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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (227297)	4/17/2007 9:31:37 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You know that "Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions." Same deal with Gitmo, of course. BTW, only one corpse photo was released to the public. The photographs the Congress people saw showed "soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated." Multiple. And still you write, "It could have been torture, at least in a few cases. But who really knows." That amazes me. If that handful of photos hadn't been released, you'd still be denying it.In fact you were denying it after the photos were released. Almost all of the survivors of Abu Ghraib were released after the exposure. They'd been picked up in "sweeps," and there was no evidence against them. Karpinski estimated later that 90% of the detainees were innocent. She denied that she knew what was going on because interrogation was sub-contracted to the Israelis. Said she was not even allowed entry into the interrogation rooms. By whom? The few rotten apples? "The Roots of Torture The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. A NEWSWEEK investigation Tough tactics: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed for a Gitmo style approach to prisoner interrogations in Iraq... May 24 issue, excerpts - ...There were 1,800 slides and several videos, and the show went on for three hours. The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated. There was simply nothing to say...."People were ashen." ...Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner declared the pictures were the worst "military misconduct" he'd seen in 60 years,.... And NEWSWEEK has learned that U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives could be accused of war crimes. Among the possible charges: homicide involving deaths during interrogations. "The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and mistreatment went far beyond what I expected, and certainly involved more than six or seven MPs," said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor. He added: "It seems to have been planned." RELATED STORY Exclusive: Read the War Crimes Memos Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal—that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis—may do a lot to undercut the administration's case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That's because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."... Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques [Duh. E].... But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. IT WAS AN APPROACH THAT THEY ADOPTED TO SIDESTEP THE HISTORICAL SAFEGUARDS OF THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS [caps mine; same reason Gitmos is in Cuba]... In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—... msnbc.msn.com

To: Bill who wrote (227297)	4/17/2007 9:44:23 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You're "glad the perpetrators were caught and brought to justice."? That's unbelievably naive. Or disingenuous. A few low-level sadists were brought to justice. That's the way it works, Bill. Deniability is protected. (It doesn't always work.) "The first public manifestation of a policy to circumvent normal detention rules came in January 2002, when the United States began sending persons picked up during the armed conflict in Afghanistan to its naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba....Guantánamo was deliberately chosen in an attempt to put the detainees beyond the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts. Indeed, in response to a legal challenge by several detainees, the U.S. government later argued that U.S. courts would not have jurisdiction over these detainees even if they were being tortured or summarily executed. ... At the same time, a series of legal memoranda written in late 2001 and early 2002 by the Justice Department helped build the framework for circumventing international law restraints on prisoner interrogation. These memos argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war.... ...Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a January 25, 2002 memorandum to President Bush, endorsed the Justice Department’s (and Rumsfeld’s) approach and urged the president to declare the Taliban forces in Afghanistan as well as al-Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. This, he said, would preserve the U.S.’s “flexibility” in the war against terrorism. Mr. Gonzales wrote that the war against terrorism, “in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” ... hrw.org

To: Bill who wrote (227297)	4/17/2007 9:51:53 AM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Bill, there's so much. Anyone who doesn't yet know that the Bush administration shitcanned the Geneva Conventions ... Abu Ghraib and Geneva Conventions gets this on google. In case it really interests you. Please do keep in mind that in Abu, after the exposure, most detainees were adjudged innocent, and in Gitmo, we got most of them by buying them with per capita bounties: google.com I've spent enough time on SI to know that most Bush supporters will make excuses for the United States of America becoming a torturing country, as you made excuses for Abu Ghraib and continue to do ("the perpetrators were brought to justice" is a really sick joke).