Torture In Our Time: Essay by Lawrence Davidson. Quote: >>The Bush administration’s reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal was to deny that the photos and stories reflected present or historical American policy. On the contrary, President Bush was quick to tell Al-hurra TV (the feeble American answer to Al-Jazeera) on May 5, 2004 that the United States was a compassionate country interested in the well-being and freedom of every individual in Iraq and elsewhere. That meant that, according to Mr. Bush, torture at Abu Ghraib was just the “wrongdoing of a few,” or as the Army’s Inspector General, Paul Mikolashek put it in April of 2004, all cases of abuse are simply “an individual failure to uphold Army values.” On the other hand, FBI personnel present at many of the interrogations carried on in 2003 and 2004 at Guantanamo Bay filed no less then 26 complaints alleging abuse and mistreatment of detainees, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which did unannounced inspections of many US interrogation facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, has documented widespread and consistent interrogation techniques that are “tantamount to torture.” This practice was (and still is) so widespread and so consistent that one must speak of a policy of torture, which now works itself out in a system of hellish prisons and interrogation centers stretching from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to Kabul in Afghanistan and Baghdad in Iraq. This policy has subsequently been confirmed by investigations carried out by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The past and present pattern of behavior is so manifestly obvious that one must conclude that both the President and the Inspector General were either totally ignorant of decades of CIA and military interrogation practice, as well as the consequences of their own on-going “enemy combatant” policy, or they were lying. Did President Bush happen to recall his own findings of January 2002 removing the protection of the Third Geneva Convention from the prisoners taken in Afghanistan and Iraq? What did he think the result would be?<<
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posted by johannes,
Friday, April 28, 2006
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