In case you were out drinking last night and missed it, the Wikileaks Iraq document dump was released last night. Here’s the Times coverage, and here’s the Guardian’s. One thing that jumps out is the Guardian’s story of how the US ignored torture, or what the Times calls “detainee abuse”.
Torture
Wikileaks
Depressing
It Never Stops
In a sign of how much awful shit is going on in the world, I just now have learned that there are accusations we experimented on detainees as we tortured them.
I’ll just avoid anything that will Godwin this discussion, but seriously, WTF? Does this shit ever stop?
American Mengele
This is nowhere near as bad as what Paul McCartney did, obviously:
In the course of trying to prove that its “enhanced” interrogation program was legal, the Bush administration may have broken the law, according to a new report (PDF) by Physicians for Human Rights. The watchdog group claims that in an attempt to establish that brutal interrogation tactics did not constitute torture, the administration ended up effectively experimenting on terrorism detainees. This research, PHR alleges, violated an array of regulations and treaties, including international guidelines on human testing put in place after the Holocaust.
According to the report, which draws on numerous declassified government documents, “medical professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA” frequently monitored detainee interrogations, gathering data on the effectiveness of various interrogation techniques and the pain threshholds of detainees. This information was then used to “enhance” future interrogations, PHR contends.
Reminder
Julius Caesar did not break ancient Rome’s taboo against marching troops into the city of Rome. Lucius Cornelius Sulla did that in 82 B.C., thirty years earlier. Sulla even set what you might call a good example: he restored the Republic’s traditional balance of powers and then, setting himself apart from self-appointed dictators then and now, he retired.
Similarly, the first Weimar leader who more or less ignored his Republic’s balance of powers was Friedrich Ebert. Ebert, the first President of Weimar after WWI, felt that nobody could rebuild German society with the existing burden of checks and balances. Maybe he was right! Historians disagree. Regardless, by Hitler’s time a leader had plenty of precedent to declare an emergency and use the Constitution as a dinner napkin.
We shoudln’t punish the Addington regime because they acted like assholes or because they made America look bad. We should punish them, and we must punish them, because we cannot afford not to.
A judge will investigate claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said tonight. The move was welcomed by civil liberties campaigners and may put pressure on the Labour leadership candidate and former foreign secretary David Miliband, who was accused by Hague, while in opposition, of having something to hide. Miliband has repeatedly rejected the accusation and broadly indicated that he or his officials may have been misled by foreign intelligence agencies about the degree of British complicity…
Hague will come under pressure to ensure the inquiry is public and comprehensive. He first called last year for an independent judicial inquiry into claims that British officials had colluded in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo detainee and a UK resident. Mohamed claimed that he was tortured by US forces in Pakistan and Morocco, and that MI5 fed the CIA questions that were used by US forces.
Isn’t it odd to see Labour utterly fail to rise to the challenge of Bush-era abuses and have the Tories stand up instead. By US wingnut standards I guess that makes the mainstream British right a bunch of terrorist-loving communazis.
For lack fo a better word, news from our side of the pond sucks ass.
[L]ast April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram. I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are “virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene,” and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely, “the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss. They quickly appealed Judge Bates’ ruling. As the NYT put it about that appeal: “The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.” Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan).
Maybe the British could indict ours as well.
Down With Torture, Up With Assassination!
Could someone inform the WH this is simply not progress:
The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism.
The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.
To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the approval of the National Security Council, required no judicial review.
Love the strong words from the Times- “uneasy.” Assassinating citizens makes “some people uneasy.” You know what makes me uneasy- taking a sip from the milk container a day after the expiration and it tastes a little sour. Or cleaning up dog vomit.
The fact that we are ordering the assassination of own citizens makes me furious, even if it is someone who has done the things al-Awlaki is alleged to have done.
Down With Torture, Up With Assassination!Post + Comments (282)
Oh. Hey! Look Who Discovered the “T-Word”
The torture of Iraqi detainees at a secret prison in Baghdad was far more systematic and brutal than initially reported, Human Rights Watch reported on Tuesday.
The Washington Post:
Adding to the political tension, Human Rights Watch released a report late Tuesday saying that members of a military unit under the command of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, systemically tortured and sexually abused hundreds of Sunni Arab prisoners.
Iraqi men held for months at a secret prison outside Baghdad were systematically tortured and forced to sign confession statements that in at least some cases they were forbidden to read, according to a new report by a human rights group released Wednesday.
When OTHER people do it, HRW is a legitimate, credible source, and it is not “allegations of torture” or “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Funny, that. In a really sad way.
*** Update ***
We’ll see how much the Iraqi government has been paying attention they call this the work of a few bad apples doing some frat boy pranks and then publish the menu at the prison.
Oh. Hey! Look Who Discovered the “T-Word”Post + Comments (27)