Tortured to Death in Abu Ghraib

America doesn’t torture. Of course it doesn’t. But, when it does, it goes to crazy lengths to conceal it.

If you’ve got a strong stomach, I urge you to check out Errol Morris’ piece, “The Most Curious Thing,” published in today’s New York Times:

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/the-most-curious-thing/?8ty&emc=ty

 

Scalia’s Jack Bauer Moment

US Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia says some physical interrogation could be used on a suspect in the event of an imminent threat, such as a bomb set to go off.

Scalia told BBC, “You can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, ‘Oh, it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good.”

Justice Scalia said it would be “extraordinary” to assume that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment applied to “so-called” torture in the face of imminent threat. He said that the Constitution “is referring to punishment for crime.”

But “is it really so easy,” he said, “to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the Constitution?”

“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” the justice said. “And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?”

This is just the sort of thinking we ought to expect from Cheney hunting partner and fellow moral reprobate Scalia. It glibly masks what’s not said.

For example, who on this planet believes that security services wouldn’t freely smack someone in the face if they believed that necessary to discover the whereabouts of a hidden bomb? But this isn’t about a smack across the face, is it? Scalia tacitly admits that when he concedes the issue becomes one of justification of torture – cause and extent. How close does the threat have to be and how severe can the infliction of pain be?

What Scalia deliberately omits is the real issue – how legitimate does the threat have to be? His sanction would absolve a torturer who could claim an “honest but mistaken” belief that something dire was imminent. What if it’s nothing more than a perceived threat, something based on ginned-up “intelligence” of the sort that Bush manipulated to justify invading Iraq? With enough wiggle room, anything is excusable, there is no excess.

No, I’m sorry. Torture needs to remain illegal because claiming that it all depends on circumstances admits just too many vagaries into the calculation of right and wrong, so many as to render judgment virtually impossible and meaningless.

Scalia then went on to show the BBC audience what a knuckle-dragger he is by wading into the death penalty issue:

“If you took a public opinion poll, if all of Europe had representative democracies that really worked, most of Europe would probably have the death penalty today,” he said. Excuse me, Tony, “representative democracies that really worked?” You mean like your own, the United States of America? This man is positively delusional.

 

When Your Pals Torture, It’s Not Torture

Canada’s federal bootlickers, the SHarper government, are falling all over themselves to avoid their pals being called what they are, torturers. From CanWest:

ForeignAffairs Minister Maxime Bernier lashed out Saturday at a controversial document identifying the U.S. and Israel as countries it suspects of practising torture, calling it “wrong” and demanding it be rewritten.

“I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department’s torture awareness training,” said Bernier in a statement.

“It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten,” said Bernier.

After making this pronouncement, Maxie swung deftly back to his perch and whiled away the rest of the afternoon tossing his own waste at passing children.

America doesn’t torture? Israel doesn’t torture?

Let’s begin with Israel and this BBC report from February, 2000:

“An official Israeli report has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli security service tortured detainees during the Palestinian uprising, the Intifada, between 1988 and 1992.

The report, written five years ago but kept secret until now, said the leadership of the security service Shin Bet knew about the torture but did nothing to stop it.

The report did not detail the torture methods used, but human rights organisations say some detainees died or were left paralysed.”

“Most of the violations were not caused by lack of knowledge of the line between what was permitted and what was forbidden, but were committed knowingly,” the report said.

“At the Gaza facility, veteran and even senior investigators committed very grave and systematic violations.”

So, Maxi-pad, that ought to whet your intellectual appetite on the subject of Israel and torture, if you had the slightest interest in anything beyond whitewashing your government’s buddies.

As for the United States? Well we know at least the tip of the iceberg on the waterboarding business. That, Maxi, is also torture – plain and simple just the way you like it. Even former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has just condemned waterboarding as torture because, well because it is dimmo.

Then there’s that special rendition business – kidnapping folks and flying them off to sunny destinations where, for a few bags of cash, you can hire people to do your torturing for you. Hey Maxi, remember that guy, Maher Arar? He got done up pretty good, didn’t he? We paid him ten million bucks. Why was that again? Oh yeah, I remember now – we paid him because he spent a year in captivity as America’s guest being tortured.

There’s something really creepy about people like the Harpies who choose to erase the historical record to whitewash the evils of their friends. At the end of the day, they all wind up with the same stench.

 

NATO Can’t, er, Won’t Protect Detainees

Sure, some of them are Taliban, the odd one might even be al-Qaeda, and some are just Afghani peasants. It doesn’t really matter what they are once NATO forces decide to detain them. At that point they’re simply Detainees and headed for an Afghan prison and, well, just about anything you can imagine.

There’s a lot of evidence coming out that the people we’re handing over are going to something that more closely resembles an abbatoir than a prison. An Afghan prison and an abbatoir really do resemble each other – both have shit and blood all over the floor.

It’s good to know that, when the villagers watch as we drive away with uncle Ahmad or cousin Mohammad or grandfather Karim bound and trussed and slung in the back of an armoured vehicle, they’ll completely understand that whatever fate befalls their loved one, their fellow tribesman, is entirely the doing of their own government and not at all the fault of the Canadian soldiers who made off with him. Thank goodness these are not people who hold grudges or seek revenge.

You see, at the level where it matters most – at the village level, where we capture and detain people – our soldiers become totally responsible to those villagers for anything untoward that happens to those detainees. We deliver their people into the hands of the butchers.

In Viet Nam, the Americans handed their captives over to the South Vietnamese. How well did that work? Just how much did that advance the Americans’ campaign to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese villagers? How many of those villagers did it drive into the arms of the insurgency?

Now, sure, I know the Taliban are as bloody and vicious as any Afghan government torturer but that’s not the point. A key tenet of the insurgents’ style of warfare is to drive a wedge between the people and their central government. One of the ways that’s accomplished is to make the people fearful and distrusting of their government. When both sides are brutal, you don’t have much to lose by choosing the side that actually controls your territory, not the one that drives through twice a week buttoned up in armoured vehicles. What we’re doing and allowing Karzai to do is precisely what the other side seeks to have us do.

Failing to ensure that the Karzai government treats detainees humanely is simply bad for business. God knows that duplicitous clown and the thugs in his government and the warlords and drug lords he collaborates with are already making our soldiers’ job over there enormously more difficult than it should be, adding torture of detainees, our detainees, only makes everything worse.

The Canadian chairing NATO’s military committee, General Ray Henault, rules out establishing our own internment camps over there. Henault says 1) we can’t afford it and 2) it would undermine the Afghani government. I suppose the good general doesn’t understand that there’s nothing we could do that would further undermine the Kabul government on this one and, when it comes right down to it, what we can’t afford is to let these atrocities continue.

This just in – the Gulf-Times, from Doha, Qatar, reports that, “Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week ordered authorities to stop torturing suspects in a tacit admission that the practice had been carried out.”

 

Partners in Torture?

One of the most controversial aspects of Canada’s participation in the Global War Without End on Terror has been the fate of those captured by our forces.

It appears that once we get them in the bag, we give them a quick medical check and then hand them over either to US or Afghan authorities. Eventually the detainees names are reported to the International Red Cross but that’s it. Unlike the Dutch contingent, Canada does nothing to follow up on these prisoners to ensure they’re properly treated or, to be more direct, not tortured.

The Afghan security forces are known not only for their corruption but also their brutality. Without foreign oversight they pretty much have a free hand in dealing with their captives.

The question becomes whether Canada is complicit in torture by delivering suspected insurgents into the hands of those we have reason to believe will mistreat them? Under our law, a person is deemed to intend the logical consequences of his acts. Turning a blind eye isn’t good enough.

It’s time General Hillier got off his duff and started explaining Canada’s position on the torture question.