(Act ll, sans JackoMania cloud coverage, which plagued Act l, and with Human Rights Watch action link and ACLU action link:)
If we were to embark upon a truly serious, responsible and comprehensive examination of our treatment of detainees, we could not avoid the most egregious exhibit along the torture trail - that of H-O-M-I-C-I-D-E. Make that homicideS. And not of just a few detainees - many were murdered.
Shall we sweep those crimes under the (bulging) national carpet too?
By nycee
What if the torture/homicide victim had been someone you knew, someone you cared about? What then? Sing along to the "Move Along" song, the one Obama conducts, with a largely complicit Congressional choir?
If you land there, please dont tell me you believe little children ought to be taught the Golden Rule - I'm not sure I could withstand the knock from that particular feather of hypocrisy.
(Neither could most in the Muslim world - those people US pols and pundits like to lecture about democracy and enlightened behavior, using Wonderful We as shining exemplar, of course!)
Sick of the Talk about Waterboarding was the title I originally considered for this diary, when waterboarding was all the rage on TV - not because I thought we were getting too much talk about torture, but rather, too little. Reporters and pundits (and politicians) committed frequent sins of omission by focusing almost solely on waterboarding, as if they'd agreed to a 'free' speech zone of sorts, as if waterboarding were the one torture space they could tramp around in, by decree of some very limited permission slip.
It irked me, too, that within the narrow confines of only waterboarding, many anti-waterboarding talkers omitted the moral component, limiting their "anti" to: "I am against waterboarding because it doesnt work!" (as Lawrence O'Donnell bellowed in his closing argument versus Liz Cheney.)
Back to he said/she said? And what if it did work once or twice?
Although there is still much information/evidence withheld regarding US torture, including those photos in Obama's hand, if the facts at hand were more fully fleshed out, we would still have a horrendous account of brutal and sadistic torture techniqueS that were greenlit at the top and perpetrated against scores of captives. And, as many of us know, but the public at large may not, this goes beyond Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib - the latter now relegated to a box in the attic marked: "A Few Bad Apples" (Did we remember not to mention Baghram? √; Nothing to see here... Move Along!)
True Confessions
For example, a more varied description of our government's hideous torture practices came out in April, via a report that was not for our eyes, by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC torture report was leaked to Mark Danner by some conscientious soul (these reports are usually kept under tight wraps). It is based on accounts from 14 detainees imprisoned in CIA black sites (including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed). Danner got it out via the New York Review of Books, in a piece titled: The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means, which included excerpts of the accounts and a link to the actual ICRC report.
(True Confessions are easy reading!)
Danner urged everyone to read the "very readable" ICRC report, presumably so it would leap out from its obscure corner (in the New York Review of Books) into the wide world of mainstream media - presumably so people, upon reading it, would shudder with revulsion and cringe at the notion that a so-called "civilized nation" (ours) would commit such violent crimes against its captives. And perhaps, they might logically conclude that such barbaric treatment was far more widespread than we are told, given that this was just one leak, given that the ACLU's FOIA requests for more reports on torture and those 2000 photos have been so vigorously fought and successfully blocked. And yet, these grotesque accounts went largely untold; the report registered but a blip and then faded off the radar.
Shouldnt we have been told, at least as many times as KSM was waterboarded, how prisoners were:
• whisked off, hooded, to undisclosed black sites
• shackled, arms stretched upward, and forced to endure hours of painful stress-standing (this included the one-legged captive, who did have a kindly US doc in attendance to measure the swelling every so often...)
• forced to endure torture while naked, forced to be naked for days on end
• forced to shit and piss on themselves, to remain soiled (Granted, some were able to stay soiled while wearing diapers)
• stuffed into coffin-like boxes (no toilet privileges there either/NOTE: Joe Scarborough did discuss this - amidst howls of pro torture laughter at how a 'scary' "caterpillar in a box" was torture... for wussies);
• "walled" - heads slammed repeatedly into walls by yanking their neck collars, as well as slapped, punched, kicked, etc
• threatened (including threats to their families), humiliated, deprived of sleep, food, and obviously, the most basic standards of decency
• totally disoriented and isolated in those hell holes (Well, not entirely, if you count their torturers.)
• subjected to these conditions for weeks and months on end
But it Was Only THREE!
And yet, with the talkers stressing ONLY waterboarding, it appeared as if waterboarding were the sum total of the brutal treatment our detainees received, to which the pro-torture crowd effectively argued that it was only to 3 people, it was well-controlled, and all 3 survived, didnt they? (This works on the American public, when contrasted with the notion of getting attacked again by terrorists.)
But NOT all of them DID survive their tortured captivity. There are those pesky HOMICIDES
Yet what do we hear of these homicides? I got nothing from the TV talkers. However, I am talking HOMICIDE, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand why no one else is - especially when it's right there in the Senate Armed Services report, as reported by Glen Greenwald in December 2008. His article was appropriately titled: Senate report links Bush to detainee homicides; media yawns.
Greenwald excerpt on DETAINEE HOMICIDES:
The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating treatment, but are directly -- and unquestionably -- responsible for numerous detainee murders. Many of those deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as "homicides" by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).
While the bulk of the attention over detainee abuse has been directed to Guantanamo, the U.S., to this day, continues to imprison -- with no charges -- thousands of Iraqi citizens. In Iraq and Afghanistan, detainee deaths were rampant and, to this day, detainees continue to die under extremely suspicious circumstances. Just yesterday, there was yet another death of a very young Iraqi detainee whose death was attributed to quite unlikely natural causes.
About those Natural Causes:
For years, it has been common to attribute detainee deaths to "heart attacks" where the evidence makes clear that abusive interrogation techniques and other inhumane treatment -- the very policies authorized at the highest levels of the U.S. government -- were the actual proximate cause of the deaths. This deceptive practice was documented in this fact-intensive report -- entitled: Medical Investigations of Homicides of Prisoners of War in Iraq and Afghanistan -- by Steven H. Miles, Professor of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Minnesota:
Excerpt from Medical Investigation report:
In March 2005, the US Armed Forces said that it suspected that 26 deaths were due to criminal homicides. However, it did not clarify whether these deaths occurred on the battlefield or in its prisons. The enumeration US Department of Defense enumeration of “Substantiated” criminal homicides of detainees is certainly too low. Two main categories of homicidal detainee deaths likely went unsubstantiated (see below). There are cases in which a homicidal cause of death was not medically recognized and other cases in which the investigation of the death was insufficient to establish whether trauma was inflicted or accidental. Prisoners died of torture at Asadadad, Bagram, and Gardez in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib, Camp Whitehorse, Basra, Mosul, Tikrit, Bucca, and an unidentified facility in Iraq (see Table). These cases do not include deaths due to medical neglect, mortar attacks on prisons, or the shootings of rioting prisoners. Such cases will be considered after reviewing US Department of Defense forensic medical procedures.
[NYCee: ["Pro intense interrogation"/"enhanced technique" types http://www.salon.com/... might want to point to these unlucky corpses, to buttress their claim that it's not torture IF those who received such treatment dont suffer from injury in the long-term. Looking thru the glass darkly, I concede this point - when it comes to the homicides that resulted from torture, it's entirely true that none of these victims have complained that they are suffering from anything.]
We Are in Dire Need of a National Intervention
That swelling heap of evidence, swept under the Oval Office rug (still topped by the eagle, I see, but I'm seeing the ostrich...) in the People's House, brings me to to the related issue of those photos Obama is blocking: I strongly believe we need to publish the 2000 torture photos because, after all the self-redacting 'debate' around torture, not surprisingly, we are still a 50-50ish squish of a nation in our views on torture, ie, roughly half the U.S. population seem not to have a clue or a care about how sadistically vile and injurious this torture was - the torture that we did - beyond Abu Ghraib, beyond Guantanamo. Half the nation, as polled, is ok with torture (against prosecutions and investigations too): TIME AP Poll -In Poll, 50% of Americans Justify Torture and Opinion Research/CNN poll -Poll finds lack of support for 'torture' investigations
Get the PICTURE?
We need to get the pictures out because we need to get the facts out more effectively - and that means with IMAGES. Some folks arent fully informed (or appropriately SHAMED) because of what they don't hear or see. And unfortunately, some folks are just imagination deficient, i.e., they need to SEE the PICTURE to GET the PICTURE. (Exempting dyed-in-the-wool sadists who enjoy seeing people victimized and "September 12th" types who justify having the morality knocked out of them by the events on the preceding day)
Despite the possible downsides of revealing the photos, often used to argue in favor of secrecy, (e.g., will hurt the troops; will hurt the hunt for Muslim hearts and minds; will hurt our war/peace/whatever efforts, will hurt our security... ), I believe it is medicine that we must swallow if we are to get to a better place, nationally and internationally, morally and legally, but also, in terms of our national security. To many Muslim hearts and minds, our guiding light of democracy is blocked by a revolting hypocrisy, ie, all that ugliness we think we are disappearing under the Oval Office rug (Of symbolic interest - Obama has not yet changed the GWB rug.)
Admittedly, showing them isnt pretty and isnt to be taken lightly, but neither is the reality of a nation that so cavalierly went to war, killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Muslims, for no sane reason on God's/Whatever's green earth and then tortured and killed its captives. This with a huge majority of support for that illegal war of aggression, initially and long into it. A blinkered population is easily hoodwinked. We are so good, therefore, so are our wars.
So we had a referendum on the war last November and most Americans came out against it, 5 1/2 years late - too late to undo the damage. And just as too many Americans were ignorant and cavalier in endorsing the war, too many are similarly ignorant and cavalier regarding the crimes of torture and death by torture that our leaders let happen, are not interested in prosecuting those who used their power to breathe life into such barbaric practices, and those who went beyond what even the warped illegal "new rules" allowed.
The downsides of concealing our torturous ways are more dangerous than the scare reasons used to stop us from revealing them - and include a downside that's probably quite dear to our leaders, but is not for our ears - that of preserving the facade of both American exceptionalism and the exceptionalism of its leaders...
Especially Conductors in Chief
By nycee
Without dealing with our governments torture/murder, openly and lawfully, we are stuck in a very bad place - by not atoning for crimes past we remain highly vulnerable to condoning such crimes in the future.
The Buck Stops Where?
The buck most definitely did not stop with Bush and it is not stopping with Obama. Rather, there is a whole lot of bucking going on... of the truth. Now we must demand that this truth be swept OUT from its hiding place to reveal the rot beneath that lovely melon-hued sunbeam carpet.
We've tried war after useless war, covert government/s toppling, and various other sorts of hegemonic strong-arming around the globe. Now torture and murder by torture. And we have continued to hail ourselves as greatest nation, which requires no small amount of broom action, carpet uplifted.
Maybe, to end the crazy cycle, we should get really radical and, for once and for a change, give that old adage "the truth shall set you free" a whirl. But first, we have to set it free.