McCain falsely blamed troops for torture during debate

During the first debate with Barack Obama, John McCain said this would solve the torture problem:

So we have a long way to go in our intelligence services. We have to do a better job in human intelligence. And we've got to -- to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don't ever torture a prisoner ever again.

CNN TRANSCRIPT

Wow. So the problem is ignorant interrogators, not the people in the White House who gave the orders?

Didn't CIA interrogators refuse to use the methods they were ordered to use until they got the legal cover from the torture memos, written under the guidance of then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales who went on to become attorney general?

The resulting memo defined torture as only "death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function."

The few soldiers prosecuted at Abu Ghraib weren't trained in interrogation techniques, but they were following orders from the interrogators at the prison who told them to "soften the prisoners up" for them, and the methods they used were remarkably similar to a then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's torture memo said to be posted publicly at Abu Ghraib by prison commander Gen. Jane Karpinski.

Recently, it was discovered that the White House principals actually met to micromanage torture methods like sleep deprivation and waterboarding, and incredibly, Bush said he knew and approved, according to ABC News.

The Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Contrary to the Bush administration spin on this, the military is hardly ignorant on torture nor do they approve of it apart from Bush's handpicked generals.

The abuse at Abu Ghraib was first reported by an Army MP, Joseph Darby.

When Navy lawyers at the Pentagon, who work for JAG became aware of the torture policy, they contacted the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights and urged them to publicly and strenuously oppose it.

In November of 2006, then dean of West Point, US Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, flew to Southern California to ask the producers of the TV show 24 to stop glorifying torture since it was influencing the thinking of cadets more than the training they were getting at West Point.

Perhaps most daming evidence against the "blame the troops" position on torture is the Army's own interrogation manual. In addition to describing as torture virtually every technique approved by the Bush administration, it gives this simple test of whether something is torture:

If your contemplated actions were perpetrated by the enemy against US PWs [prisoners of war], you would believe such actions violate international or US law.

FM 34-52

Jesus said it more simply, "Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you" (Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31).

All the Christians who have supported Bush have forgotten that in their lynch mob blood lust.

To his credit, John McCain bucked the Bush administration on torture for a while and even wrote a moving op-ed on why it was a bad idea.

Our commitment to basic humanitarian values affects--in part--the willingness of other nations to do the same. Mistreatment of enemy prisoners endangers our own troops who might someday be held captive. While some enemies, and Al Qaeda surely, will never be bound by the principle of reciprocity, we should have concern for those Americans captured by more traditional enemies, if not in this war then in the next.

(John McCain, Newsweek Nov. 21, 2005)

Unfortunately, McCain gave up this moral and pragmatic position to gain the support of the Bush administration and voted to give Bush the discretion to use torture.

After being involved in the torture debate since it broke out in 2004, McCain knows this is not an issue of poorly trained soldiers but of elected civilian leaders and their appointees who put their own personal agendas ahead of our military's traditional ethics, our laws, and the Geneva Convention, which we helped write. They put their own agendas and personal gains ahead of the safety of our troops with their torture policy, as McCain's own earlier words testify to.

Instead of defending the troops, McCain is siding with the worst president in our history and blaming them for the conduct of the White House, which has used the troops as human shields to deflect responsibility for their own war crimes.

That is beneath contempt.

At a future debate, I want McCain to be asked who bears primary responsibility for the torture that has occurred: the troops in the field or the civilians who gave the orders.

BUSH TORTURE RESOURCES

Declassified torture memos

NY Times guide to torture memos

Geneva Convention against torture

Overview of Abu Ghraib abuse: 60% or more innocent

The most famous torture victim's story

Detaining, abusing, & raping children

VIDEO: Torture Memo Author Asked if President Can Bury Someone Alive

How Democrats can be to the right of the GOP gay issues AND PRO gay marriage

As I listened to the umpteenth story these last seven years on Republican torture it occurred to me that Democrats have a profound advantage on gay issues--we only support VOLUNTARY gay sex.

When the Abu Ghraib story broke, the defenses offered by the right in addition to the "few bad apples" lie was that it was no worse than a fraternity hazing or "Skull & Bones initiation" as Rush Limbaugh said (an inadvertent slip revealing what kind of people populate these 'elite' fraternities).

So I guess these republicans and their apologists think VOLUNTARY gay sex is bad, but COERCING likely heterosexuals to have gay sex at Abu Ghraib and in out of control police stations on "Guiliani time" where I seem to recall a guy in custody being sodomized with a plunger. Bush has fought tooth and nail to keep the power to do these tortures and only this week barred the use of sexual torture (and even then left some wiggle room so he could still authorize it). On a less trumpeted issue, it's not hard to figure out which side of the prison rape issue republicans fall on. Most have no trouble with gay rape of heterosexuals when it's part of punishing someone for selling a dime bag of pot or the like (truly violent offenders or big gangsters aren't in much danger).

The basis of right wing concern about gays is that they will somehow "convert" people to be gay. The vast majority of gays, especially those who want to get married, want to do their gay things only with other gays.

By contrast, if you are a heterosexual and cross the GOP, you could be forced to perform gay sex acts.

There's got to be a way to boil this down to a bumper sticker.

I bring this issue up at all because I know some democratic candidates for president will be tempted co-opt GOP positions on gays like opposing gay marriage and or even civil unions.

This approach could give them a chance to appeal to right wing homophobes without kicking a loyal constituency in the nuts as supposed "centrist" Democrats seem so willing to do.

Would saying Dems only support VOLUNTARY gay sex help with righties?
	NO-- the right would really prefer lynching. anything that emphasizes live and let live is repugnant to them
	NO--righties would not be able to process something they didn't hear from Rush or Fox News. They are the gimp locked in the trunk of the right wing co
	MAYBE--if it got enough airplay and Democrats had the balls to do it (two ginormous and unlikely ifs)
	YES--the fear of being raped would trump the more obtuse threat of being converted by osmosis if gays married.
	I'm George W. Bush, and sodomy is not gay unless I say so. See sodomy is gay sex between two terrist loving Democrats. When you rape a prisoner, yur jes showin' em who's boss.
	other
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Hey Dumbass, Impeach Bush & Cheney NOW!

EXCERPT:

The survey by the American Research Group found that 45 percent support the US House of Representatives beginning impeachment proceedings against Bush, with 46 percent opposed, and a 54-40 split in favor when it comes to Cheney.

FULL TEXT

According to the Wall Street Journal, support for impeaching Clinton never broke 30% and was two to one AGAINST it even at the peak of 24/7 impeachment coverage (contrast that with the near blackout of impeachment talk about Bush).

How many average people does it take to cancel out the big business interests that like Bush's lax oversight, cronyism, and murder of Iraqis to give their oil to his corporate friends at ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, or BP?

Please share this with Pelosi and other Democratic leadership. It would also be a good idea to send this screenshot to Republicans and ask them how many votes they think they are going to get if Bush & Cheney are still in office on election day 2008. Emails are good, but they essentially get scanned for the issue and counted. Better to FAX them. Some staffer has to physically handle it, and the congressman or senator might even see it if they are walking by or waiting for a fax on their golf itinerary from some pharma lobbyist.

Contact others in Congress

We need to make our government fear us more than CEOs and lobbyists, or they will continue to play us for suckers, use our tax dollars and military to seize assets for their corporate cronies, and funnel our kids into the meat grinder to feed the dogs of war.

VIDEO & PICS: More of new Abu Ghraib photos & how methods developed

The only place to see all of the new photos is in the real player video of the story, which includes the first video clips from inside the prison I've seen. You definitely need moving pictures to capture a guy banging his head against a door he's chained to.

The good news is that these were leaked by people in the Army who are repulsed by this and the policies that allowed it to happen, and therefore may rebel against other orders that do our country more harm than good.

The official Bush administration position is that this is old news and those who are responsible are being punished.

But consider these things:

Rumsfeld authorized these techniques:

the use hoods, stress positions, isolation, stripping naked, deprivation of light, removal of religious items, forced grooming, and menacing with dogs.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20050425.html

Our current attorney general approved this White House torture memo:

Torture, the memo says, "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23373-2004Jun7.html

Both definitions violate the Geneva Convention, American laws, and the Army Field Manual on Interrogations which states that the guiding principle is the Golden Rule--treat your prisoners the way you would want ours treated.

Bush himself has said we don't torture, but when John McCain wrote an amendment simply requiring the military to follow their own interrogation manual and not torture people, Bush first asked for an exception for the CIA and then, rather than make his first veto of a prohibition of torture, accompanied his signature with a signing statement saying he could ignore this law whenever he chooses.

This business of issuing signing statements that contradict the plain sense of laws Congress passes is what Samuel Alito meant when he used the term "unitary executive" in his confirmation to the Supreme Court; he meant the president can do whatever the hell he wants and it's legal. Like term limits and balanced budgets, conservatives will suddenly change their mind about this if there's a Democratic president.

The first link on this is best and you can only see some of the pics there. It requires real player though, so if the player doesn't open automatically,you may need to copy the URL and paste it into real player. The slideshow link has the same clip in flash player.

AUSTRALIAN STORY:

http://203.15.102.143:8080/ramgen/media/6304abughraib.rm

STILLS:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/16/abu_ghraib/portfolio.html


STILLS & SLIDESHOW:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/abu/#salon

Democracy Now did three stories on these new photos. The most compelling was on the history of the development of these methods which started around the same time as the governments research into using drugs, hypnosis, electro-shock and other methods mind control. Ironically, those more exotic ones proved less effective than a couple of simpler ones: sensory deprivation, self-inflicted injury, and culturally based humiliation. One university researching sensory deprivation found they could induce psychosis within 48 hours by cutting off light, sound, and touch.

The researcher also goes into more detail of the mind control program, MKULTRA, and his research into CIA involvement in the drug trade in Southeast Asia, which is gripping stuff. Audio and video is available too.

Even these methods are relatively useless for obtaining information, but since at least 60% of the detainees at Abu Ghraib were innocent, it is far more likely this was done to incite fear in the general public or recruit informers as the guy in the famous Christ pose photo said he was pressured to become.

KEY EXCERPTS:

HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228

Friday, February 17th, 2006

Professor McCoy Exposes the History of CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror

SENSORY DEPRIVATION

From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered -- they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked. What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill -- and the first breakthrough came at McGill. And it's in the book. And here, you can see the -- this is the -- if you want show it, you can. That graphic really shows -- that's the seminal C.I.A. experiment done in Canada and McGill University --

AMY GOODMAN: Describe it.

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, it's very simple. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown.

And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.

SELF-INFLICTED PAIN

Now, then the second major breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, “You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.” And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.

Now, if you look at the other aspect of those photos, you’ll see that they're short-shackled -- okay? -- that they're long-shackled, that they're made -- several of those photos you just showed, one of them with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in front of him, people are standing with their arms extended, that's self-inflicted pain. And the combination of those two techniques -- sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain -- is the basis of the C.I.A.'s technique.

CULTURAL ASSAULT STARTED AT GUANTANAMO & EXPORTED TO ABU GHRAIB

Now, one of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of the war of terror, in late 2002, he appointed General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantanamo, alright, because the previous commanders at Guantanamo were too soft on the detainees, and General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantanamo, they perfected the C.I.A. torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.

And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created these things called “Biscuit” teams, behavioral science consultation teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother, and by the time we're done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm, and it had a three-fold total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they sent General Miller to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. Professor McCoy, we’re going to break for a minute, and then we'll come back. Professor Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

FULL TEXT:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228


OTHER DEMOCRACY NOW STORIES ON NEW ABU GHRAIB PHOTOS:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522219

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522224



abu ghraib torture photos democracy now memo kubark mkultra video

President can torture suspect's CHILD says torture memo author

I thought these guys were losing their ability to shock me, but they did it again.

John Yoo wrote the torture memo for the White House that said it wasn't torture unless it resulted in death, organ failure, or impairment of a major bodily function.

The issue raised in this debate are not hypothetical.

Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker has said he seen tapes of children being raped at Abu Ghraib, and former prisoners and guards have separately told similar stories of children abused there.

http://www.sfbayview.com/072104/hersh072104.shtml



The author of this piece says the true purpose of torture is to terrorize Iraqis into obedience, and more broadly as an example to those who might resist us in the future. That sounds harsh, but think about how Stalin used torture. He grabbed people at random, including the wife and son of one of his closest lieutenants. Stalin personally told the guy of their arrest and that they were on their way to a work camp in Siberia and asked him what he thought about it. He unhesitatingly said, "They must have done something to deserve it." Stalin had them released.

The guy in the famous Abu Ghraib Christ pose photo confirmed the purpose, and his release proves that he was no threat to the occupation. This is from an interview with him:

What did they ask you during the interrogations?

\"They wanted to know if I was fighting against the occupation. But also if I knew people in the area in which I lived: I had the impression that they were searching for someone who would become a collaborator, they wanted information. They wanted me to become \"their eyes\" in the region.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=15727

If they use force and police powers to coerce obedience overseas, it is not hard to see them taking the additional steps to do the same here, and the recent revelations about warrantless wiretaps on Americans shows that they are not restrained by law or morality here either--only by what the American people will take before they say enough and stop it.


KEY EXCERPTS:

http://rwor.org/a/028/john-yoo.html

John Yoo – Presidential Powers Extend to Ordering Torture of Suspect's Child

by Philip Watts

December 30, 2005, posted at revcom.us

John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.

This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.

What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, any where, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.

***

[relevant portion of the debate]

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

[audio of this exchange: http://rwor.org/downloads/file_info/download1.php?file=yoo_on_torture.mp3 ]

****

This fascist logic has nothing to do with “getting information” as Yoo has argued. The legal theory developed by Yoo and a few others and adopted by the Administration has resulted in thousands being abducted from their homes in Afghanistan, Iraq or other parts of the world, mostly at random. People have been raped, electrocuted, nearly drowned and tortured literally to death in U.S.-run torture centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay. And there is much still to come out. What about the secret centers in Europe or the many still-suppressed photos from Abu Ghraib? What can explain this sadistic, indiscriminate, barbaric brutality except a need to instill widespread fear among people all over the world?

FULL TEXT:

http://rwor.org/a/028/john-yoo.html



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