Monday, May 9, 2011

Torture Newsletter #2

OMNI NEWSLETTER # 2 ON TORTURE WAR CRIMES, MAY 9, 2011 (#1 October 5, 2007 http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/). Compiled by Dick Bennett, Building a Culture of Peace

As on every other subject regarding US illegal and unjust wars, OMNI has not been silent regarding our abhorrence of torture and by torture the subversion of our constitutional and best moral traditions. In addition to this newsletter: our book forums and petitions to our senators. If you wish to be help or lead OMNI’s anti-torture efforts, contact Gladys Tiffany at OMNI 935-4422.

Contents of #2

No Exceptions

Apologists

Bad Science and Medical Ethics

Bush Admin. War Crimes, Psychology, and Accountability

Prosecuting Bush Officials

Cheney Admits to War Crimes

CIA Waterboarding Legal Shield

Solitary Confinement

Justice Denied to Guantanamo Dead

Books

President Obama and Faisal Shahzad

“No torture. No exceptions. “ Charles and Gregory Fried, The Washington Post 5-9-11

Excerpt: "Yet Lincoln's code also said that 'military necessity does not admit of cruelty ... nor of torture.'"

“The Torture Apologists” By The New York Times Editorial

05 May 11

he killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden's death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.. . . .

There is no final answer to whether any of the prisoners tortured in President George W. Bush's illegal camps gave up information that eventually proved useful in finding Bin Laden. A detailed account in The Times on Wednesday by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage concluded that torture "played a small role at most" in the years and years of painstaking intelligence and detective work that led a Navy Seals team to Bin Laden's hideout in

Pakistan

That squares with the frequent testimony over the past decade from many other interrogators and officials. They have said repeatedly, and said again this week, that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured. The Times article said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, fed false information to his captors during torture.

Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by CIA interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush's decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard. . . .

No matter what Mr. Yoo and friends may claim, the real lesson of the Bin Laden operation is that it demonstrated what can be done with focused intelligence work and persistence. . . . . For the full essay go to http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/287-124/5836-the-torture-apologists

Jane Meyer, “Bin Laden Dead, Torture Debate Lives On”

The New Yorker

Jane Meyer writes: "Well, that didn't take long. It may have taken nearly a decade to find and kill Osama bin Laden, but it took less than twenty-four hours for torture apologists to claim credit for his downfall. Funny. You would think that if the CIA's interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the US government would have succeeded in locating Bin Laden before 2006, which is when the CIA's custody of so-called 'high-value detainees' ended."

“Bad Science Used to Support Torture and Human Experimentation” by Iacopino, Allen, and Keller, in Science (Jan. 7, 2011. “The science used to justify torture…failed to assess important long-term physical and mental health outcomes….and violated the most basic tenet of medical ethics and scientific inquiry…first, do no harm.”

THE WAR CRIMES OF THE TORTURERS AND THEIR RATIONALIZATIONS

“CIA Psychologist's Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush's Torture Program” by Leopold and Kaye From Truthout 3-22-11

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=hpsT5ftDepxOFQeU0K0cuv5OAdqaBwg1

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=JQvjJTMoFtd2QcQPKBTUM2zCKQA8DGFg

It's been nine years since the Bush administration implemented its highly-classified torture program, where government interrogators subjected "war on terror" detainees held at CIA prisons and at Guantanamo to brutal techniques in an effort, the public was told, to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the

United States

and its interests abroad.

While President Obama and Congressional lawmakers "look forward" and have failed to hold accountable those individuals who violated international and domestic human rights laws, new revelations continue to surface showing the extent of the previous administration's war crimes and the lies upon which they were based.

Indeed, as Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye report in this in-depth investigative report, the handwritten notes, obtained exclusively by Truthout, that were drafted by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the so-called "enhanced interrogation" program, show that torture was used to "exploit" detainees and to get them to "collaborate" with government authorities.

The documents stand as the first pieces of hard evidence to surface that further explain the psychological aspects of Bush's torture program and the rationale for subjecting detainees to so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Jessen's notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a decorated veteran who previously held high-ranking positions within the Department of Defense, and is speaking publicly for the first time. Kearns, who worked closely with Jessen in developing a survival training program for military personnel that the torture program was based upon, said Jessen's "duplicitous act is appalling to me and shall haunt me for the rest of my life."

Supplementing this groundbreaking report is an exclusive, on-camera interview with Captain Kearns conducted by Jason Leopold. Truthout is also providing our readers with copies of Jessen's notes that can be downloaded from the article page.

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=nX1qKx42YyAItjNo5AyhYf5OAdqaBwg1

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Michael Ratner, “Bringing the 'Bush Six' to Justice “

Guardian

Michael Ratner writes: "Today, the Centre for Constitutional Rights filed papers encouraging Judge Eloy Velasco and the Spanish national court to do what the United States will not: prosecute the 'Bush Six.' These are the former senior administration legal advisors, headed by then US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who violated international law by creating a legal framework that materially contributed to the torture of suspected terrorists at US-run facilities at Guantanamo and other overseas locations."

t r u t h o u t “Cheney Admits to War Crimes, Media Yawns, Obama Turns the Other Cheek” [01/20]

TUESDAY 30 NOVEMBER 2010

Cheney Admits to War Crimes, Media Yawns, Obama Turns the Other Cheek

Monday 15 February 2010

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

Dick Cheney is a sadist.

On Sunday, in an exclusive interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News' "This Week," Cheney proclaimed his love of torture, derided the Obama administration for outlawing the practice, and admitted that the Bush White House ordered Justice Department attorneys to fix the law around the administration's policy interests.

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding," Cheney told Karl, as if he were issuing a challenge to officials in the current administration, including President Barack Obama, who said flatly last year that waterboarding is torture, to take action against him. "I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques..."

The former vice president's declaration closely follows admissions he made in December 2008, about a month before the Bush administration exited the White House, when he said he personally authorized the torture of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.

“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times about the waterboarding, a drowning technique where a person is strapped to a board, his face covered with a cloth and then water is poured over it. It is a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition.

The

has long treated waterboarding as a war crime and has prosecuted Japanese soldiers for using it against US troops during World War II. And Ronald Reagan's Justice Department prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

But Cheney's admissions back then, as well as those he made on Sunday, went unchallenged by Karl and others in the mainstream media. Indeed, the two major national newspapers--The New York Times and The Washington Post--characterized Cheney's interview as a mere spat between the vice president and the Obama administration over the direction of the latter's counterterrorism and national security policies.

The Times and Post did not report that Cheney's comments about waterboarding and his enthusiastic support of torturing detainees amounted to an admission of war crimes given that the president has publicly stated that waterboarding is torture.

Ironically, in March 2003, after Iraqi troops captured several US soldiers and let them be interviewed on Iraqi TV, senior Bush administration officials expressed outrage over this violation of the Geneva Convention.

"If there is somebody captured," President George W. Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, "I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals." For the rest of the article go to:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=dd75a4efec&view=cv&fs=1&tf=1&ver=b1_WpQkzs8s.en.&am=!10dEyMHDV0SxhZxijtQ2BOc5EP5Pl_K7beUNJVTcGSJNCxD30BZD2Q&search=inbox&th=12c9e8229f5772a7&cvid=1

“Officials: CIA Gave Waterboarders $5 Million Legal Shield”

Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press

Reader Supported News (18 December, 2010)

The Associated Press reports: "When the CIA decided to waterboard suspected terror detainees in overseas prisons, the agency turned to a pair of contractors. The men designed the CIA's interrogation program and also personally took part in the waterboarding sessions."

READ MORE https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/12cfac10193dccea

Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?

Atul Gawande, The New Yorker

The article begins: "Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people."

US DENIES JUSTICE TO MEN WHO DIED IN GUANTANAMO

By Andy Worthington http://pubrecord.org/law/8359/court-denies-justice-guantanamo/

From Cindy Sheehan 10-16-10

BOOKS

--Greenberg, Karen. The Torture Debate in America. (see rev. below)

-- Kurnaz, Murat. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. Palgrave, 2008. Rev. Z Magazine (Dec. 2010). Torture of Muslim prisoners was “systemic,” with “countless acts of murder…at least in the hundreds.” “Pentagon architects designed prisons that were sadistic torture chambers.”

--Alfred McCoy A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project)

--Roth, Kenneth, et al. Torture. (see rev. below)

--Spero, Nancy. Torture of Women. Siglio, 2010. Artist Spero created the 125-foot scroll-like “Torture of Women” in 1976. Here the artwork is remembered in detail.

Books on Torture

Necessity or Atrocity?

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Review by LANCE MORROW

Published: January 29, 2006

Sept. 11 encouraged a corrupted version of American exceptionalism, among other things. The superpower suddenly became the embattled victim, the injured innocent - which was how Americans imagined themselves when they declared their independence in 1776. The Bush Justice Department's 2002 "torture memos" - hardboiled pettifogging intended to give legal cover for getting rough, for "taking the gloves off" in America's war on terror - were later repudiated by the administration. But the memos amounted subliminally to a different sort of declaration of independence, conjured up out of the founding Shinto: America, claiming a special dispensation under Providence, would make its own rules, especially if national security was at stake. The signal emanating from the White House and the Pentagon borrowed a memory from the American subconscious: we would not be contradicted by the tainted Old World, with its treaties and conventions drawn up far away - in Geneva, for example - especially not when such conventions would protect the likes of Al Qaeda.

THE TORTURE DEBATE IN AMERICA
Edited by Karen J. Greenberg.
414 pp. Cambridge University Press. Paper, $18.99.

TORTURE
Does It Make Us Safer? Is It Ever OK?
Edited by Kenneth Roth and Minky Worden; Amy D. Bernstein, contributing editor.
218 pp. The New Press. $25.95.

Forum: Book News and Reviews

New reality trumps old morality. Out of a new emergency of history, one particularly menacing narrative took shape, darkened by the prestige of apocalypse - the ticking bomb. A script emerged, along these lines:

The Qaeda terrorist breaks under aggressive questioning. (The waterboard worked. He came up spluttering and talking.) The interrogator relays information that, just in time, snips the wire on the dirty nuke hidden in the heart of an American city. The interrogator - "torturer," if you insist - is actually a hero. Thousands of lives are saved.

The ticking bomb may be hypothetical for now, but according to this scenario a certain amount of rough stuff may already have paid off in the war on terror, which, mind you, is a real war against ingeniously concealed fanatics traveling the globe at will, capable of mass killing, anywhere, without warning. In this context, due process, beyond a certain formal point, is for sissies. We live in a newly vulnerable, porous world. Human rights fetishists, fighting the last war (a state-to-state conflict, with old rules now rendered quaint) have become Al Qaeda's useful idiots. What will the bien-pensants have to say if and when another 9/11 - or something worse - occurs?

Who-whom?, Lenin asked. The rough-stuff rationale elicits an indignant counterversion from advocates of human rights:

Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have become outposts in a global American gulag in which innocent and guilty alike are illegally detained and tortured, usually with no yield of usable intelligence - we squander the nation's moral capital for trash. Torture is the refuge of the lazy, the stupid, the pseudo-tough. Real intelligence services don't have to torture; they are intelligent enough to learn the prisoner's language and culture. Why would a tortured man tell you the truth? He will say anything to stop the pain. What happened to those mystic chords of memory about all men - all of them - being created equal, endowed with unalienable rights? What of America's respect for human dignity? For itself? A couple of dozen prisoners, give or take, have died in the American gulag - not to speak of those whom the C.I.A. has disappeared into regimes far less fastidious than our own.

The American superpower, many human rights advocates go on, has under George W. Bush turned its back on civilized opinion from Aristotle on, has abandoned the Geneva Conventions, America's 1994 antitorture law and a century's progress toward basic rights, and in the process, compromised the ideals of freedom and democracy for which the wars on terror and in Iraq are supposedly being fought. America has become a pariah among nations by committing human rights crimes similar to those for which Nazi government officials were tried and convicted at Nuremberg.

Two new volumes of essays take up all of the questions contained in these contrasting views, examining the subject of torture in the context of international terrorism, studying it in various lights - moral, legal, political, historical, military, philosophical. "The Torture Debate in America," edited by Karen J. Greenberg, focuses especially on legal questions; almost all of its contributors have been trained as lawyers, and are either professors of law or human rights workers. "Torture: Does It Make Us Safer? Is It Ever OK?," edited by Kenneth Roth and Minky Worden, looks at torture from a more global and historical perspective, ranging from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Renaissance, to contemporary Israel and Algeria and Argentina and Rwanda. Both collections proceed from an essentially left-brain mentality; the right brain's script has only token defenders. Overall, the voices in these books suffer from a tendency toward piousness: Torture bad, me virtuous.

More Articles in Books >

Related Articles

· Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S. (December 8, 2005)

· THE REACH OF WAR: PRISON SCANDAL; New Book Says Bush Officials Were Told of Detainee Abuse (September 12, 2004)

· World Briefing | Asia: Cambodia: Khmer Book A Hot Seller (March 6, 2004)

· At Internet Torture Trial, Defense Builds Case on a Beat Novel (March 26, 1998)

END OF TORTURE NEWSLETTER #2

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Responses to the Killing of Osama Bin Laden #2

Causes of US Wars

Reasons to Kill: A conversation with Richard E. Rubenstein

Written by The Editorial Cell

 
Q. In REASONS TO KILL, you study the arguments that pro-war advocates have made throughout American history as we’ve mobilized for war. What reoccurring themes did you find in our rhetorical and philosophical strategies?
 
RR. This book is not about the factors that motivate elites to make war. Elites have many reasons to fight, including economic interests, geopolitical ambitions, and domestic political motives. The basic question I ask is: What convinces ordinary Americans to send their kinfolk, friends, and countrymen to kill other people and risk their own bodies and minds in battle? The overall answer, I find, is that we are persuaded to fight by appeals to widely shared and deeply held moral values – values associated with what some call our civil religion. The most common themes are these:
 
* Self-defense. We have a moral right and duty to defend the nation against unjustified attacks. The problem is that we have vastly expanded the definition of self-defense. The “self” we feel justified in defending is not just America’s soil and people but U.S. troops, intelligence agents, civilian employees, private contractors, and allied forces around the globe. Equating this imperial apparatus with American proper creates what I call “imperial circularity” and generates an endlessly expanding war.
 
* Evil enemies. We have a moral duty to destroy diabolical leaders who commit atrocities against their own people, threaten their neighbors, and seek world domination. The problem is that we often label adversaries absolutely evil when they are not really satanic and can be dealt with in ways short of total war. To justify U.S. participation in World War I, we converted Kaiser Wilhelm II into the “Beast of Berlin,” and to justify attacking Iraq we diabolized Saddam Hussein. Sometimes we label a whole people evil, which can lead to violence on a horrific scale.
* Humanitarian interventions and moral crusades. We have a special mission to secure the values of democracy, human rights, civil order, and moral decency around the world, by military means if necessary. The problem is that the U.S. is a superpower with its own interests and cultural biases, not a disinterested liberator of the oppressed. More often than not, as in the case of the Spanish-American War, we end up acting exactly like the tyrants and aggressors we oppose.
 
* Patriotic duty. We earned our freedom by fighting for it. When Uncle Sam asks us to fight, even die, for our nation, we should be prepared to do so. The problem is that patriotism has never meant killing and dying on command. Generations of American patriots have demanded that the government justify war by showing that there is a real threat to the nation and that violence is needed to counter it. What I call communal patriotism creates a special problem by excluding anti-war dissenters from the American community.
* National honor. If we don’t demonstrate that we are willing to fight, we will lose face and credibility, bad people will take advantage of us, and we will become a humiliated second-rate nation. For the same reason, once we have committed the nation to a war, we cannot retreat or withdraw without dishonor. The problem is that this is not a moral doctrine; it is an insecure cowboy machismo posing as morality. Most American wars since the end of World War have ended in something short of victory, and most should not have been fought at all.
 
* No peaceful alternative. Negotiations to avert war have failed, or they would be fruitless, since the enemy cannot be trusted to keep its word. The only alternative to war is therefore dishonorable appeasement. The problems are that the U.S. refuses to negotiate in good faith as much as any other nation, and that, even where it is attempted, negotiation falls short of conflict resolution. Without serious attempts at conflict resolution – that is, ending violence by eliminating its underlying causes – war is never a last resort.
 
 
You note the United States has the most bellicose record of all modern nations and in REASONS TO KILL are most curious about why people follow. Can you tell us a bit about your ideas here?

Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War

By Richard E. Rubenstein

What makes Americans fight? Why do the professed first citizen of the free world so often accept armed conflict as a political measure, and how do we justify those choices to ourselves? When is war the right decision?
From the American Revolution to the end of World War II, the United States spent nineteen years at war against other nations. But since1950, the total is twenty-two years and counting. On four occasions, U.S. presidents elected as "peace candidates" have gone on to lead the nation into ferocious armed conflicts. Repeatedly, wars deemed necessary when they began have been seen in retrospect as avoidable and ill-advised.
Americans profess to be a peace-loving people and one wary of "foreign entanglements." Yet we have been drawn into wars in distant lands from Vietnam to Afghanistan. We cherish our middle-class comforts and our children. Yet we send our troops to Fallujah and Mogadishu. How is it that ordinary Americans with the most to lose are so easily convinced to follow hawkish leaders-of both parties-into war? In Reasons to Kill noted scholar Richard E. Rubenstein explores both the rhetoric that sells war to the public and the underlying cultural and social factors that make it so effective. With unmatched historical perspective and insightful commentary, Rubenstein offers citizens new ways to think for themselves about crucial issues of war and peace.

New blog post from Rich.

Advance Praise for Reasons to Kill:

“Many of us long for an intelligent and informed conversation about America’s role in the world. Are we going the way of all empires, or is there another way? Richard E. Rubenstein has provided a sane and probing contribution to that conversation. In a time of faux-populism and jingoistic patriotism, it is encouraging to read a critical analysis of our attitude to war and violence from a writer who deeply loves his country.”—Alan Jones, dean emeritus, Grace Cathedral and author of Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality and Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting your Mind.

Reviews and media for Reasons to Kill:
Here’s Richard’s Guest blog post for the Washington Post’s Political Bookworm
Feisty essay in The Chronicle Review this week that includes Reasons To Kill
Great post on Juan Williams' website
“A lively, contrarian view of history—fruitful reading for peaceniks and warfighters alike.” —Kirkus Reviews
Nice early excerpt in Alternet – 5 Ways We Should Radically Reconsider War
Watch a Video with Richard.

Reasons to Kill: A conversation with Richard E. Rubenstein

Written by The Editorial Cell

 

Q. In REASONS TO KILL, you study the arguments that pro-war advocates have made throughout American history as we’ve mobilized for war. What reoccurring themes did you find in our rhetorical and philosophical strategies?