Sunday 19th of May 2024
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imperial rights .....

imperial rights .....

Despite no involvement in terrorism, prisoners are subjected to horrific torture, abuse, and humiliating treatment as "unlawful enemy combatants" - now called "unprivileged enemy belligerents," defined as anyone (with or without evidence) suspected of "engag(ing) in (or materially supporting) hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."

International law expert Francis Boyle calls it this legally nihilistic "quasi-category....where human beings (including US citizens) can be disappeared, detained incommunicado, denied access to attorneys and regular courts, tried by kangaroo courts (with no right of appeal, convicted), executed, tortured, assassinated and subjected to" unspeakable treatment.

Whatever its wording, the notion is "a long-defunct World War II era legal category of dubious provenance....superseded by the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949" and their Common Article 3, requiring detainees to be treated humanely and prohibiting:

- "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture (and) degrading treatment."

No longer under the bogus War on Terrorism where imperial rights replace human ones.

Of the original 517 Guantanamo detainees:

- few at most committed violent acts;

- many were randomly seized, guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time;

- 95% were sold for bounty - $5,000 per claimed Taliban and $25,000 for alleged Al Queda members; and

- 20 were children, some as young as 13, yet were treated as horrifically as adults.

Alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was victimized, despite no evidence of his involvement, yet in custody, he:

- was initially held in Afghanistan;

- had no lawyer;

- was isolated at black sites for over two years, including the secret "Dark Prison" near Kabul International Airport, infamous for its brutalizing torture in total darkness;

- another north of Kabul called the "Salt Pit," where in 2002, a detainee was stripped naked and left chained to the floor in frigid temperatures until he died;

- in Afghanistan, Mohammed was hog-tied, stripped naked, hooded, and repeatedly abused in numerous ways, including being:

- kept in prolonged isolation for months;

- waterboarded numerous times;

- chained naked to a metal ring in his cell in a painful crouch in intense heat and extreme cold;

- subjected to deafening sounds round the clock for weeks;

- forcefully thrown against walls, a procedure called walling;

- suspended from the ceiling by his arms so his toes barely touched the ground;

- beaten with electric cables;

- given electric shocks; and

- forced to endure a variety of stress positions for extended periods, causing excruciating pain until - in 2006 - he was sent to Guantanamo where his torture continued, including being waterboarded over 180 times and subjected to numerous other tortures.

Since its 2002 opening, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) represented hundreds of Guantanamo detainees, publishing detailed accounts of their treatment that remain unchanged, appalling, and illegal. Besides the above listed ones, they include:

- 20 or more daily hours in tiny cells with virtually no human contact;

- severe discipline for the slightest infraction;

- holes for toilets;

- burning lights 24 hours a day;

- sleep deprivation;

- painful shackling;

- physical attacks by guards;

- confinement in boxes in extreme stress positions causing severe physical and psychological pain and trauma;

- under restraint for hunger strikers, force feeding through their noses and throats abrasively enough to draw blood - a procedure causing excruciating pain;

- instances of severe beatings causing deaths; in some cases, willful murders; and

- to exact confessions, some are told they won't be killed, but will taken to the brink of death and back repeatedly.

Complicit with America, Britain still denies them, in breach of Geneva and other international laws. Post-9/11, War on Terror priorities supercede human rights and civil liberties. Muslims became targets of choice, and still do for their faith at the wrong time in both countries.

Yet writing in the Daily Telegraph in early February 2010, Jonathan Evans, MI5 director-general in 2007, said:

"We in the UK agencies did not practice mistreatment or torture (earlier) and do not do so now, nor do we collude in torture or encourage others to torture on our behalf."

He lied as do his American counterparts.

"Fabricating Terrorism:" Victims Of UK Injustice

and the beat goes on ......

reprehensible...

var articleheadline = "Hoon: I did not know British troops hooded Iraqi prisoners";

Hoon: I did not know British troops hooded Iraqi prisoners

 

...

But Mr Hoon, who avoided the waiting photographers and cameramen by entering the inquiry building via a back door, said yesterday: "I've never seen that film before. If it is what it appears to be, it looks pretty appalling. If British soldiers engaged in that, it's reprehensible."

The then armed forces minister Adam Ingram was also copied into memorandum sent after Mr Mousa's death revealing that he had been subjected to prolonged hooding. In June 2004, nine months after Mr Mousa's death, Mr Ingram assured the parliamentary joint committee on human rights that hooding was used only while detainees were being transported for security reasons. Giving evidence last week the former minister was forced to admit that this was "not accurate".

The inquiry has heard that British troops used "conditioning" methods on Iraqi prisoners which included hooding, sleep deprivation and forcing them to stand in painful "stress positions" with their knees bent and hands outstretched. The techniques were outlawed by the Government in 1972 after an European court ruling on their use in Northern Ireland.

In October 2003, a month after Mr Mousa's death, the chief of joint operations at the military's Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) in the UK, Lieutenant General Sir John Reith, issued a fresh order banning hooding. However, the hearing was told, UK special forces had continued to place sandbags over the heads of detainees and the practice did not end until May 2004.

Earlier Lieutenant General Robin Brims, a senior officer in southern Iraq, was asked by Mr Elias: "Did you know at the time of issuing that order that there were troops on the ground that believed it was a standard operating procedure to hood prisoners at the point of capture? Lt Gen Brims responded: "I didn't know at the time."

Asked whether questions surrounding the legality of hooding should have been raised at government level or with the Attorney General to get a "definitive view to what the law was", Lt Gen Brims replied: "I didn't need to raise it... because I was told what the legal adviser at various levels was saying and I was aware that the legal debate was going on at the higher level." Mr Elias asked: "Was this your understanding that this was a decision likely to be taken at the highest level, to go up to the Attorney or ministers?" Lt Gen Brims replied: "If necessary."

Asked how he felt after learning of Mr Mousa's death, the Lt Gen said: "I was appalled that anybody could die while in custody of soldiers."

Inquiry chairman Sir William Gage asked: "About the time of your going into Iraq, if anybody had said to you is there a danger of soldiers beating up people they have captured, what would you have said?" Lt Gen Brims said: "No, because they know it's wrong."

Torture: The history of 'hooding'

The Gestapo became renowned for using hooding during the Second World War and over the decades it would become a global form of "stealth torture".