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Title: General claims Bush gave 'marching orders' on aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo
Source:
Raw Story
URL Source: http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Gener ... gave_marching_orders_1022.html
Published: Oct 23, 2007
Author: Nick Juliano
Post Date: 2007-10-23 18:46:29 by Zipporah
Keywords: None
Views: 83
Comments: 4
More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents demonstrate how US military interrogators "abused, tortured or killed" scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001, including some who were not even expected of having terrorist ties, according to a just-published book. In Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners. "[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes," write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. "Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating 'stress positions,' held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months." Most of the documents on which Administration of Torture is based were obtained as a result of ongoing legal fights over a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October 2003 by the ACLU and other human rights and anti-war groups, the ACLU said in a news release. The documents show that prisoner abuse like that found at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was hardly the isolated incident that the Bush administration or US military claimed it was. By the time the prisoner abuse story broke in mid-2004 the Army knew of at least 62 other allegations of abuse at different prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors report. Drawing almost exclusively from the documents, the authors say there is a stark contrast between the public statements of President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the policies those and others in the administration were advocating behind the scenes. President Bush gave "marching orders" to Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve harsher interrogation methods at Guantanamo, the general claims in documents reported in the book. The ACLU also found that an Army investigator reported Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al Qahtani. The prisoner was forced to parade naked in front of female interrogators wearing women's underwear on his head and was led around on a leash while being forced to perform dog tricks. “It is imperative that senior officials who authorized, endorsed, or tolerated the abuse and torture of prisoners be held accountable," Jaffer and Singh write, "not only as a matter of elemental justice, but to ensure that the same crimes are not perpetrated again.”
Poster Comment: Columbia University Press Administration of Torture Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh Listen to a a podcast interview with Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. Read sample government memos and documents from the book. Read an excerpt from the introduction. Listen to Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh on NPR’s Talk of the Nation "Administration of Torture is a powerful account of the devastating effects of deviating from longstanding legal prohibitions on the mistreatment of prisoners. Through government documents, Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh bring to light the grim reality of the torture and abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody abroad. This book will serve as a historic reminder of the dangers of curtailing human rights protections in the name of national security."-" "The issues raised in this book are too fundamental to be left unaddressed. The years ahead will continue to test our security, and we will again be tempted to violate our values in the mistaken belief that we will be made more secure by doing so. Jaffer and Singh remind us that when that test comes, we must find the courage to defend our principles more firmly. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this message." "After the Second World War, the United States played a leading role in developing the rules that govern the conduct of states during times of peace and war. Simply by letting the facts speak for themselves, Jaffer and Singh show how far the country has strayed from that tradition. They go on to present a compelling case for rebuilding what the Bush administration has torn down." "In gathering these truly telling documents Jaffer and Singh have distilled the essence of an evil that has shamed America. Exposing it can only help remove a terrible national stain." "Jaffer, Singh, and their colleagues at ACLU deserve congratulations on two counts: first for their assiduous use of the Freedom of Information Act that brought the documents in this shocking dossier to light, and second for making it easily accessible here. Introduced by their lucid commentary, this book will be an essential source for historians of one of the darkest episodes in American history."-" "This is an extraordinary book. The documents that the ACLU has been able to wrest from government control are harrowing and the authors' treatment of them is judicious, meticulously researched, and ultimately damning. For more than three years now, we've heard over and over that the abuses at Abu Ghraib took place despite the Bush administration's policies, not because of them. As Jaffer and Singh show, that claim could not be further from the truth.-" When the American media published photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration assured the world that the abuse was isolated and that the perpetrators would be held accountable. Over the next three years, it refined its narrative at the margins, but by and large its public position remained the same. Yes, the administration acknowledged, some soldiers abused prisoners, but these soldiers were anomalous sadists who ignored clear orders. Abuse, the administration said, was aberrational-not systemic, not widespread, and certainly not a matter of policy. The government's own documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, tell a starkly different story. They show that the abuse of prisoners was not limited to Abu Ghraib but was pervasive in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. Even more disturbing, the documents reveal that senior officials endorsed the abuse of prisoners as a matter of policy-sometimes by tolerating it, sometimes by encouraging it, and sometimes by expressly authorizing it. Records from Guantánamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating "stress positions," held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months. Files from Afghanistan and Iraq describe prisoners who had been beaten, kicked, and burned. Autopsy reports attribute the deaths of those in U.S. custody to strangulation, suffocation, and blunt-force injuries. Administration of Torture is the most detailed account thus far of what took place in America's overseas detention centers, including a narrative essay in which Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh draw the connection between the policies adopted by senior civilian and military officials and the torture and abuse that took place on the ground. The book also reproduces hundreds of government documents—including interrogation directives, FBI e-mails, autopsy reports, and investigative files—that constitute both an important historical record and a profound indictment of the Bush administration's policies with respect to the detention and treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad. About the Authors Amrit Singh is a Staff Attorney at the Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union and has been a litigator for the ACLU since 2002. She was educated at Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School.
New book says US uses 'methods of the most tyrannical regimes'
A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond
Foreword by Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director, and Steven R. Shapiro, ACLU legal director
—Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 1997-2002 and President of Ireland 1990-1997
—Alberto J. Mora, former U.S. Navy General Counsel
—George Soros, chairman, Open Society Institute
—John W. Dean, Nixon White House counsel and author of Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches
—David Rose, contributing editor, Vanity Fair, and author of Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights
—Rory Kennedy, director, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Jameel Jaffer directs the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project and has been a litigator for the ACLU since 2002. He was educated at Williams College, Cambridge University, and Harvard Law School.
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#1. To: Zipporah (#0)
This shit is just too sick and depraved for words.
Bush's Memorandum of Notification to the CIA of Sept. 17, 2001, which seems to have been the source of the torture policies, remains, as far as I know, classified.
To reason, indeed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. - Macaulay, "History of England," Vol. 1, Chapter 6, on James II.
I'll bet the videotapes from those interrogations are all sticky and stuff. Sickos.
Honi soit qui mal y pense
#2. To: Zipporah (#0)
#3. To: aristeides (#2)
of course, state's secrets, bump
#4. To: Zipporah (#0)
The ACLU also found that an Army investigator reported Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al Qahtani. The prisoner was forced to parade naked in front of female interrogators wearing women's underwear on his head and was led around on a leash while being forced to perform dog tricks.
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