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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (377267)	4/9/2008 2:13:16 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575787

Re. Abu Ghraib - this is timely: .......................... But Karpinski, a seething presence in the film, says she didn’t know what was going on, and it’s easy to believe her. The low-ranking enlisted personnel, meanwhile, keep blaming the abuses on a vague “they” somewhere between them and Karpinski, or resort to the passive voice: This was being done, we keep hearing. But the soldiers in the film can’t come up with the names of anyone who ordered them to do the things they did, or even who knew what they were doing. .................................. The great liberal construction of Abu Ghraib is that it proves America is the bad guy, in this war and maybe in general, but when you look closely at the events, you get tripped up by a lot of other liberal truisms. “Standard Operating Procedure” is a story of the poor, the uneducated, women and gays—and the awful things they did. Harman, for instance, a gay soldier who, though sensitive—she wouldn’t allow her fellow soldiers to kill a cricket that was annoying them—and spiritually wounded by the experience, is also seen flashing a brilliant smile and a thumbs up while posing next to a horribly roasted cadaver. It turns out she is the one who told “Gilligan,” the infamous hooded prisoner who was forced to stand on a box, that he would be electrocuted via the wires attached to his fingertips if he stepped off the box. So it turns out the most “iconic” image of American nastiness, the one used to sell T-shirts and coffee-table books was the product of a kind, thoughtful, working-class, soft-spoken young lesbian and two other low-ranking soldiers (staff sergeant Ivan Frederick and corporal Charles Graner, both of whom were not interviewed for the film and perhaps as a result come off especially badly. Graner is still in prison, serving a ten-year sentence.) Moreover, one message of “Standard Operating Procedure” is that there may be much more to the photograph than the photograph. In no case is this more true than in the most famous picture. Gilligan was only made to stand on the box for “ten or fifteen minutes,” apparently didn’t take the electrocution threat seriously, soon laughed about it, and subsequently became a model prisoner and even palled around with Harman and fellow soldier Megan Ambuhl. “He was just a funny, funny guy,” Harman says. “If you’re going to take someone home, I would definitely have taken him.” So the smokingest of smoking guns turns out to be . . . a water pistol. commentarymagazine.com Message 24480850

To: i-node who wrote (377267)	4/9/2008 2:21:30 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1575787

"No, I've just convinced myself that it isn't as big a deal as it was portrayed as by the left. " Understand. Just like you have convinced yourself that the Governor in Texas is a powerful position.

To: i-node who wrote (377267)	4/9/2008 3:49:55 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575787

US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan - UN 06.24.2005, 11:37 AM GENEVA (AFX) - Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said. The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity. 'They are no longer trying to duck this and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,' the Committee member said. 'They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark,' he said. UN sources said this is the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities. The Committee, which monitors respect for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is gathering information from the US ahead of hearings in May 2006. Signatories of the convention are expected to submit to scrutiny of their implementation of the 1984 convention and to provide information to the Committee. The document from Washington will not be formally made public until the hearings. forbes.com

To: i-node who wrote (377267)	4/9/2008 3:52:32 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1575787

Afghanistan's Hamid Kharzai demands action from President Bush after evidence of American torture emerges. The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, has reacted with anger after hearing the details of a US army report into abuse at a US detention facility in Afghanistan. Two inmates died after being beaten by inexperienced guards the report found. Mr Karzai says he'll raise the matter when he meets President Bush on Monday and ask that all Afghan prisoners being held by the US abroad should be returned to Afghanistan. He also wants the US military to stop raiding homes in his country. Julian Rush reports. By all accounts Dilawar was a shy and simple man, rarely leaving the remote village where he's now buried. He died, in December 2002, at the hands of ill-trained US troops at Bagram airbase. Troops who allegedly repeatedly assaulted and abused prisoners, sometimes just out of boredom. He was the second prisoner to die within six days. The US military gave his family a death certificate: homicide, it says, but no-one in the village could read English. In pages from the investigation file into the deaths, obtained by the New York Times, witnesses describe how Dilawar was chained to a ceiling for four days; how he was repeatedly kneed in the leg, turning his flesh to pulp so he couldn't stand; injuries like those of somebody run over by a bus, said the military coroner. The Afghan President, making it clear today he will confront President Bush when he sees him on Monday. In echoes of the prisoner abuse at Abu Graib in Iraq, no officers have been charged. Just seven junior soldiers will go to court, even though the investigation said senior officers had condoned the abuse. One of the British prisoners released from Guantanamo, Moazzam Begg, was held in Bagram at the same time. Earlier this year, he told Channel 4 News he had been abused there too. He has confirmed to us he believes the questions from investigators he described to us then were about these deaths. Drawings from a US. military report that was obtained by the New York Times. US forces in Afghanistan are increasingly unpopular: passions inflamed this week by the now-withdrawn report from Newsweek magazine of a Quran flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo. Americans, though, listening to their President on radio today, heard no acknowledgement their country's image was growing ever more tarnished. "On Monday, I will meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the White House to discuss freedom's remarkable progress in his nation. Afghanistan now has a constitution, an elected President, and its citizens will return to the polls this September to elect provincial councils in the lower house of the National Assembly. We're helping Afghanistan's elected government solidify these democratic gains and deliver real change. A nation that once knew only the terror of the Taliban is now seeing a rebirth of freedom, and we will help them succeed." - President Bush, speaking on radio. But help isn't always wanted. In Washington, Mr Karzai will also ask for an end to searches of Afghan homes by US troops. This was the funeral of a 75 year old man killed by soldiers searching his home. It's causing growing resentment: others displaying injuries they say were caused in an American search. The investigation into the deaths has taken nearly three years: dilatory, say some involved. Comprehensive, says the Pentagon, a sign of how seriously they take allegations of abuse. channel4.com

To: i-node who wrote (377267)	4/9/2008 3:54:16 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575787

The Practice of Torture by the American Army Was Widespread in Afghanistan By Eric Leser Le Monde Tuesday 15 March 2005 Military reports, cited by Human Rights Watch, detail the treatment undergone by two Afghan prisoners who died in December 2002 at Baghram. The same interrogation techniques were then applied to detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. From our correspondent in New York. American Army internal reports detailing the conditions under which two Afghan prisoners were beaten to death in December 2002 in Baghram prison, north of Kabul, demonstrate, according to the human rights defense organization Human Rights Watch, that the use of torture was systematic in Afghanistan. Close to thirty American soldiers could be indicted for having participated in the murders. Two of them from the 377th Military Police Company of Cincinnati (Ohio), Sergeant James Boland and Private Willie Brand, have been charged: for abuse and assault in the first case, for involuntary manslaughter in the second. According to researcher and Afghanistan specialist for Human Rights Watch in New York John Sifton, who has obtained a clandestine copy of the Army's reports, the prisoners died in December 2002, a year before the photographs of tortures and humiliations were taken in the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison. "These documents are equivalent to police notes. They demonstrate the evolution of the inquiries, the testimonies, the proofs. The Bush Administration and the Pentagon describe the problems of torture as isolated incidents that are not part of an overall plan. The proofs show otherwise," Mr. Sifton explains to Le Monde. "The incidents are not isolated cases. We cannot assert that they were the norm, but Private Brand acknowledges, for example, that he beat some twenty other detainees. Blows and painful positions were used very frequently in Afghanistan. According to our own inquiries, almost all the prisoners who subsequently testified underwent abuse in 2002," he adds. The men of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion who established the interrogation methods at Baghram did the same thing later at Abu Ghraib. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched a suit to obtain the army's reports officially under the Freedom of Information Act; however, they have been refused, since the inquiry is not yet terminated and several indictments could still be pronounced. A Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Jeremy Martin, has asserted that "the investigations are being intensively conducted and ... [that] the guilty will be punished appropriately." The two murdered prisoners were thirty-year-old Mullah Habibullah, the brother of a Taliban commander, and Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver. They died a week apart from one another and had been delivered to American troops by Afghan forces. The New York Times, in its March 12 edition, cites extracts from the reports Human Rights Watch obtained, which detail the treatments undergone. "Violent Traumas" The two detainees were "chained in their cells and frequently beaten." The investigators cite "credible information" according to which four guards regularly "kicked them in the groin and the legs," "threw them against walls and tables," "forced them to stay in painful positions during interrogations and poured water into their mouths until they suffocated." The autopsies completed by doctors and cited in the reports indicate that Dilawar's legs were so damaged that amputations would have been necessary. Dilawar died of "violent trauma to the inferior extremities provoking coronary and arterial complications," according to a document dated July 6, 2004. Mullah Habibullah died of a pulmonary embolism apparently linked to the presence of clots formed in his legs following blows received to them, according to a June 1, 2004 report. Among the other soldiers under indictment, one "put his penis alongside the face" of a prisoner" and "simulated sodomization." "There were several other deaths in American prisons in Afghanistan before December 2002, and we would like to have information on this subject," explains John Sifton. He also wonders "the reason why, in this matter, in those at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, no member of American intelligence services, and notably of the CIA, has been indicted, even though they had overall control of the interrogations and the prisoners." truthout.org

To: i-node who wrote (377267)	4/9/2008 3:57:24 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575787

In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths By TIM GOLDEN Published: May 20, 2005 Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him. The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. Dilawar was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who died while in custody of American troops. Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face. "Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!" At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. "Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time. The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths. In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both. In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning. The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military's response to the deaths. Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002, including some details of the two men's deaths, have been previously reported, American officials have characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated. And many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well treated. "What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that there were people who clearly violated anyone's standard for humane treatment," said the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We're finding some cases that were not close calls." 12345678Next Page > nytimes.com