Editorial

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Map of the world with signatories to the Convention Against Torture. Dark green = signed and ratified.  Light green = signed but not ratified.  Grey = not signed.

This is the complete text of part 1.  Parts 2 and 3 deal with how the program is to be administered, and can be read here.

The USA is clearly in violation of this convention.  Who enforces it and what are they waiting for?

Article 1

1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.

Article 2

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political in stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Army psychologist objects to participating in torture, a few days later she's dead

Alyssa Peterson worked only two nights in a torture facility in northwestern Iraq called "the cage," before objecting and being reassigned. 

A few days later, on September 15, 2003, she died from her own gun in what the Army is considering a suicide.  Her personal notebook, which was found with her body, was redacted (the contents not released). 

From Editor and Publisher:

"Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed."

According to the official report on her death released the following year, she had earlier been "reprimanded" for showing "empathy" for the prisoners. One of the most moving parts of that report is: "She said that she did not know how to be two people; she ... could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire."

Peterson was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and was sent to suicide prevention training. "But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle," the documents disclose.

Her parents, who live in northern Arizona, stated that they never received any official documents corroborating the report issued by the Army. 

Alyssa was 27. 

Why won't the Army reveal the "techniques" that Alyssa objected to?  Why was her personal notebook redacted?   What are they afraid of?

Who would have guessed that the most impassioned denunciation of torture would come from Fox News?

This clip of Shepard Smith moved me to tears.  After all the bullshit, all the lies, all the equivocating and justifying of those who intentionally inflicted extreme torment on those who have not been convicted of any crime -- after all that, to hear one man say definitively that "We are Americans, we do NOT torture," it was a glorious thing to hear.

In contrast, Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, comes off as lacking several crucial body parts:  spine, brain and heart. FDD is lousy with heartless neocons: Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich. 

I hope Smith is not right now being tortured by Roger Ailes for speaking the truth.

Thank you Shepard Smith.

 

Journalist bets he can stand waterboarding for 15 seconds (Video)

A Playboy journalist bet he could withstand 15 seconds of waterboarding by a trained US soldier.  Watch to see how it turned out.

If Spain used rendition - as the US does - we could see the Bush 6 kidnapped off an American street and into a Spanish prison

Published in the May, 2009 Rock Creek Free Press

An internationally renowned Spanish judge is attempting to prosecute six former Bush officials for their role in allowing torture at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.  Despite being urged by the Spanish Attorney General  to drop the case, Judge Baltasar Garzon has submitted the case to a lottery system which will now assign it at random to one of six high court judges.  As one of those high court judges, Garzon has a one in six chance of getting the case back. 

Spain has jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents claim to have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay.   

The language used by Spanish Attorney General Conde-Pumpido, such as calling the case “fraudulent,” has led some observers to conclude that Conde-Pumpido bowed to pressure from the Obama administration.  The AG also said "If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder said that he isn't going to prosecute any Central Intelligence Agency employees who water boarded suspects.  Holder said that it would be unfair to prosecute those who actually carried out acts of torture, because it was considered legal at the time by the Justice Department. Holder also said the U.S would defend the CIA torturers against attempted prosecutions from overseas.

The 1984 Convention Against Torture states:  “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture…” Both Spain and the US are signatory to the Convention, which the US was involved in negotiating. 

"Moving forward" and letting mass murderers go free

Back in the days before I woke up and extricated myself from the matrix, I thought I was well informed because I read The New York Times every day, especially the opinion section. 

I don't read it anymore, although I do glance at their headlines to see what the official spin is on the issues of the day. 

This piece from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff is a stellar example of using a newspaper to spread propaganda.  It has the smell of being worked over by a disinfo committee trying to cram as many lies into one essay as possible. 

I won't dissect every obfuscation, but here are a few:

Kristoff is too smart to be blind to this fact:  Obama wanting to "move forward" and ignore the many crimes of the Bush admin should be a huge red flag to all those trusting, benighted souls who believed we'd turned the page into a new era of enlightened government. 

What criminal doesn't want to move forward and avoid punishment for his sins?  "Never mind about the innocent people I slowly tortured to death, that's in the past." 

What citizen, not to mention government official, should bother to obey the law when those who have taken a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution thumb their noses at it?

Kristof's reference to "Muslim terror groups," tells me he is either completely ignorant or taking orders from someone with a specific agenda. 

I'm not convinced there are any Muslim terror groups.  Whether in Gaza, Afghanistan or Iraq, what I see are desperate people trying to defend their land from vicious invaders with far greater firepower.  The biggest terror groups on the planet are based in Israel and Washington DC. 

As Paul Craig Roberts, former associate editor at the Wall St. Journal, put it in his recent essay The War on Terror is a Hoax: 

What Americans and Israelis call terror is the response of oppressed people who are stateless because their countries are ruled by puppets loyal to the oppressors. These people, dispossessed of their own countries, have no State Departments, Defense Departments, seats in the United Nations, or voices in the mainstream media. They can submit to foreign hegemony or resist by the limited means available to them.

Also, poor people in Africa and Latin America don't need more research into their diseases, so that more pharmaceuticals can be peddled to the third world.  They need help obtaining clean drinking water, wholesome food, a fair price for their labor, and avoiding the toxic chemicals that corporations like to dump in places where they can get away with it. 

Here are a few paragraphs from an essay which surely originated from the so called "intelligence" agencies.  No real journalist with a shred of self-respect would write such dreck.

Philip Zelikow?  Please!

Putting Torture Behind Us

Source: nytimes.com

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 28, 2009

President Obama is resisting calls for an investigation into torture and other abuses during the Bush years, so the chance to learn from our mistakes is slipping away.

Mr. Obama understandably wants to focus on economic recovery rather than a dissection of the past. Why fritter political capital on an inquest that would antagonize Republicans and imperil our economy and his agenda?

But as George Santayana, the eminent Harvard philosopher wrote: “Those who forget history are destined to repeat it.” Rather than lose forever the chance to grow from our missteps, here’s a two-step proposal for confronting the past without distracting from the work on the economic crisis.

The first step is to appoint a high-level commission — perhaps a McCain-Scowcroft Commission? — to investigate torture, secret detention and wiretapping during the Bush years, as well as to look ahead and offer recommendations for balancing national security and individual rights in the future.

This wouldn’t be a bipartisan commission, with Democrats and Republicans offsetting each other in seething distrust. Rather, it would be nonpartisan, dominated by military and security experts.

It could be co-chaired by Brent Scowcroft and John McCain, with its conclusions written by Philip Zelikow, a former aide to Condoleezza Rice who wrote the best-selling report of the 9/11 commission.

Are you gagging yet?  If you can bear it, here's the rest.

Rice Directed Torture from White House

by Sheila Casey

published in the May 2008 issue of The Rock Creek Free Press.

In December 2005, Condoleezza Rice testified to Congress “The United States does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances.” 

But ABC news has now revealed that during 2002 and 2003, Rice led dozens of meetings to discuss specific torture techniques with the National Security Council Principals Committee in the White House Situation Room.  The committee included Vice President Dick Cheney and former Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, CIA Director George Tenet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.  They approved using the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of sleep deprivation, waterboarding, pushing and slapping. 

Comedian Jon Stewart has joked that waterboarding sounds fun, as in “I’m going to hop in my Chevy Tahoe, get a six pack, and head out for some waterboarding.”  But until recently the United States considered waterboarding to be torture, and prosecuted Japanese officers for subjecting prisoners to waterboarding in World War II.

In waterboarding, a prisoner is strapped to a board with his head lower than his feet, while water is poured steadily over his nose and mouth, until his lungs fill with water.  Prior to death, the process is stopped and the victim revived, often to endure it yet again.  It can leave victims with lung damage, brain damage and death, if they cannot be revived. 

Waterboarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in the Vietnam War.  On January 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a controversial photograph of two U.S soldiers and one South Vietnamese soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang.   The photograph led to the soldier being court-martialled by a U.S. military court within one month of its publication, and he was discharged from the army.