Obama's faulty "Churchill didn't torture" claim
Betsy's Page
Chalk it up as just a presidential gaffe that will soon be forgotten. When President Obama claimed in his press conference that he opposed torture of military prisoners just as Churchill had opposed torture, he happened to have gotten some of his facts just plain wrong. Apparently, there was an ongoing program of harsh interrogations that those who criticize what was done at Guantanamo would certainly label as torture. Here's the story that The Guardian published in 2005 about what was known as "The Cage."
<<< By examining thousands of documents stored at the National Archives, formerly the Public Record Office, as well as the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, the Guardian has established what happened to this prisoner, and many others like him.
The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. The brutality did not end with the war, moreover: a number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948. >>>
It's a fascinating story about how Britain was routinely violating the Geneva Convention in interrogating German prisoners throughout the war. Do you think that Churchill didn't know what was going on right there in London?
And, apparently, that isn't all that historians have on the record regarding Churchill and torture. Ed Morrissey links to Neill O'Dowd this report from Irish Central about Churchill approving torture techniques to suppress Kenyan revolutionaries in the Mau Mau Revolution, including Barack Obama's own grandfather.
<<< Excuse me, Mr. President: Churchill did condone torture and he did use torture — and advocated using poison gas and concentration camps. And he was quite proud to do so, writing about it frequently as a means to an end.
I don’t know whose Kool-Aid Obama was drinking, but it must have been supplied by the British Embassy in bucketfuls.
It was an amazing gaffe, as there is clear evidence that Obama’s own grandfather, a member of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, was tortured by the British after he was captured.
Recent accounts in the British press note that he was whipped mercilessly every day when he refused to cooperate.
It was good old Winnie, drawing on his experience in similar tactics during the Boer War, who as Prime Minister ordered the savage suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in 1952.
According to historians, “The ensuing torture caught up many uninvolved Kenyans, and just like many modern 'anti-terror' campaigns, radicalized them and their friends and family, too. One earlier victim of this approach was the President's grandfather.“ >>>
Here's the story from the London Times.
<<< Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, according to the Kenyan family of the US President-elect.
Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.
“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.
Mrs Onyango, 87, described how “white soldiers” visited the prison every two or three days to carry out “disciplinary action” on the inmates suspected of subversive activities.
“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.” >>>
Churchill was Prime Minister when the Kenyan insurgency broke out and he ordered British troops to Kenya to put down the revolt. Here are some other stories of British treatment of Kenyan insurgents in this period.
<<< The British colonial authorities began a sustained campaign to quell the Mau Mau uprising, establishing numerous detention camps that some historians describe as “Kenya’s Gulag”, where inmates were frequently abused. “There was torture in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, institutional and systematic, and also casual and haphazard,” Professor Anderson writes in Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2005). “Violence . . . was intrinsic to the system, and the use of force to compel obedience was sanctioned at the highest level.”
At the height of the rebellion, an estimated 71,000 Kenyans were held in prison camps. The vast majority were never convicted. Letters smuggled out of the camps complained of systematic brutality by warders and guards. According to the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her exposé of British atrocities during the Mau Mau uprising, there were reports of sexual violence and mutilation using “castration pliers”. “This was an instrument devised to crush the men’s testicles,” she writes in Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005). “Other detainees also described castration pliers, along with other methods of beating and mutilating men’s testicles.”
Several hundred letters from camp inmates survive in the Kenyan National Archives, “chronicling camp conditions, forced labour, torture, starvation and murder”, according to Ms Elkins. One white policeman, Duncan McPherson, told Barbara Castle, the former MP, that conditions in some detention camps were “worse, far worse, than anything I experienced in my 4½ years as a prisoner of the Japanese”. >>>
So where did Obama get this story that Churchill didn't torture? Mickey Kaus links to speculation that the story came from Andrew Sullivan who had been touting the contrast between Dick Cheney and Winston Churchill on torture. Marc Ambinder confirms with the White House that Obama does read Sullivan's blog and that the story came from him. Kaus concludes,
Scariest thing I've heard about Obama: He reads Andrew Sullivan's blog. >>>
Will Obama admit his mistake and risk offending the British even more than when he sent back the bust of Winston Churchill? Don't count on it.
betsyspage.blogspot.com |
