Torture

Why is Holland supporting this?

Torture, War on Afghanistan
Published on 1 Comment on Why is Holland supporting this?

Seriously. Dutch soldiers are supposedly bringing democracy and freedom to Afghanistan, but the US military still operates black prisons:

An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

For all of Obama’s rhetoric, his actions so far have been bitterly disappointing. The closure of Guantanamo stranded on America’s refusal to take up responsibility for the prisoners and no other country (save Palau) was willing to help them out. He has made noises about ending the occupation of Iraq but these have not been matched by deeds so far, while the War on Afghanistan has actually be scaled up.

So why are we still enabling this? What is in it for us to have our troops in Afghanistan reaping the fallout of American warcrimes?

Not even Hitchens voluntered for the sodomy

Torture
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The Beast talks about the dirty secret of American torture: sodomy and how nobody likes to talk about US torture other than waterboarding, as that’s something that you can pretend isn’t real torture anyway:

the sodomy as torture debate

That’s right; sodomy. Forcible anal penetration. The documentation of this and other forms of sexual humiliation is too extensive to be denied or pawned off on a couple of redneck privates. And we know now that sexual humiliation techniques were among those discussed and approved by the National Security Principals Committee, a White House group including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John “History will not judge this kindly” Ashcroft.

I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about forcible anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.

[…]

The upshot is this: America is the country that rapes its prisoners. We’re sex criminals. That’s our thing now. And Obama’s refusal to “look back,” i.e. prosecute these incredibly serious crimes, ensures that it’s our permanent legacy. No national reputation can survive this simply by shrugging it off. We used to be seen as a bastion of freedom and decency around the world. That shit is over, folks. We’re like the Soviet Union with better movies now. When we talk about human rights, we are an international joke.

And when we talk about torture, we stick to waterboarding, because nobody, not even the “liberals,” are willing to face what we’ve done.

Let’s not pretend this is anything for America either. It has always engaged in torture, either directly or through its Third World proxies, as any honest account of e.g. Vietnam or Central America will make clear.

I Sentence You To Be Taken From Here and DNA Tested Till You’re Dead. Or Until We Get Our Sample. Whichever’s The Soonest.

Policing, Torture, Totalitarianism
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America may have a Democrat president charming the rest of the world but at home Cheney’s heirs are still in charge. And they’re still gaily torturing away willy-nilly, with judicial approval.

After police lost or contaminated an already willingly given DNA sample, Niagara County Court Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza issued an order requiring the suspect to provide another. Not so unusual, you might think except the order was issued ex-parte – which meant defence counsel had no chance to object.

Odd. Why ex-parte? Why would the defence object to a DNA test? It’s a quick and painless operation. Well actually no, it’s not. Not the way Niagara County does it. William N Grigg describes what happned to Ryan S. Smith of Niagara Falls, New York, a 21-year-old charged with burglary:

Smith was brought in handcuffs to the police station and informed that the investigators had been authorized to use physical force. Although nobody intended to harm him, Smith was told, the sample was going to be surrendered; it was just a question of how much he wanted to endure before it was. Smith still refused to comply.

Confronted with an intransigent suspect who refused to provide critical evidence, the investigators reluctantly strapped the handcuffed Smith to a downward sloping table, covered his face with a towel, and waterboarded him. He broke within seconds, and meekly permitted the DNA sample to be taken.

On the basis of the DNA evidence, Smith was hit with a 24-count criminal indictment. He was also charged with “criminal contempt of court” for forcing his interrogators to torture him.

When Smith’s defense counsel filed a motion to suppress the evidence based on Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections, the same Judge who issued the ex parte orders produced a ruling validating the use of waterboarding as means of forcing compliance, as long as it’s not done “maliciously” or to “excess.”

This account is true and accurate in every detail, save one – the specific torture protocol that was used to compel Smith to surrender a sample of his DNA.

He wasn’t subjected to water torture; instead, he was given a brief taste of electroshock torture by way of a Taser that was used to inflict a “drive stun.” This involves placing the prongs of the device directly on the body of the victim for a brief, painful, paralyzing charge.

Oh, so that’s why it was ex-parte. I think should think the defence would have been sure to object if they’d known their client was to be tortured into compliance with a taser.

It may have been only a tasering (!) and not an actual waterboarding but that’s hardly the point. It was no abberation; those were no bad apples or rogue cops acting on their own warped initiative. The official torturers were acting on the direct orders of both a DA and a judge.

As Detective Lt. William Thomson would later testify, Assistant Niagara County D.A. Doreen M. Hoffmann, who is presiding over the prosecution of Ryan Smith, instructed the police that “we could use the minimum force that was necessary” to force the suspect to submit to a DNA test.

Now, think carefully about that formulation: In principle, it authorizes the use of any amount of force needed to extract the sample, since the critical term is “necessary.” As long as the police were reasonably careful in calibrating the duress the applied, they could continue escalating the level of force until it broke the suspect; wherever they end up would obviously be the “minimum” necessary to accomplish their objectives.

Exactly. It doesn’t matter what method of torture the official torturers use; it’s almost irrelevant, though there’s something particularly distasteful and reminiscent of Pinochet’s Chile about Tasers. Torture is torture is torture. You’re using pain to make someone do something. Once that’s been judicially ordered the dam is breached and torture is official policy. In no time at all physical coercion becomes the norm – never the last option, but always the first. It’s practical everyday fascism; it may be red in tooth and claw but it’s always covered by the paperwork.

This week we’ve seen waterboarding reportedly used in London against drug suspects by the Met. Bad apples, say the police. That time it wasn’t, thankfully, court-ordered and was entirely unofficial – but given that British police methods slavishly follow the US as night follows day, it can’t be long before it is.

Former Harvard Law Review Editor Forgets Law

Torture, Uh? WTF?, War on Terror
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“Only Following Orders” is not a defence to accusations of war crimes. You’d think Obama, former constitutional scholar and Harvard Law Review editor, would know that, wouldn’t you? It seems not. CBS:

President Obama announced that CIA interrogators who used harsh tactics on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration will not be prosecuted… Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, offered the first definitive assurance that those CIA officials are in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal advice at the time.

Even though it was wrong? Sounds like the Nuremburg defence to me.

The Nuremberg Defence states that the defendant was “only following orders” (“Befehl ist Befehl”, literally “order is order”) and is therefore not responsible for his crimes; it was most famously employed by Nazis during the Nuremberg Trials, for which it is named.

The victorious Allies suspected such a defense might be advanced, and issued the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which specifically stated that ‘only following orders’ was not a valid defense against charges of war crimes.

Let’s just remind ourselves of what exactly it is Obama is condoning, shall we?

With his accession to ultimate power Obama seems to have forgotten all he ever knew about human rights and the US constitution:

….now the world knows that the Obama Administration doesn’t want to fully look back to understand how it could come to pass as a matter of law that our nation would torture. The federal courts cannot initiate there own investigations or cases. So the nation turns its lonely eyes to Congress. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., has said for months that he favors a blue-ribbon “torture commission” that would truly (i.e., with subpoena power) investigate this matter. Will he now push forward with such a review? Or will he fold like a cheap umbrella the way Spain did today?

For the pro-prosecution gang, about the only bit of encouraging news came from Sen. Russ Feingold, also a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee. He issued a release late in the day suggesting that the government’s acknowledgment of immunity and indemnity only extended to the lower-level military officials who engaged in water-boarding and not to the men who drafted those memos, men like Steven Bradbury, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who just two months ago so publicly trashed his fellow traveler, John Yoo, over the matter. If Sen. Feingold is correct, if he’s on to something, then this story may yet live another day. But I wouldn’t bet on that.

Those of us still hoping that the EU will uphold international law and prosecute US and other war crimes (a position so easily and quickly vacated by Obama that one might be led to suspect he never intended prosecution to begin with, but just implied he might to get votes. Oh, surely not.) are shit out of luck too, just as much as those who thought that one day they might see justice in the US are:

Spain wants torture charges against Bush Six dropped
…on Thursday, Spanish Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido said he would advise Judge Garzon to drop the case.

Ironically, Spain’s Socialist government was highly critical of the Bush administration’s policies in the war on terror. But it enjoys warm relations with the new U.S. administration led by President Barack Obama, and some critics have suggested that Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero does not want to risk embarrassing his friend.

“It’s a shame the prosecutor is taking this position, but not a surprise,” Boye told CNN. “They always obey political orders. They don’t want to be in a bad position in front of the Obama administration.”

The author hopes that prosecutor Garzon, who also arrested Pinochet, has the balls to resist the political pressure coming from DC and Madrid. I hope so too – but I wouldn’t bet on that.