Thursday 25th of April 2024
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the blind one-eyed cyclops .....

the blind one-eyed cyclops .....

Last week, the Washington Post gave Bob Woodward the front page for a story in which Susan J Crawford, the convening authority for Bush’s military commissions acknowledged the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," she said.

She was referring to the treatment of a Saudi man who was kept nude in sustained isolation, deprived of sleep and exposed to cold, until his condition became "life threatening".

As scoops go, this is hardly Watergate. The blogger Digby points out that Al-Qahtani's interrogation logs were published in Time three years ago, while Dick Cheney, CIA Director Michael Hayden and George W. Bush himself have all acknowledged the use of waterboarding, a favoured torture technique of the Khmer Rouge.

No, the significance of Woodward’s article lies almost solely in Crawford’s use of the T word.

meanwhile, down the road a bit …..

Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr, the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, received a sentence of 97 years gaol for torturing his opponents.

"It is hard to conceive of any more serious offenses against the dignity and the lives of human beings," U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga Altonaga said.

"The international community condemns torture."

Matthew Friedrich from the U.S. Justice Department's criminal division released an equally stern statement. "Our message to human rights violators, no matter where they are, remains the same,’ he said.

"We will use the full reach of U.S. law ... to hold you accountable for your crimes."

One couldn’t agree more.

So now that we have an admission that what took place in Guantanamo constituted torture, when do the prosecutions begin?

spilling the beans .....

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story.

"The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong," he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.

http://www.truthout.org/021609L

wishful thinking .....

Air America conducted a poll that asked a question raised by Time Magazine's Joe Klein: "Should Obama pardon George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney?" The idea: a pardon would brand them for crimes without the agony of a trial.

Air American's aren't buying the Klein solution. They want the whole lot thrown in jail. No trial necessary! A whopping 90% of our 9000 respondents want to see Bush and Company pay for their crimes with either hard time in the pokey or hard time in the pokey after enhanced interrogation techniques. (Shocking!)

In an interview last year with Philadelphia Daily News reporter Will Bunch, Barack Obama said something that seemed to signal the presidential hopeful might prosecute George W. Bush and his staff for crimes committed during the eight-year death march also known as the 43rd presidency of the United States of America.

It was one of the many moments that whipped up my own private Obama fervor. But did he say what I thought he said? Not really.

"I would want to find out directly from my attorney general--having pursued, having looked at what's out there right now--are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies."

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/128423/