Oops! Leaders did not approve or encourage "torture"

I don't normally bother posting in the political forum, too much opinion and conjecture, too little fact. But since we've been listening to the accusations for so long I thought I'd relate this to balance things out a bit.

Gee, I can't imagine why the liberal Dems aren't parading around the streets with this.

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~Raithere

Next Topic: Conspiracy Theories

 

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There is no need to direct or approve abuse: just "let it be known" that if the results are satisfactory there will be no questions asked.
The record of US detention in other wars involved torture: a US administration that did not want torture applied this time would have explicitly forbidden it in orders going directly down from high command through every rank in the chain of command. They didn't, but announced that these prisoners had no rights and left the people involved to decide what that meant.

 

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Well, who is doing the investigation, the Navy?

from your link:
"I can only conclude that the Defense Department is not able to assess accountability at senior levels, particularly when investigators are in the chain of command of the officials whose policies and actions they are investigating," he said.

I'm not surprised they found no evidence, nothing written needed to be generated for this to occur. It's well known that Rumsfeld often circumvented the Judge Advocate General's Corps, who complained from the very beginning about how the war on terrorism was being implemented.

 

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This would constitute "back channel" permission for which they could find no evidence.

Nor could they find any systematic occurrence of abuse. Most incidents occurred "not in prisons but on the battlefield at what the military calls the "point of capture"". In which case we're talking about soldiers getting out of hand with their captives not authorized interrogation procedures as was being asserted.

So no evidence is evidence. Interesting. I bet that lawyers cream in their pants when they see you walk in for jury selection.


Pretty much what I expected: Two votes for conspiracy.
Watching the quick retreat is entertaining though.

~Raithere

 

Retreat from what? It's already well known that Alberto Gonzales approved a memo authorizing torture. This isn't a court of law, but a court of public opinion. I didn't say no evidence is evidence, I'm saying it's common sense that such an interpretation and undermining of the geneva conventions and our own torture laws would lead to abuse especially during the heat of wartime. The fact that you would even challenge me for for hard evidence is disturbing, like- as long as no one records the classified telephone conversations between the principle leaders of our government, then they can get away with murder. The only thing keeping the Bush crime family from getting impeached is their control of the House, there is ample reason to start a real investigation.

 

What evidence was there for Saddam's WMD's? ...for the mobile laboratories? ...for his nuclear weapons program? Oops!, we invaded the wrong country! Doh.

 

Amen.

Anyway, as to the fact: The Gonzalez memo has done a fair bit of damage. Furthermore, the main focus of all this is that torture happened in the first place. There was no well-trained, well-organized system at the prison. That's the main issue.

 

Not just at one prison: just about everywhere that the US took prisoners torture was used. If it wasn't on direct orders or implicit hints it suggests that there is something very wrong with the mindset of the US armed forces if the first thing they do when they hold prisoners is set up torture chambers. If the chain of command didn't know about this they were culpably ignorant about the kind of people under their command.

 

any 1 see the channel 4 documentry (part of the torutre season) where they reconstructed a guntanemo cell and put in 5 volunteers? its was on the UK. the techniques they knew were only the known ones but they were all torture to me. one the volunteers copped out after a few hours and suffered early hypothermia. they explainined alot of the propaganda words that America uses to make Guntanoma bay look good.

did u know that torture according to the US is pain similar to organ failure - anything below is not torture os america isnt lying (mostly) when it says it isnt using torutre

there was one a documentry on US prisons the next day aswell. the prisons was a normal american criminals. and if that stuff is happening in the US to US citezens by US police then i am not suprised about the tactics happening abroad

 

From accusations of official authorization of torture for purposes of interrogation to an accusation of tacit approval in general. I'm not singling you out specifically; it's just a general perception.

Ah, same old spin. It was a legal opinion about what constituted torture and what did not, not an approval. Personally, I feel he should have defined torture more broadly than he did and I think the subsequent DOJ rewrite is definitely more appropriate. Point is there is a difference between defining what legally constitutes torture and authorizing its use.

Common sense indicates that "in the heat of wartime" you're going to have mistakes made and abuses occur no matter what the official position is. The finding that I find particularly significant is that most of the abuses did not occur in the prisons and detention centers but on the battlefield.

And what should we base a determination upon, a tarot reading? What I find disturbing is that you've made up your mind without evidence.

Doh! Indeed. How quickly you forget. Prior and post Desert Storm it was well evinced and internationally accepted that Saddam had and had used WMD. For instance, when he killed a town of over 5000 Kurds in a single attack in 1988. Terms of the surrender included that Saddam destroy the WMD and provide evidence that he had destroyed them. Evidence was never provided. For 11 years Saddam continued to interfere with investigations to determine whether or not the WMD had been destroyed. Frankly, I think the error was in pulling out of Desert Storm and not making sure it was already taken care of. After 11 years most of the world seems to have forgotten what occurred.

~Raithere

 

Replying with old posts.

Spending any time talking about Saddam's crimes would have been as useful as spending time informing the audience that the sky is blue. For our (the U.S.) policy towards him to have had any credibility, we would have had to condemn him and abandon all support the moment it was clear that he was a criminal. His use of chemical weapons in Halabja in 1988 was a crime deserving of the most severe penalties imaginable. But it was not enough for the U.S. to stop supporting him. Which greatly strengthens Noam Chomsky's arguments that virtually no atrocity is sufficient for the U.S. to stop supporting a dictator or government that they find useful.

The pictures are said to have been taken in the aftermath of Saddam's attack using chemical weapons and cluster bombs on the Kurdish city of Halabja (population estimated at 70,000) on March 17, 1988. Halabja is located about 150 miles northeast of Baghdad and 8-10 miles from the Iranian border. The attack, said to have involved mustard gas, nerve agent and possibly cyanide, killed an estimated 5,000 of the town's inhabitants. The attack on Halabja took place amidst the infamous al-Anfal campaign, in which Saddam brutally repressed yet another of the Kurdish revolts during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam is also said to have used chemical weapons in attacking up to 24 villages in Kurdish areas in April 1987.
http://www.kdp.pp.se/chemical.html

In 1989 President George Herbert Walker Bush took power and ordered a review of United States policy toward Iraq. According to Power:

The study ... deemed Iraq a potentially helpful ally in containing Iran and nudging the Middle East peace process ahead. The "Guidelines for U.S.-Iraq Policy" swiped at proponents of sanctions on Capital Hill and a few human rights advocates who had begun lobbying within the State Department. The guidelines noted that despite support from the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and State Departments for a profitable, stable U.S.-Iraq relationship, "parts of Congress and the Department would scuttle even the most benign and beneficial areas of the relationship, such as agricultural exports." The Bush administration would not shift to a policy of dual containment of both Iraq and Iran. Vocal American businesses were adamant that Iraq was a source of opportunity, not enmity. The White House did all it could to create an opening for these companies"Had we attempted to isolate Iraq," Secretary of State James Baker wrote later, "we would have also isolated American businesses, particularly agricultural interests, from significant commercial opportunities."

Powers mordantly comments: "Hussein locked up another $1 billion in agricultural credits. Iraq became the ninth largest purchaser of U.S. farm products.... As Baker put it gently in his memoirs, 'Our administration's review of the previous Iraq policy was not immune from domestic economic considerations.'"
http://hnn.us/articles/862.html

Who gives a shit about chemical weapons and slaughter when there is money to be made? Five thousand people, two thousand more than were killed in 9/11. I can remember reading a little about it in the newspaper at the time, maybe something in the television evening news. Imagine if the response of the rest of the world to 9/11 had been a collective yawn, and shrug of the shoulders.

http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?p=713914#post713914

 

If we really feared Saddam, or cared in the slightest about the Iraqis, we would have supported the rebellion that we incited. But we allowed Saddam to crush it instead.

The spontaneous Shiite uprising of 1991 consumed the southern part of Iraq right up to the approaches to Baghdad. Rebels came to U.S. troops, who were then deployed in the Euphrates Valley, begging for U.S. intervention. The Shiite political parties sent emissaries to the few Americans who would see them. To this day, I am haunted by the desperation in the appeals made to me by one group, as they realized time was running out for their countrymen.....

..... But although Bush had called for the rebellion, his administration was caught unprepared when it happened. The administration knew little about those in the Iraqi opposition because, as a matter of policy, it refused to talk to them. Policymakers tended to see Iraq's main ethnic groups in caricature: The Shiites were feared as pro-Iranian and the Kurds as anti-Turkish. Indeed, the U.S. administration seemed to prefer the continuation of the Baath regime (albeit without Hussein) to the success of the rebellion. As one National Security Council official told me at the time: "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime."

The practical expression of this policy came in the decisions made by the military on the ground. U.S. commanders spurned the rebels' plea for help. The United States allowed Iraq to send Republican Guard units into southern cities and to fly helicopter gunships. (This in spite of a ban on flights, articulated by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf with considerable swagger: "You fly, you die.") The consequences were devastating. Hussein's forces leveled the historical centers of the Shiite towns, bombarded sacred Shiite shrines and executed thousands on the spot. By some estimates, 100,000 people died in reprisal killings between March and September. Many of these atrocities were committed in proximity to American troops, who were under orders not to intervene.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10874-2003Apr11?language=printer

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Beware Of America's Kangaroo House Investigation Ruse's

1945 TRANSLATION :
BERLIN -- German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and the Reichstag's top brass were exonerated yesterday of accusations that they ordered, or turned a blind eye to, the brutal torture and extermination of detainees at Germanys notorious Aushwitz Extermination Camp .

 

yep. Rumsfeld = Hitler (??)
that Aussie beer must be damn good, Brian

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I can see the point of this thread has obviously been lost on you

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No surprises there ......................

 

Whoa, who exactly 'cleared' Bush and his cohort? Where they given a trial by U.N officials, or by their own lackeys?

 

Newt Gingrich ?

 

Raithere,

While this may be true, coalition forces did not go to war to protect Kurds, they went to war because it was said that Saddam was a threat to the West. Yet, this threat has never been sufficiently proven. Regardless of its horrible nature, using WMD against a bunch of local Kurds incapable of retaliation is not equivalent to launching a missile and succesfully delivering a devestating pay load on e.g. U.S. soil.

 

I agree. But this wasn't a discussion about US foreign policy over the last 50 years and I won't be dragged into one. I was simply replying to the well worn question "what WMDs?" The answer to which is, "the ones he used before and refused to show us what he did with them."

My point really wasn't to argue the validity of US (or any other countries) involvement in the Middle-East. I find the issue too complex to easily pick apart and it's impossible to determine a single source of blame, there's plenty to go around for everyone. I do however, object to the demonization of the US or indeed any other country. I find this type of idealism and demagoguery obtusely simplistic and ignorant. I don't accept it from Bush and I don't accept it from his detractors. Those who do I consider ignorant and stupid.

Back to the topic, the claim that the US officially condoned torture as a tool of interrogation appears not to have been well founded. Yes, there were abuses. Yes, this cannot be condoned and responsibility needs to be addressed, and it is. But the remainder of the issue appears to be mere political demagoguery.

~Raithere

 

yep. why trust a Senate Comittee (especially a partisan comittee), when there are so many rogue-states/UN-members out there you can ask!

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