Republican leaders fight to legalize torture.

October 15, 2004 2:31 AM

Bush administration fights to legalize torture. Secret arrests by mysterious people in private jets, as documented by Swedish television and Seymour Hersh. It's called extraordinary rendition -- the outsourcing of torture on unconvicted -- and often innocent -- individuals. The American Bar Association is strongly against it, and the Democrats are trying to pass legislation to ban it -- apparently international treaties against torture aren't enough anymore.
posted by insomnia_lj (10 comments total)

I think this is a pretty distasteful development: only last night I was watching Question Time (UK political program) when both a Conservative opposition and a Labour government member defended the Iraqi Invasion in the aftermath of revelations that Sadam possessed no WMDs or links to Al-Quaeda. Their main line of argument was that Sadam tortured his own people and therefore the seemingly illegal war was justified on moral grounds. Perhaps we should've kept him in power and instead exported our own prisoners for "extraordinary rendition" - after all, if he was so good at it he might as well do it for the benefit of the Western powers. Seems there is a now difference between "good" torture carried out by sympathetic tyrannies and "bad" torture carried out by evil tyrannies.

As a side note, the BBC is planning to air quite an interesting documentary which details the FUD tactics used by the Bush administration and Labour government to control the political debate on their terms. Among it's many interesting revelations is that there the Fleming-style, evil, global Al-Quada conspiracy does not actually exist as the media and government would have us believe, and that in fact many of the terrorist actions attributed to it are carried out by various groups working independantly (something I've long suspected).

Also, it points out that the threat of a dirty bomb is actually "a fantasy. The Americans should know: the CIA tried for years to make one, before realising that blowing up radioactive material won't hurt anyone. Radioactive dust disperses so quickly you'd need to be exposed to it for about a year before any real damage occurred."
posted by axon at 3:24 AM on October 15, 2004

A guardian article about the programme axon mentions, and issues arising.
posted by biffa at 3:37 AM on October 15, 2004

Say, isn't violation of international treaties one of them thar unconstitional things?
posted by rough ashlar at 4:05 AM on October 15, 2004

When this nightmare administration is toppled and the last dog is hung, Sy Hersh should get not another Pulitzer but perhaps some kind of medal for patriotic service.
posted by planetkyoto at 4:15 AM on October 15, 2004

All this is true, but the immediate danger of the torture law receded last week, when it was dragged into the light. The law as amended replaces it with indefinite detention without trial. This isn't really acceptable either, but it isn't, in most US prisons, equivalent to torture. In some, it probably is.
posted by alloneword at 5:40 AM on October 15, 2004

"Governments around the world are using the global campaign against terrorism to crack down on human rights."
Joanna Weschler, UN Advocacy Director [Link]
posted by DrDoberman at 5:51 AM on October 15, 2004

Lies, barbarity, torture, murder, fascism; signed sealed and delivered by God's best prophet: dubya! All Hail!
posted by acrobat at 6:06 AM on October 15, 2004

"The religious warrior of Abu Ghraib : An evangelical US general played a pivotal role in Iraqi prison reform" - Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian, Thursday May 20, 2004

Infiltrating the U.S. Military : Gen. Boykin’s “Kingdom Warriors” On the Road to Abu Ghraib and Beyond
posted by troutfishing at 10:59 AM on October 15, 2004

Thanks to insomnia_lj for posting this. When I watched the one hour show on Swedish TV I was disgusted with 'my' governments spy-games as well as the US. Sweden was never really "neutral", still that was beyond my wildest imaginations, having CIA interrogating people at Swedish airports before sending them off to Egypt to be tortured all the while pretending to be against torture and deporting people back to countries that employ those methods in the UN. Hypocrites.
posted by dabitch at 11:26 AM on October 15, 2004

The Hersh presentation at Berkeley contains a really disturbing story -- truely, without exaggeration, shades of My Lai:

... rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.

"He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'

"It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts," Hersh continued. "You know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet in the back.' And that's where we are in this war."

I watched the webcast [RealMedia], and Hersh was visibly downcast as he finished the story. He talks again and again about how much of an impact the Iraq war is having on the military -- heavy attrition among Special Forces, severe damage to morale, and here this...
posted by lodurr at 1:48 PM on October 15, 2004