba)served no military or intelligence purpose whatsoever but, what the hell, they were a lot of fun for the torturers and the fact that they did it in front of the boys’ mothers who were helpless to intervene at risk of their own lives was an added thrill. It’s hard for you to think like these people because you’re probably a normal person. You can call Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld a lot of things but normal people is not one of them. Think about the anthrax letters: is it normal for a government to send weaponised anthrax through the mail to senators of the opposition party because they’ve opposed a piece of legislation? I didn’t think so. In Russia it might be but not, one would think, in America.

The political problem that Obama has is that the brutality of torture conflicts sharply with the sacred bullshit of America supporting Freedom and Democarcy in the American mainstream truth tradition.  I am using the concept of ‘bullshit’ here in the philophical sense of professor H. G Frankfort in his trenchent philosophical treatise ON BULLSHIT.

Torture is a hot button issue that way mass murder is not, the Bush-Obama policy of bombing homes and weddings not arousing nearly the same uproar.  Death apparently does not capture people’s imagination as much as torture.

But many of the most important power figures that put Obama in office were neoliberal Zionists, whose advisers surrond him.  And Israel routinely tortures Palestinians to prevent resistence to its ethnic cleansing. So Zionism opposes banning or even informing people about its torture policies.

Obama is trying to straddle this ideological divide by releasing torture memos and not legally acting on them.  Since the architects of torture know where all the bodies are buried, and fnnctioned with Dem complicity, they cannot be brought to open trial. 

And since the War on Terrorism against populations cannot be fought without torture, now being done as usual by client regimes in prisons around the world, and probably continued by US financed agencies as well, there is no way to operatively define them as illegal without ending them.  And ending the War on Terror.  Which the Zionists support and helped initiate, and so can’t be ended by Obama.

So the solution that Obama is trying to implement is to PROCLAIM that the US does not torture while continuing the torture in practice. And this is what the TD Obama cheerleaders are trying to legitimate.

Those nuts who are trying to belittle and downplay the seriousness and gravity of torture should be rounded up and subjected at least once to one of each of these torture techniques, so they would know how they fare! We should start with those fascists whose names appear in the following piece From Media Matters for America!
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“Torture, handshakes, and Pulitzers, oh my!

This Week’s Top Story:

Apparently, torture is friggin’ hilarious to media conservatives!

For most rational human beings, even the notion of torture is bone-chilling. Media conservatives, on the other hand, apparently find it hilarious. Following President Obama’s release of four previously classified Justice Department memos that had authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees—including “stress positions,” “cramped confinement,” “sleep deprivation,” and “the waterboard”—numerous conservatives in the media have downplayed, mocked, and jeered the notion that those practices constitute torture. Hard to believe? Here are just a few of the many examples:

  * Conservative leader and radio host Rush Limbaugh asserted, “If you look at what we are calling torture, you have to laugh,” said that “if somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn’t torture,” and claimed that “appeasers” have “water[ed] down” definition of torture like “NOW gang” did with definition of domestic violence.
  * Radio host G. Gordon Liddy compared the proposed technique of placing a detainee who “appears to have a fear of insects” in “a cramped confinement box with an insect” to his appearance on a game show, stating, “I went through worse on Fear Factor.”
  * Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee mocked the same technique: “Look, I’ve been in some hotels where there were more bugs than these guys faced.” Huckabee went on to state that under the Obama administration, “We’re going to talk to them, we’re going to have a nice conversation, we’re going to invite them down for some tea and crumpets.” Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson replied, “That usually works with your kids, too, right? When they’re in trouble for something, they just tell you everything.” To which her co-host Steve Doocy joked, “Mr. Moussaoui, it’s time for you over in the time-out chair.”
  * To buttress his support of torture, Fox News’ resident conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Glenn Beck aired a clip from Fox’s 24.”

Paolo writes:

“BUT—torture is VERY useful for creepy governments to extract “confessions” that are POLITICALLY useful.”

But Paolo, if that’s all you wanted, why didn’t they just lie? Why not simply tell the public that the prisoner confessed to X, Y, and Z?

It seems awfully precious of these people, who obviously do not scruple to lie whenever convenient, to go to the trouble of extracting an actual confession.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
~ Benjamin Franklin ~ February 17, 1775 ~

How strange it is that the “I was just following orders” is used as a rationale for these calculated acts against human decency. The precedent set by the United States at the Nuremberg tribunals, clearly states that this was and is no excuse for enabling barbarism. Strange… wasn’t the United States a signatory nation for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? But that, and Nuremberg, and even the Magna Carta, have become quaint useless artifacts of a forgotten time. This is not good, any way you look at it.

True justice demands that Bush, his cronies, AND the ones who performed the actual torture hang at Nuremberg.  An American has a duty to refuse illegal orders.

The torture masters of the KGB were experts at this sort of thing. Our own masters in Washington learned their lessons well.

Torture, as the CIA has said for years, does not yield reliable information. The victim may or may not give up useful information; more likely, he way say whatever his captors want to hear, or what may seem like plausible (though misleading) intel.

Look at it this way: if your side knew that capture and torture was a possibility, how would you prepare for it, so that no useful information would come forth? You would coach your guys by having them memorize convincing-sounding (though false or misleading) stories. You could even set up stuff that seems to confirm the false leads.

For example, you could make up a fake story about a plan to crash planes into tower X. You could put fake plans on some computers, and make sure those computers later get captured and taken as evidence. You could send out some electronic chatter confirming the plan to hit tower X. And so on and so forth.

BUT—torture is VERY useful for creepy governments to extract “confessions” that are POLITICALLY useful. That is exactly what the Bush Administration was trying to get with waterboarding KSM. They wanted a tortured “confession” that would PROVE Saddam had WMD. KSM, probably realizing how ridiculous that assertion was, seems not to have confessed. He probably thought it would be too obvious he was lying if he said such a stupid thing.

Do you remember the old film from the Vietnam war, in which our dazed and shambling pilots were dragged before cameras to “confess” their war crimes?

Do you think they might have been waterboarded? Oh—but if they were, that’s okay. Fair is fair. If it’s legal for us to do it to the other side, then it’s legal for them to do it to us.

By the way, locking someone in a box with bugs is an old KGB technique. You can read about it in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The KGB’s favorite insect was bedbugs. As Solzhenitsyn described it, the victim would at first scream and struggle for hours, confined in a box with hundreds of bedbugs. Then, he would stop resisting their bites and just let them gorge themselves.

Yes, our heroic boys in Washington really learned their lessons well from their KGB counterparts.

The release of these documents proves what author R.M. Koster once said, that “hell is a bureaucracy”. Some actual good may come of this, but it also serves as a very convenient diversion away from the fact that the remaining national treasury continues to be looted by the banking/insurance crowd that President Obama seems to hold so dear.
After constant indoctrination about the U.S. being the good guys, it is quite a shock for some to come to grips with the government’s brutality. The new indoctrination, via television programs about terrorists, has not, as yet, convinced all Americans that torture is necessary and good. But alas, so many embrace the doctrine of the bully. Their only answer to violence is more savage violence.

Ed,

It is hard to understand. Maybe this is just how people like Cheney and Rumsfeld get their jollies.

It’s very easy to say, “This what the law says, and so Obama must issue immediate warrants for arrests of Bush, Cheney, Pelosi”, etc., etc.

But listen, people: when a crime implicates so many people with so much power - including plenty of Democrats from Pelosi on down - then bringing all concerned to justice in the middle of two wars and a financial meltdown becomes a major structural intervention, something like performing a heart transplant while the patient is running a marathon.

Obama has clearly decided to try to prepare public opinion by a massive release of the evidence. It might not work, but it’s obvious that this is what he’s trying to do.

Torture is a national disgrace, it is also illegal: The Nuremberg defense will not do -“I was only following orders.” Well, who gave these orders? Who authorized the use of torture? The law requires that those who colluded with these crimes be investigate, charged, brought to trail, and, if found guilty, sentenced—CIA operatives, private contractors, and Bush administration officials included. There is no debate on this. Torture is a violation of the Geneva Convention that the United States Government initiated, help draft, and signed, along with other nations, on the dotted line. The US has imposed compliance with Geneva in its’ treaties and military alliances with other nations. Further, United States law makes it obligatory that Eric Holder bring charges against those responsible for the crime of torture. If Holder and/or Obama do not comply with these laws then they are engaged in a cover-up.

>A.Z. Arrow
—————->

re: By Tony Wicher, April 24 at 7:19 pm #

Tony writes:

“Obama knows what he’s doing. He released the memos. This starts a process which will go on even against his stated objections. I have heard some commentators say he is “losing control”, but I say he’s a smooth operator and this is all going according to plan.”

I agree. It’s so obvious.

Let’s see: in order to get these prisoners to produce “evidence” of a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, they adopted the torture methods successfully used by the Chinese during the Korean War to extract false confessions from US soldiers.

These would seem to be strong evidence that the Bush torturers knew the “evidence” they were looking for was phony….

...But still,  if a false confession is all they wanted, why didn’t they just lie? Why bother to torture people? Just say they confessed, even if they didn’t.  Why didn’t they just say, “Prisoner A admitted to X, Y, and Z”?

I still don’t get it.

Obama knows what he’s doing. He released the memos. This starts a process which will go on even against his stated objections. I have heard some commentators say he is “losing control”, but I say he’s a smooth operator and this is all going according to plan.

I am even nourishing the hope that he knows as well as I do that our own military and intelligence services were complicit in 9/11 and that this fact will be exposed as open investigations proceed and leads are followed up.

“Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center” in Open Chemical Physics Journal

http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM

Danish Chemistry professor Niels Harrit discusses 9/11:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_tf25lx_3o

Hear architect Richard Gage, AIA, on No Lies Radio tonight at 7PM Eastern at

http://www.911truth.org/

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
ae911truth.org

And why, we ask ourselves, were they so determined to pin 9/11 on Saddam Hussein and the Taliban instead of finding out whodunnit? Because they already knew whodunnit. All they had to do was look in the mirror. So many stuff ups: but the intelligence services are noted for their stuff ups and not just in America. The FSB in Russia can screw it up with the best of them. During the series of bomb explosions in Moscow in September 1999 which Putin blamed on the Chechens and used as a pretext to invade that country, there was a moment of light relief in the Russian Parliament.

The Duma gaffe

On September 13, mere hours after the second explosion in Moscow the speaker of the Russian Duma, Gennadiy Seleznyov of the Communist party made an announcement: ‘I have just received a report’, he said. ‘According to information from Rostok-on-Don. An apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night’.  And here it is again. That Jane Standley/building number 7 moment: only this is no mere BBC journalist, this is the speaker of the Russian Parliament announcing the bombing of a building which would not occur until three days later on September 16th. Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer himself, recognized this Monty Pythonesque moment for what it was. ‘Moscow two was on the 13th and Volgodonsk on the 16th but they got it to the speaker the wrong way round’, he said.  Sacha should have been more careful: that kind of outspokenness can get a man killed. The independent investigator appointed to investigate the Moscow bombings, Mikhail Trepashkin, confirmed that it was, in fact, an FSB officer who handed the note to Seleznyov. But not only did Trepashkin not get to investigate he was arrested and given four years for revealing ‘state secrets’. Bush and Cheney and the CIA/Pentagon lack the power to do this but if they could they would. Litvinenko described the farce in the Duma as the ‘usual Kontora mess up’. If someone gets poisoned with radioactive material for writing a book, what do people deserve who carry out terrorist attacks on their own people so they can have some wars? Even if you torture me I couldn’t tell you the answer.

Marjorie,

This is one of the most comprehensive articles I’ve read on this subject to date. Great work. Please keep it up.