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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Israel & Saudi Arabia AGREE: Iraq War creating not just attracting terrorists

Normally, about the only thing you could get Israel & Saudi to agree on is the weather.

But this analysis debunks the Bush argument that at least the Iraq War is attracting terrorists to Iraq instead of the US, as if there is a finite number, and we can kill enough to resolve the problem.

This study was done by examining interrogations of captured foreign fighters in Iraq, and background investigations of suicide bombers in Iraq.

The history of past insurgencies including our own failed war in Vietnam show that this is asinine. Every time to you kill someone, you inspire a brother, or cousin, or neighbor to take up arms. And if the war itself is obviously unjust it can attract sympathizers from outside even to the point of taking up arms, as the Israelis and Saudis are noting.

We had something similar happen with a terrorist here in the US about 150 years ago. John Brown was a well-known anti-slavery activist who raided slave-holding farms to liberate their slaves. When he tried to seize weapons from the Harper's Ferry armory, he was caught and hung. Rather than quell the anti-slavery movement, it galvanized it (the original lyrics of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" were about Brown's death). Within a few years, the Civil War followed because Lincoln said he would not allow slavery to spread into anymore new states.

The same thing happened to the French in Algeria. A French director made an extremely realistic movie, The Battle of Algiers, about the insurgency against the French. At the very end, the French capture the leader of the rebels hiding in a hole in a wall, and say "at last, we have broken the back of the rebellion." As the screen fades to black, the words that crawl up the screen say the rebellion continued, and a few years later, the French were forced to leave.

Just because people aren't white (or as white as us), don't speak English, and put up with a dictator for decades, doesn't mean they are stupid or less human than us.

KEY EXCERPTS:

The Boston Globe

Study cites seeds of terror in Iraq
War radicalized most, probes find

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | July 17, 2005


However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.

A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."

****

Obaid said in an interview from London that his Saudi study found that ''the largest group is young kids who saw the images [of the war] on TV and are reading the stuff on the Internet. Or they see the name of a cousin on the list or a guy who belongs to their tribe, and they feel a responsibility to go."

Other fighters, who are coming to Iraq from across the Middle East and North Africa, are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and have families, according to the two investigations. ''The vast majority of them had nothing to do with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do with Al Qaeda today," said Reuven Paz, author of the Israeli study. ''I am not sure the American public is really aware of the enormous influence of the war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab world."

FULL TEXT:

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/07/17/study_cites_seeds_of_terror_in_iraq/