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

Why Bush impeachment doesn't make front page of LA Times, NY Times, or Washington Post

Yesterday, Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush in the House of Representatives.

Click each image to see full front page:

He provided substantial evidence of criminal activity, evidence that included the president's own public statements that were prima facie confessions of criminal guilt, from admitting he ordered wiretaps and torture, admitting privately to ordering the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, to lying about the threat from Iraq and Iran in spite of overwhelming intelligence to the contrary, lying about available intelligence warning of the 9/11 attacks, to his forcing bureaucrats to lie about the cost of his Medicare drug bill and global warming, to the endemic cronyism from Iraq to Enron to Hurricane Katrina.

This did not merit front page coverage of the nation's top newspapers, the Washington Post, New York Times, or Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post had a small blurb on it their Washington news round up.


This all in spite of this being only the third time in American history a president was impeached, and the very first poll on impeaching Bush a few years back showed the same public support for it as there was for impeaching Nixon the day before he resigned and nearly double the peak support for impeaching Bill Clinton.

All of these papers equaly ignored Kucinich's articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney.

The newspapers do have one good excuse for not covering this: the Democratic leadership in Congress has said impeachment is "off the table," so Kucinich's resolution will likely go nowhere.

But that in itself is worthy of story. Nine years ago, we impeached a president for lying in a sexual harassment civil suit deposition. That could have prevented the plaintiff from getting a fair trial though the point is moot given that the judge threw out the case and Clinton had an ironclad alibi for his whereabouts at the time Paula Jones claimed the incident occurred.

By contrast, Bush's lies, imcompetence and corruption has cost the lives of thousands of our troops in an unnecessary war in Iraq, arguably thousands in a preventable terrorist attack, the lives of a million Iraqis and loss of much of the thin goodwill we enjoyed in the Middle East. It has also cost us our reputation as a model of respecting human rights and international law. And of course it has and will cost us trillions for his war, most of it going into the pockets of cronies who have a habit of doing poorly or not doing at all the no bid contracts we are given.

Apparently, Kucinich doesn't understand the difference between the seriousness of the offenses of Clinton and Bush.

Clinton's real offense was being competent and not completely subservient to the wishes of the wealthy and powerful (though he came close with NAFTA) compared to his Republican predecessor. Bush's offenses were merely against American taxpayers and voters, who matter only to the extent that they need to be snookered into ignoring government of, by, and for the wealthy, and against the powerless people of Iraq, who do not matter at all.

On Torture: civilization vs. the lynch mob

Jeremy H posted this question on Yahoo Answers:

For all of you that are against torture?

I want to know what you would do instead?

If we can't use loud noise, sleep deprivation, ect {sic} What can we use?

Do you think sitting them down and demanding an answer by pounding your fist on the table is going to work? What type of interrogation techniques can be used?

My response (as Yurbud):

You are assuming that torture is used like in 24 with the theoretical ticking bomb. Real military and intel people say that almost never happens.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0212/p99s0...

When they really need to get information, the Israelis have found that deception works as well or better than physical torture. In one tactic, they rough a guy up, release him to the prison yard, then other prisoners say they are part of his group and ask him what he didn't tell so they can pass the info to those outside. Instead, they give it to the interrogator and get a plane ticket to the US and a green card.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bo...

Ironically, though the Israelis live with terrorism on a more constant basis, their supreme court has banned torture.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bo...

The purpose of torture is to terrify the people in the country when you release the victim or news of what you did to him gets out, the same way Stalin used it when he had people picked up at random. What kind of useful information could those people possible have? None. But they would be hesitant to get out of line because they knew a neighbor might be picked up and turn them in or turn them in to avoid being taken.
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/prin...

The guy in the most famous photo, where he is wearing a hood and blanket and standing on a box with his hands out and electrodes on his fingers, that guy was innocent. Once they figured out he hadn't done anything, they kept at him to pressure him to become an informant AFTER he was released.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=15727...

Not incidentally, when Army Maj. Gen. Taguba investigated Abu Ghraib, he found that at least 60% of the inmates were not guilty of ANYTHING, let alone terrorism. The general who ran the prison put the estimate at 90%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/abu_ghraib_...

One method of torture does work: threatening or actually abusing the loved ones of the person you are trying to break. This was done with children at Abu Ghraib. While it may work, using methods like that shows Bush is not fighting FOR democracy, and the only thing it will do to terrorism is inflame more of it.
http://web.archive.org/web/2004081614113...

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middlee...

The one guy running for president who was a POW is also the only GOP candidate who doesn't salivate at the prospect of torture. He knows that the only hope we have of our troops being treated well if captured is if we treat those we have in captivity well. Even if this doesn't work on some religious extremists, it establishes a reputation that will serve us well in future conflicts.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111305...

In World War II, German soldiers were more likely to surrender to us than fight to the death because they knew we would treat them well. Since the Soviets were retaliating for what the Germans did on the Eastern Front, they were less likely to surrender to them.

Likewise, in the first Gulf War, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who surrendered without firing a shot were probably motivated by our reputation for treating prisoners well as much as our overwhelming force of arms. I wonder if that would have been the case if they knew they would sodomized once captured.

This doesn't seem to occur too often to people on the right. They prefer the logic of the lynch mob that says I am mad and someone else must pay for it. As soon as the mob catches someone who roughly fits the profile of who they are mad at, they convince themselves that person is guilty, take out their wrath on him (or her) and feel their manhood is confirmed.

They don't even wonder why we have left untouched the countries that Congress determined DID fund and have a role in 9/11, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articl...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/...

Besides being ignorant and cruel, that logic (or lack of it) solves no problems and creates more.

A civilized society has to ask why terrorism is occurring, including whether some of our actions are giving people grievances that give them a reason to join terrorists groups (like occupying their country, propping up their dictators, or overthrowing their elected leaders, and controlling their natural resources), what we can do to reduce those grievances without jeopardizing our safety, and finally how we can capture or kill those responsible for attacking us without making unnecessary enemies in the process.

context on YAHOO ANSWERS

Wear orange until Bush and Cheney are impeached

I went to the fabric store to buy three different kinds of orange fabrics to mess around with. The high school girl who cut it for me ask why so much of the same color and I told her the World Can't Wait has come up with this campaign to show national, public support for impeaching Bush & Cheney. She got excited and said she was going to get all her friends to do it too.

The campaign would like to get critical mass on this by Labor Day, and especially have people wearing orange on ORANGE FRIDAYS.



The choice of colors has a couple of advantages:

• It echoes the orange revolution in the Ukraine, which is a great irony since Bush criticized that government for rigging elections when the exit polls didn't match the vote.
  
  
• Orange is a bright, annoying color, most people don't wear in most situations.
  
  
• Enough construction workers wear orange that it will make it look like even more support the campaign.
  
  
• It is also the color of the jumpsuits of the prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
  
  
• Rush Limbaugh has been selling orange "Club Gitmo" wear for a while, so some dittoheads will unwittingly be participating in the campaign.
  
  

The World Can't Wait has bandanas and tees, but if you can't afford to buy anything from them, you could go to a thrift store and buy a couple of orange tee shirts, or a strip of fabric from a fabric store to make a bandana, scarf, or armband. You can also buy one of those rubber wristbands in orange.





Some variations you can do with this:

• Tie an orange ribbon to the antenna on your car or side mirrors.
  
  
• Send an orange postcard to your senators and reps with just the words IMPEACH NOW on it. (or maybe tell them you'll wear orange until they do their job and impeach, so every time they see the color they'll remember they aren't doing their job).
  
  
• Send that postcard to the White House too. What the hell. You know you're on the list already.
  
  
• Put an orange banner or background on your blog.
  
  
• You might also send a nice orange tie or scarf to your favorite White House press corps reporter and say you would be honored if they wore it at press conferences, especially when they're with Bush himself. (Whether or not you tell the reporter the significance of the color is up to you). Hell, Helen Thomas might wear it even if you tell her what it's for.
  
  
• Even better, when Cheney goes hunting, he will be supporting impeaching himself.
  
  

Will you participate in this campaign?

CIA ‘refused to operate’ secret jails

I heard this on Democracy Now this morning, still the one hour of radio news you need to listen to everyday.

Our one hope for preventing the Bush administration from invading Iran and starting a world war isn't protesters or even elected Democrats, but a rebellion by the CIA and military.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker has documented the Pentagon generals dissent to Bush's goals and methods, and Sidney Blumenthal of Salon just published a book that documents how Bush has essentially been at war with the military since 2002 when they began to tell him what would happen if we invaded Iraq.

Right now, when generals dissent, they are forced to retire, which has a downside for the Bushies: they are then free to air their gripes PUBLICLY, which they are doing.

Either the Bushies will push things to the point that the military does what the CIA did in the case of secret prisons (simply refuse to follow orders) or they will realize that is the likely outcome and quietly start packing their bags for their retirement in Saudi Arabia (I think Idi Amin's cabana is now available).

There is something wrong with our democracy when the only way change can happen that a majority of Americans want is when government employees rebel. Our elected officials are not representing us, certainly not the Republicans, but sadly neither are a large number of Democrats.

KEY EXCERPTS:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/57e68ed8-48da-11db-a996-0000779e2340.html

CIA ‘refused to operate’ secret jails

By Guy Dinmore in Washington

Published: September 20 2006 22:07 | Last updated: September 20 2006 22:07

The Bush administration had to empty its secret prisons and transfer terror suspects to the military-run detention centre at Guantánamo this month in part because CIA interrogators had refused to carry out further interrogations and run the secret facilities, according to former CIA officials and people close to the programme.

***

The administration publicly explained its decision in light of the legal uncertainty surrounding permissible interrogation techniques following the June Supreme Court ruling that all terrorist suspects in detention were entitled to protection under Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions.

But the former CIA officials said Mr Bush’s hand was forced because interrogators had refused to continue their work until the legal situation was clarified because they were concerned they could be prosecuted for using illegal techniques. One intelligence source also said the CIA had refused to keep the secret prisons going.

FULL TEXT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/57e68ed8-48da-11db-a996-0000779e2340.html

torture CIA secret prison Guantanamo abu ghraib iraq war war on terror terrorism oil president george w bush donald rumsfeld dlc democratic leadership council republican GOP conservative corruption occupation halliburton colonialism white mans burden professor smartass iraq democratlies peak oil propaganda corporation fascism democracy public relations foreign policy al qaeda false flag cointelpro northwoods terrorist worst president ever failure war criminal idiot retard closet gay karl rove puppet fascist blumenthal war crimessupreme court water board john yoo Seymour Hershtorture memo nazi smartass comments resistance censored news

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

RIVETING: Brit ambassador to our ally who BOILS ALIVE dissidents

CRAIG MURRAY: I think it’s just what any decent person would do, I mean, when you come across people being boiled and their fingernails pulled out or having their children raped in front of them, you just can't go along with it and sleep at night.

The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan was so disturbed by the brutality of the regime there and the United States used that in the "War on Terror" that he made public secret memos of protest he sent to his government and the replies he got back.

He spoke to DemocracyNow the other day.

Among his revelations:

As previously reported, the Stalinist dictator of the country BOILS ALIVE dissidents. The mother of one smuggled photos of his body out of the country:

Additionally, torture is used in the same way it was in the Spanish Inquisition: members of the secular democratic opposition are tortured until the admit they are members of al Qaeda and trained in Afghanistan with bin Laden, a charge the ambassador found ludicrous.

The Bush administration cozied up to this thug because they wanted their natural gas reserves for an Enron pipeline and so they could send detainees there to be tortured.

The ambassador matter-of-factly said that the War on Terror is a cover for seizing other nations' gas and oil. Tony Blair's former environmental minister said the same.

I've just excerpted some of this, leaving out how it ties in with our torture policy, and more on the broader nature of the regime. The whole thing is worth a read though.



KEY EXCERPTS:

TORTURE HYPOCRISY IN INVADING IRAQ

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, I should say that one thing, which completely astonished me, was, as we went into the Iraq war, I saw George Bush on CNN, making a speech the day the real fighting started, where he said we are going in basically to dismantle the torture chambers and the rape rooms. And yet, the United States was subsidizing the torture chambers and the rape rooms in Uzbekistan. The sheer hypocrisy of that led me to write another one of the telegrams, which we've published on the web.


GAS & ENRON IN UZBEKIZTAN

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, it goes back to before George Bush became President. In 1997 or 1998, George Bush, as Governor of Texas, had a meeting with the Uzbek ambassador to the United States, Ambassador Safayev, which was actually organized and set up by Kenneth Lay of Enron. And if you go to my website, you can find a facsimile of Kenneth Lay's letter to George Bush, telling him to meet Ambassador Safayev in order to conclude a billion-dollar gas deal between Uzbekistan and Enron. And that was the start of the Bush relationship with the Karimov regime.

Karimov is one of the most vicious dictators in the world, a man who is responsible for the death of thousands of people. Prisoners are boiled to death in Uzbek jails. And he was a guest in the White House in 2002. It's very easy to find photos of George Bush shaking Karimov's hand. Rumsfeld is particularly chummy with Karimov, so –

***BOILED ALIVE STORY***

AMY GOODMAN: Boiled to death?

CRAIG MURRAY: Yeah, it was one of the first cases I came across, back in August or September of 2002. Two Muslim prisoners in Jaslyk gulag, which is an old Soviet gulag in the middle of the Karakum Desert, a sort of forced-labor camp, a terrible place where people are sent to die, effectively, two Islamic prisoners were boiled to death. They died of immersion in boiling water. The mother of one of the prisoners received her son's body back in a sealed casket, was ordered not to open the casket, and just to bury it the next morning. Despite being in her sixties, she managed to get the casket open in the middle of the night, even though police were guarding the house outside.

She got the body onto the kitchen table and took a series of detailed photos, which she got to the British embassy. I sent them back to London -- or, in fact, to Scotland, to the University of Glasgow, the pathology department. On the basis of these detailed photos, they did an autopsy report, in which they said that he had had his fingernails extracted, he had been severely beaten, particularly about the face, and he died of immersion in boiling liquid. And it was immersion, rather than splashing, because there is a clear tide mark around the upper torso and arms, which gives you some idea of the level of brutality of this regime.

TORTURE DISSIDENTS TO CONFESS FALSE AL QAEDA TIES

I had been there for two or three months, which was long enough to know that, effectively, any Uzbek political or religious detainee is going to be tortured. There's no question of definition here. You know, we're not talking about ‘Is that or is that not torture?’ We're talking about people having their fingernails pulled, having their teeth smashed with hammers, having their limbs broken, and being raped with objects, including broken bottles; both male and female rape, extremely common in Uzbek prisons. And from the security service, which was operating right alongside the C.I.A., we were getting this intelligence.

I mean, the intelligence itself was nonsense. The purpose of the intelligence was to say that all the Uzbek opposition were related to al-Qaeda, that the democratic Uzbek opposition were all Islamic terrorists, that they'd traveled to Afghanistan, held meetings with Osama bin Laden. It was designed to promote the myth that Uzbekistan was, in total, part of the war on terror, and that by aligning himself with Karimov, Bush and the Bush Administration were backing or improving United States security, which wasn't true at all. I mean, the intelligence was false. If you torture people, they will say anything. I couldn't believe that the C.I.A. was working so closely with these dreadful security services and then were accepting intelligence which was obviously untrue...

US FAILURE IN UZBEKISTAN: NO GAS, NO BASES

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you say that this president, President Bush's relationship with Karimov in the Uzbek regime goes way back, and one of the links is Enron. Can you elaborate more on this?

CRAIG MURRAY: Yes. Enron cut a deal with Uzbekistan to exploit Uzbekistan's natural gas reserves. Central Asia has the largest untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world. Uzbekistan doesn’t have much oil; it has a terrific amount of natural gas. And Uzbekistan dominates Central Asia. It has half the population of the whole region. It has, by far, the biggest army and the most muscle. So Uzbekistan was key to the energy policy, and that's why Enron and Halliburton and all of the companies you very much associate with the Bush administration were in there plugging this policy of staying close to Karimov. And that’s why he was such a welcome guest in the White House.

The war on terror, if you like, was a cover for these activities. And that's why they needed this false intelligence, saying that the Uzbek opposition was all Islamic terrorists. I mean, it’s quite astonishing. Again, the White House spokesman in that clip was saying that the prison break in Andijan would have released terrorists. The majority of people in Andijan jail -- and I’ve been to Andijan; I knew two people who were killed in the massacre -- the majority of people in Andijan jail were perfectly peaceful political and religious prisoners. There were also some petty criminals who released, too. But the wellspring of the whole policy of the United States was the ruthless pursuit of sectional oil and gas interests, and that originated with Enron. Obviously, once Enron collapsed, those interests passed on to other U.S. companies.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

CRAIG MURRAY: Basically other major oil companies. But the sad thing, or the ironic thing, I suppose is the way to put it, is that ultimately the policy didn't work, because having given probably about $1 billion over a three-year period and having even supported the Uzbek government at the time of the Andijan massacre, when the rest of the world was expressing outrage. The Uzbeks eventually cut a deal with Gazprom of Russia, and the United States then got kicked out of Uzbekistan very unceremoniously. They didn't leave....

FULL TEXT:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/19/1452237
Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org

ambassador torture dissidents democracynow.org craig murray ubekistan boil alive iraq warwmd terrorism oil president george w bush osama bin laden real reasons republican GOPconservative corruption occupation halliburton colonialism white mans burden professor smartass lies peak oil propaganda corporation fascism democracy political opinion war on terror muslim public opinion opinion public relations foreign policy al qaeda false flagcointelpro northwoods terrorist worst president ever failure war criminal abu ghraib childsmartass comments resistance censored news rebel

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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