Here is a succinct executive summary of everything you need to know about torture:
Yes, Waterboarding IS Torture
President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Malcolm Nance (an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence), Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples (the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) and many other interrogation experts and high-level politicians say that waterboarding is torture
Everyone claiming waterboarding is not torture has changed their tune as soon as they were exposed to even a small dose of it themselves. See this, this and this
Why the Huffington Post will report the story below and not this story here, is no mystery. The left gate-keeping media don’t want you to know that there is good reason to question the official 9/11 story….with science, observation, and experiment.
And to all the Obama supporters- Guantanamo was supposed to be closed a half year ago. (Let alone, it should never have been built, used, or funded.)
Omar Khadr appeared before Military Judge Patrick Parrish in Guantanamo Bay this week to confirm his decision to fire his American legal team. He then stated that he plans to boycott the military commissions because he considers them “unfair” and “unjust.”
In explaining his decision, Khadr read from his own handwritten prepared statement that cited his objections to a proposed plea deal that would have had him admit guilt, saying that such a move would allow the U.S. government to use him to fulfill its goals and would provide the government with an excuse for torturing and abusing him as a child. Khadr asked how he could get justice from a process like the one found in the military commissions.
As Obama’s solicitor general, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan urged the Court to dismiss the suit that our 9/11 families have been pressing against the Saudi government and several Saudi princes for their extensive funding of al Qaeda. The families sued under the domestic tort exception to sovereign immunity, which according to Kagan’s Supreme Court brief (at p. 14):
requires not merely that the foreign state’s extraterritorial conduct have some causal connection to tortious injury in the United States, but that “the tortious act or omission of that foreign state or of any official or employee” be committed within the United States. 28 U.S.C. 1605(a)(5).
The “tortious act or omission” is the wrongful act (the tort) that leads to the injury. Thus she is claiming that for Saudi funding of al Qaeda to be actionable, the funding itself has to have been transacted within the United States. Compare this with the actual wording of 28 U.S.C. 1605(a)(5):
This story belongs in the same folder as the following announcements made in the last 2 weeks:
The documents obtained by the ACLU (page 26), which have the signature’s of Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Ashcroft telling the 9/11 Commission Chairs that they can’t interview the 9/11 detainees due to National Security.
In a federal court filing, Justice backed away from the Bush administration’s statements that Zubaydah was the No. 2 or No. 3 official in al-Qaeda who had helped plan the 9/11 attacks, as well as even earlier claims from the Clinton administration that he was directly involved in planning the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.
General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly (Nor Cal Edit) gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.
Also don’t forget what the ACLU revealed last week: Tenet, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld told the 9/11 Commission that they (Commission Members) could not cross “certain lines” of investigation, namely the interviews with detainees like the one in the story below….and above.
Editor’s Note: As of 4:51 pm PST Thursday, April 1, 2010, this story was updated to include additional information from the court document undercutting the government’s case and is now a complete writethru.
The Justice Department has quietly recanted nearly every major claim the Bush administration made about Abu Zubaydah, the alleged al-Qaeda leader who was the first suspected terrorist subjected to the torture of waterboarding and other White House-approved “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
In a federal court filing, Justice backed away from the Bush administration’s statements that Zubaydah was the No. 2 or No. 3 official in al-Qaeda who had helped plan the 9/11 attacks, as well as even earlier claims from the Clinton administration that he was directly involved in planning the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.
The US government’s retreat underscores yet another problem with President George W. Bush’s use of torture. Besides its illegality and immorality, torture can be applied to suspected terrorists who have been falsely identified and who thus don’t possess the expected information, which can lead frustrated interrogators to escalate the torture until the subject provides something, whether true or not.
Bullshit. I want to “call” out all their cards. I want to see who is locked up, where they are locked up, and for how long. How much of this is real, and how much of it comes from the mouths of senior intelligence officials declining to be named, spouting talking points to a severly mono-controlled media? KSM for example was declared dead in 2002, apparently even the FBI was there. Yet we hear about KSM in Guantanamo for the last 6 years, being tortured numerous times daily. To what extent is psychological warfare waged, and on whom? – NorCalTruth
by Stephen Webster source: Raw Story March 23, 2010
A (alledged) terror war prisoner, once considered of such high value by the Bush administration that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered he be tortured, has taken his first step toward freedom thanks to a federal district court judge, who ordered the government to free him after nearly 10 years of imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay.
Though 39-year-old Mohamedou Slahi, an alleged 9/11 conspirator, won his habeas corpus appeal before U.S. District Judge James Robertson on Monday, he likely does not know it yet. That’s because the judge’s decision was classified, according to published reports.
“After the [9/11] attacks, he was fingered by a senior al Qaeda operative for helping assemble the so-called Hamburg cell, which included the hijacker who piloted United 175 into the South Tower,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007.
After being captured and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, he was repeatedly subjected to torture by his American captors, with Rumsfeld himself ordering “special” interrogation tactics be set aside for Slahi.
Robert Gibbs was on MSNBC recently and spoke about alleged 9/11 hijacker Kalid Sheikh Mohammed. No matter where the trial is held, “he is likely to be executed” Gibbs said. Unfortunately, legal concepts like ”innocent until proven guilty” are a far cry from even our highest officials minds.
Gibbs was echoing comments from many on both sides of the political aisle. From Glenn Beck to Bill O’Reilly, President Obama and President Bush, everyone wants to “rid the world of the evil-doers’.” Kalid Sheikh Mohammed was allegedly arrested in Pakistan on March 1st, 2003.
The 2005 Bradbury memo revealed the waterboarding routine for KSM in 2003; he was waterboarded 183 times in one month alone. Whatever happened in the four years between his alleged arrest in Pakistan and alleged confession at Guantanamo, the information he did or did not provide has not:
A federal appeals court has denied the appeal of (alleged) 9/11 terror conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.
A three-judge panel of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, rejected his claim that he was denied potentially helpful evidence during his trial and restricted in choosing his own counsel. Read the rest of this entry »
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran at least two secret detention facilties in the Baltic nation of Lithuania, a parliamentary inquiry has found.
The sites were set up by Lithuanian intelligence services for the CIA, according to the report published on Tuesday.
But the head of the inquiry said he was not able to confirm whether al-Qaeda suspects had ever been interrogated at either location.
“The sites existed … and planes landed,” Arvydas Anusauskas, the head of parliament’s national security and defence committee, told reporters.
A man accused of taking part in a deadly siege in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008 has retracted his confession, claiming that police tortured him into admitting his role in the attacks.
Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 22, told the judge in a special court on Friday that he came to Mumbai as a tourist and was arrested 20 days before the siege began.
“I was not present at VT [Victoria Terminus, the former name of Mumbai's main railway station]. I do not know what has happened,” Kasab said.
“Witnesses have come and recognised me because my face looks similar to the terrorists … that is why I was picked up. I have been framed“, he said.
Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.
Less than a year after Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is co-operating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.
The United States Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by four former Guantanamo inmates who want to sue the US government for torture they say they endured during their stay at the prison camp, a move the inmates’ lawyers say could pave the way for future torture practices by the US military.
The four plaintiffs — Rhuhel Ahmed, Jamal al-Harith, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul — say they were subjected to numerous forms of physical abuse and religious humiliation, including having their beards shaved, being threatened with dogs and being placed in cells that were alternately very hot or very cold. The lawsuit also alleges that one of the guards at Guantanamo flushed a Koran down the toilet to anger and humiliate the prisoners. One of the inmates, Ahmed, has also alleged “sexual abuse.”
Three of the detainees — Ahmed, Iqbal and Rasul — are British residents who say they were in Afghanistan in 2001 to provide humanitarian relief in the wake of the US invasion when they were kidnapped by Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum, a US ally, and accused of belonging to Al Qaeda. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Brian 
