What Bush and Friends did in your name.

[Grace Linda]

The international Committee of the Red Cross made a report of the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Feburary 2007. It said, "prisoners are subject to torture and/or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.

They described the treatment included suffocation by water,prolonged stress positions, which involved standing, "naked, held with arms extended and chained above the head" for up to three days: while hung from the ceiling, toilet access was sometimes denied, forcing prisoners to urinate and defecated on themselves; collars were held around detainees necks and used to forcefully bang their heads against the wall. Inmates were confined to coffin like boxes; routinely deprived of sleep for days at a time; and told their family members would be beaten or killed.
THIS IS AN ABBREVIATED LIST.

An 18 month investigation done by McClatchy newspaper, said this was "systematic" and "routine" conduct.

All I know it that when i teach exercise classes, people can barely hold their arms above their heads for three minutes. They make all sorts of faces and complain how it hurts. But the above is not torture cause it is being done to someone else.

I see this pattern reoccurring all the time in this country. Americans have very little capacity to empathize with others. But the most foul thing is that if you condone torture, you are in essences saying that you are yours is worth most than the family of someone else.

The argument goes, that they were trying to kill us, ironically this has not even been proven.


I know that if someone was doing this sort of stuff to me,I would confess to, or name names, or make up stories on the spot, especially if I was told they would kill my son.

This, nightmare we visited on these people will come back to bite us on the ass. So, I don't want to hear about how barbaric such and such a country is for doing this and that to one of ours. Hopefully it won't be anyone we know.

[funesthememorious]

From a news letter I get from Ramsey Clark:

A free people will not permit torture. Throughout history, torture has always been an instrument of tyranny. The very purpose of the Grand Inquisitor was to compel absolute obedience to authority. Torture was the weapon he used in the struggle to force freedom to submit to authority.

Fear is the principal element in both public acceptance of torture and individual submission to it. The frightened public is persuaded that only torture can force confessions essential to prevent catastrophic acts—terrorism in the present context. The frightened victim is persuaded torture will be unbearable, or be his death.

Franklin Roosevelt spoke truth when he said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Justice Black warned wisely, "We must not be afraid to be free," dissenting in In re Anastaplo. Anastaplo was a law school classmate of mine who refused to take a non-Communist oath, a requirement for admission to the Illinois bar at the time. We have failed to follow this wisdom, a failure of faith urged by Lincoln at the then Cooper Institute: "Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

At stake is our cultural insistence that America has faith in freedom, that America is, or aspires to be, the land of the free and the home of the brave. At risk is the image of America, which might become Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and rendition to torture chambers in client States.

Now we are confronted by the brutish and brazen mentality of Dick Cheney, only one of George W. Bush’s many vices. Having concealed truth by refusing to release records and after the destruction of evidence, Cheney proclaims, "I am very proud of what we did"—a war of aggression that has devastated and fragmented Iraq and Afghanistan, and created a danger to peace in Pakistan and beyond. The same wars that have left 5,000 U.S. soldiers dead and maybe 30,000 with impaired lives, spread corruption within the Bush administration, politics in prosecutors offices, the worst recession in 70 years caused by the failure to police his greedy friends and supporters, boasting of torture by any other name.

Cheney wants us to believe "enhanced interrogation techniques," the phrase he prefers to torture, "were absolutely essential" in successfully stopping another terrorist attack on the U.S. after 9/11. This is utterly false, a matter of indifference to Cheney who may be getting desperate. These "enhanced interrogation techniques" were, however, torture as defined in Article 1 of the Convention Against Torture of 1984, an international treaty ratified by 184 nations, including the United States a decade late in 1994. The Convention, which is part of the supreme law of the land under the U.S. Constitution, recognizes "the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world," and "that these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person."

Thus, the U.S. is treaty bound to prosecute all persons, high and low, who have authorized, condoned or committed torture if our word in the international community is to mean anything.

The Convention requires each signatory to ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law. It requires prosecution, or under specific conditions, extradition to another nation for prosecution of alleged torturers.

Former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan is only one of the key U.S. intelligence and investigative officials directly involved in the key interrogations who have publicly condemned the "enhanced interrogation techniques." He has explained how the practice not only failed to obtain reliable or new information, but was also harmful. He concluded an op-ed article in the New York Times on Sept. 6, which stated that "the professionals in the field are relieved that an ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive program, one that may have given Al Qaeda a second wind and damaged our country’s reputation is finished."

The struggle to prosecute torture by U.S. agents is related to the struggle over health care legislation and troop increases in Afghanistan. Real health care reform would end the theft of major national resources by the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and the wealth seeking medical profession at the expense of the lives and health of the poor and middle class.


President Obama faces challenges, torture in our name, health care and Afghanistan all at once. If he fails to insist on full investigation of torture and prosecution of all persons found to have authorized, directed or committed it, including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, he will lose all three, because his adversaries in each are the same.

We want to thank every member of the IndictBushNow movement for their work. The announcement that a Special Prosecutor has been appointed to investigate the crimes committed during the Bush administration is a critical step. It was the action taken by you and people all around the country that made this possible. Now we will build on this momentum. The voice of the people must and will be heard.

[Whiny Old Bastard]

Oooooh ooooooh I know, Wylde.
I would politely stomp their ass to mud and walk it dry.

[Wylde Abandyn]

It amazes me that everyone is so concerned about the mistreatment of people who have openly admitted they want to kill us all and not a word of condemnation for beheadings and acid attacks on young women who are trying to educate themselves and bombs being set off in markets, killing and maiming dozens or hundreds of innocent civilians at a time...or hey, what was that thing that happened about 8 years ago where 3,000 innocent people were killed in New York? If your child was in danger of being killed and you thought someone had information to prevent it, would you simply politely ask for that information and give up if they refused to answer, or would you do everything in your power to extract that information and save your child's life? Answer the question, it's not a hard one.

[Mark F]

You honestly believe that McClatchy made all this up? The government has admitted to doing most of this stuff already.

[Sarge!]

LOL McClatchy is a liberal news organization and owners of the Sacramento Bee? This of course is an unbiased report of bad ole America who had it coming when 911 occurred. I understand 66 former detainees were interviewed for this definitive report.... Need I say more?

[Mark F]

And people looked at me funny when years ago I said I was ashamed of my government.

[funesthememorious]

From a recent Washington Post editorial.


“The real culprits in this sordid story are those higher-ups, starting with former president George W. Bush and former vice president Richard B. Cheney, who led America down the degrading path of state-sanctioned torture and left the next administration to cope with the fallout.”

What does the report that Attorney General Eric Holder released yesterday reveal? That Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld’s torture tactics included:

* Mock executions
* Repeatedly choking detainees carotid artery until unconsciousness
* Threatening sexual attacks against the children and parents of detainees
* Detaining the children of detainees and threatening to kill the children
* “Hard takedowns” meaning repeatedly smashing prisoners into the floor
* Head smashing inmates into walls
* Water dousing, pouring freezing water on naked inmates strapped to plastic sheets followed by holding the still naked inmates in bitterly cold cells for days
* Sleep deprivation lasting for 11 days
* Violent shaking of prisoners
* Waterboarding (mock drowning) 183 times in the case of one detainee
* Hanging prisoners form their wrists for up to three days
* “Scrubbing” the bodies of detainees with metal brushes

More than one hundred prisoners may have died in these torture centers according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson who served as Colin Powell’s chief of staff during the Bush Administration.

The IndictBushNow movement is now in high gear for the next phase of this critical struggle to save the Constitution. Every elected official and the mass media must know that the people will not accept finding a few low-level scapegoats to punish.

Members of Congress are echoing this call and we can create an avalanche of public support for the indictment of Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld.

Jerome Nadler, the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee Chairman said yesterday: “The gruesome acts described in today's report did not happen in a vacuum ... it is vital that this special counsel be given a broad mandate to investigate these abuses, to follow the evidence where it leads, and to prosecute where warranted.”

Now that the investigation has begun all efforts to limit it will fail. Each step of the investigation will inevitably point to those who gave the orders in the chain of command. It is Bush and Cheney who gave the orders and it is they who must be held responsible.