7GEN #3: On torture, Electric motorcycles, Earth day, and more

Torture, by the U.S. Government

It saddens me the recent revelations of torture committed in our name by the Bush Administration. It also saddens me the reluctance to make a serious stand against that torture. But first a bit of context..

It is now understood that beginning in early 2002 the Bush Administration's fight against terrorism included the use of torture supposedly to extract information not otherwise available. Remember that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said clearly that the war against this terrorist threat will include dealings with dark people. Apparently some of those dark people were himself, Cheney and others in leadership positions in the U.S. Administration. In that period we were told those terrorists were dangerous people and essentially everybody was made to be scared out of their minds, and in the name of salving that terror atrocities were committed.

Stories were coming out all along about the torture as well as the illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens. In terms of torture my earlier coverage included:-

Waterboarding = Drowning = Torture = Illegal = Immoral,

Redefining torture, or "The Constitution is just a piece of paper",

Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary about Torture,

The U.S. and torture,

Jeremy Scahill: On CNN The Real Abu Ghraib Scandal is The Photos, Not the Torture | The Huffington Post,

"extraordinary rendition" - Outsourced torture?,

Sinking to our enemies' level,

Secret CIA Prisons in Your Backyard ...

However only the barest inkling of the story had been told. Much of the story was kept under the cover of being labeled Top Secret. Yes, U.S. forces were using illegal interrogation tactics, torture, and using Top Secret clearances to hide the fact. The torture tactics were ones the U.S. has several times convicted & sentenced others for war crimes. By international legal standard the tactics used are illegal as war crimes. The choice of prosecuting war crimes is not optional. Political expediency doesn't let you say "we should be looking forward and not backwards" as Pres. Obama recently said. These war crimes rise to the highest level of requirement to prosecute just as the world prosecuted war crimes committed by Nazi Germany, and others such as the leaders of various factions in the former Yugoslavia.

Some Bush Administration memos were recently released which confirmed my deepest fears. That the conduct of torture by the Bush Administration went beyond all legal standards, went beyond reason, and is a dark stain on America's reputation. The ACLU has published copies of The Bush Administration's Secret Legal Memos along with a call to action.

In addition to Pres Obama's "looking forward" statement I'm completely irked at the call from Cheney and others to release other memos, the ones that show that the torture worked and produced useful information. Uhm.. gosh. This sounds like a repeat of "The ends justify the means" so Cheney do you want to be lumped with the evils of the U.S.S.R.?? To hide behind "it provided useful evidence" is to claim that it doesn't matter how illegal this is, the tactic "worked". Just because it may have produced useful information at one time or another does not justify its use.

What's most shocking is there seems to be very little in the avalanche of news coverage that explores this very obvious connection. I'm dumfounded at news presenters who are simply repeating Cheney's assertion that the torture worked and because it worked it is okay to have done it. No, as I said that is backwards. It is an illegal tactic labeled by international law as a war crime. Period.

I understand that in regular prosecution of regular crimes one way a conviction can be overturned is to show prosecutorial misconduct. A famous recent case was Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens who was convicted for gross corruption, but the conviction was overturned when it was shown the prosecutors witheld some evidence. Similarly police torture is widely recognized as a reason to overturn convictions, therefore any information the U.S. interrogators learned through their use of torture should have itself been tossed out. Such as: Decision in Manisa Children Torture Case: Teenagers in Turkey had been convicted of membership in leftist organizations, their sentences later overturned because of police torture.

In Harpers Magazine, Scott Horton laid it out very well in Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration. The issue is much bigger than the use of torture, it is:-

This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted “signing statements” that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.

... There can be no doubt that torture is illegal. There is no wartime exception for torture, nor is there an exception for prisoners or “enemy combatants,” nor is there an exception for “enhanced” methods. ...

The question I was asking all through the Bush II years was: Is this the kind of governance we want? Clearly in many ways the Obama administration was an answer to that collective yearning for just governance. Now I am asking what do we do about the sins of the Bush II Administration? Do we simply look forward and move forward and that's it? That's what Obama is suggesting.

It seems to me that if the Bush II Administration people are left to go free the wrong lesson will be engraven in history. Some of the leaders of the Bush II Administration, Rumsfeld and Cheney in particular, were present in earlier Administrations where misconduct had happened for which there was little legal effect. They learned it's possible to break the law and get away with it, and that's what they've done. These acts by the Bush II Administration cannot be left unpunished, because future leaders may look back on these years and decide they can do even more heinous acts in our names.

Electric motorcycles

After that I want to cover something more pleasant.

In early April 2009 I had the privilege to attend an electric motorcycle endurance race. The race was sponsored by Zero Motorcycles, and conducted at a dirt bike track in south San Jose. It lasted for 24 hours and as a long time electric vehicle advocate I found it totally awesome that their motorcycle could do this. I've been to other electric vehicle races which had to be kept short because, well, the range issue. Some electric vehicle advocates say that if an electric vehicle can't go far it might as well go fast. But at the Electricross race they were able to do both, go far and go fast, because of quick change battery packs.

The following is over 30 minutes of video going over the event.

Technosanity #25: 24 Hours of Electricross - Interview with Neal Saiki

Technosanity #26: Interview w/ Don Amador at 24 Hours of Electricross

Technosanity #27: Zero X Motorcycle demo ride

Earth day

It came around again this week. For me it's like any other day because I basically live that ideal every day of the year. It's nice that there is an effort to raise awareness as to the need for a better environment, but it strikes me as being akin to new years resolutions. Every year people make promises on Jan 1 only to forget those promises after a few days.

What keeps the environmentally unsound practices going is habit. One day each year isn't enough to break or change habits. Changing ones habits takes much more effort than setting aside one day to change a few lightbulbs. It takes continual practice, awareness, and patience with the process of change.

The social environment around us does not support environmentally sound living. Especially in the U.S. where the cities have been built to the convenience of cars, it is very difficult to live a low impact lifestyle. Hence just as it's difficult to break a smoking habit when you hang out with smokers, it's difficult in modern U.S. society to practice environmentally sound living when there are so many environmentally unsound opportunities around us.

Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary about Torture

Media Matters, March 2, 2008, This week our guest is Alex Gibney, 2008 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature for his film Taxi to the Dark Side. The interview makes this sound like a very important documentary about the U.S. move to the dark side. In 2001 V.P. Dick Cheney told us that in pursuing the war on Terror we, that is the U.S., would have to engage in dark activities and to work with nasty people. So here we are with a country that is now committing torture, a country who has an idealism that is being ignored by U.S. leaders like V.P. Cheney.

Quote:

In December 2002, an Afghan named Dilawar had scraped together enough money to buy a taxi. He was fingered by a paid informant as a terrorist connected with a rocket attack. Taken to the American prison at Bagram, Afghanistan, he was tortured so violently that he died after five days. An autopsy showed that his legs were so badly mauled, they would have had to be amputated, had he lived. Later, the informant who collected U.S. money for fingering him was proven to be the terrorist actually responsible for the crime the innocent Dilawar was charged with.

An official report said Dilawar died of "natural causes." The New York Times found an autopsy report describing the death as a homicide. After a belated investigation, a few U.S. soldiers were accused of the murder. No officers were involved. Dilawar was the first casualty after we started to "work the dark side." In all the torture scandals since, few officers have ever been charged. If all of these crimes took place without their knowledge, they would appear to be guilty of dereliction of duty, if nothing else.

-- Taxi to the Dark Side

In the Media Matters interview the director discusses several forms of cost related to the practice torture. The above is one cost, an innocent man who was fingered by another, and who died during "interrogation". This cost is the loss of life. However he also discussed another instance, one of the "high value detainees" who was transferred from FBI interrogation at Bagram Air Base through the CIA Extraordinary Rendition program to Egypt and officials who are more amenable to, ahem, cough, cough, enhanced interrogation techniques. The same sort of techniques which Pres Bush wants to allow (see: Bush veto limits on torture? Or did Bush say he supports use of torture?). That high value detainee was providing useful and actionable intelligence, but it was not the story which VP Cheney and Pres Bush wanted to hear, hence the transfer to the Egyptians. Under torture this high value detainee told the interrogators a pack of lies and those lies were later used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

That's the cost.. the blunderbuss of the wrong war at the wrong time against the wrong people which has visited upon the Iraqi's untold pain and suffering.

In the interview he discussed how, after World War II, the German military elite were prosecuted for war crimes under the doctrine of "command responsibility". Think about the Abu Ghraib scandal, supposedly perpetrated by some bad apples in the lowest ranks. However it was committed in the context of an administration who was investigating all the legal angles to justify the use of torture. They wrote many memo's discussing anti-torture laws as "quaint" and old-fashioned, and were they doing that just to hone their legal skills, or were they doing so to provide cover for a program of committing torture?

Quote:

KENNETH ROTH: The Bush administration very deliberately doesn’t promote human rights. It promotes this soft fuzzy concept of democracy. And the reason it does that is because it’s too embarrassing to talk about human rights when it’s been responsible for so many human rights abuses in the name of fighting terrorism. So it falls back on this feel-good concept.

- Taxi to the Dark Side: Oscar-Nominated Documentary Film Explores U.S. Abuses in “War on Terror”

Article Reference: 

Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)

Taxi to the Dark Side

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side

Director Explores 'Dark Side' Of U.S. Treatment of Detainees

http://www.will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080302.mp3

http://taxitothedarkside.com/

http://www.jigsawprods.com/

"Taxi To The Dark Side" - Trailer

Taxi to the Dark Side - Tom Tomorrow

Taxi To the Dark Side

Taxi to the Dark Side - Why Democracy

Taxi To the Dark Side - Amy Goodman, Truthdig

Taxi to the Dark Side: Oscar-Nominated Documentary Film Explores U.S. Abuses in “War on Terror”

Taxi to the Dark Side: Oscar-Nominated Documentary Film Explores U.S. Abuses in “War on Terror” - MP3

“Taxi to the Dark Side”: Exposé on US Abuses in “War on Terror” Wins Oscar for Best Documentary

“Taxi to the Dark Side”: Exposé on US Abuses in “War on Terror” Wins Oscar for Best Documentary - MP3

Taxi To the Dark Side - NY Times

"Taxi to the Dark Side": How Did America Become a Country That Tortures?

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Sorry, you need to install flash to see this content.

Bush veto limits on torture? Or did Bush say he supports use of torture?

Pres. Bush a couple days ago veto'd a bill which included a provision that would have required all U.S. agencies to abide by the Military Interrogation manual. This would have required all U.S. agencies to not torture. That would be a great thing, it would be a move towards restoring some of the respect the U.S. used to have. But instead he veto'd the bill ... some press reports I've heard describe it in very bland terms, as if the government really is being hindered with limited interrogation techniques. Okay, that's one way to look at this event, and the other way to look at it is that Bush has acted in support of interrogation techniques abhorred worldwide and which are highly illegal. But this is par for the course for this president who has committed one illegal act after another.

Text: Bush on Veto of Intelligence Bill is the text of his weekly news address, in which he explains the veto thusly:

Quote:

...Unfortunately, Congress recently sent me an intelligence authorization bill that would diminish these vital tools. So today, I vetoed it....The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the C.I.A. program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives. This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us prevent a number of attacks....The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the C.I.A. to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision. The bill Congress sent me would deprive the C.I.A. of the authority to use these safe and lawful techniques. Instead, it would restrict the C.I.A.’s range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army field manual. The procedures in this manual were designed for use by soldiers questioning lawful combatants captured on the battlefield. They were not intended for intelligence professionals trained to question hardened terrorists....

In other words he's defending the use of torture (calling it lawful) because of the ticking time-bomb defense. The idea is you know there is a bomb somewhere, due to explode at a given time, you don't know where the bomb is, you don't know precisely when it will explode, but you have in your hands the person who planted the bomb. What do you do. If you're the star of the TV show 24 you don't let a little thing like laws stop you, you instead gird up your loins and commit torture in the name of God and Justice and Truth. But the real world experience with torture is the torturee often lies, or rather they get into a state of mind where they'll say anything just to get the pain to stop. You don't end up with truth, you end up with confusion.

The ACLU says:

Quote:

"It is fundamentally un-American when our president vetoes laws against torture," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The president's veto sends a message to the world that despite Congress' actions, our country will continue to engage in this inhumane and heinous conduct when we should be affirming unequivocally and in one voice that torture and abuse will stop and never happen again. No one is above the rule of law, including the president. Congress should hold firm and persist in trying to get an anti-torture bill signed into law."

However the International Herald Tribune, in Bush vetoes bill to limit CIA interrogation methods, says:

Quote:

President George W. Bush further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to halt a congressional effort to limit the CIA's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

Oh, gee, he's fighting for the Presidency to have more power? How noble of him! Um, should that extend to the right for the President to authorize or commit illegal acts? Because that's exactly what's going on here, is the President is acting to support illegal acts (torture) which are abhorrent worldwide.

Quote:

The director of the CIA, Mike Hayden, was swift to praise the Bush veto, arguing that the field manual was inappropriate as a guide for the CIA as the two institutions "have different missions, different capabilities and therefore difference procedures".

Uh, does a specific law become invalid in specific circumstances? In other words, if you're a trained race car driver is it then legal for you to drive 100 miles/hr in rush hour traffic? No, it's just as illegal to break the speed limit if you're a race car driver or if you're an 80 yr old half blind retiree. Therefore CIA Director Hayden is, uh, full of it.

Quote:

The veto throws the spotlight back on to America's use of so-called coercive interrogation methods like waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique invented by Spanish inquisitors and adopted by regimes such as the Khmer Rouge.

Put's us in great company... eh? NOT. Look, if America is to live up to the ideal we believe in then we must outlaw torture and make it stick. We cannot let this "President" run roughshod on the law.

Article Reference: 

Bush: Limiting CIA Interrogations "Could Cost American Lives"

Text: Bush on Veto of Intelligence Bill

ACLU Condemns Bush Veto Of Intelligence Bill Preventing Torture

Bush Explains Veto of Waterboarding Bill

Bush vetoes bill to limit CIA interrogation methods

Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms Bush’s Legacy

Bush Vetoes Bill That Would Have Barred Waterboarding (Update2)

Bush vetoes move to ban water torture

President George Bush vetoes Congress ban on CIA use of waterboarding

Bush veto keeps torture techniques on the board

Reaction to Bush's Veto of Torture Bill

Bush vetoes U.S. bill outlawing CIA waterboarding

Bush vetoes interrogation limits

The Torturous Logic of The New York Times

Waterboarding, ‘Harsh’ Techniques OK by Bush

Bush Supports Undifferentiated Tortures, Even as “The People” Explicitly Do Not

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BROADCAST EXCLUSIVE: Yemeni Man Imprisoned at CIA “Black Sites” Tells His Story of Kidnapping and Torture

BROADCAST EXCLUSIVE: Yemeni Man Imprisoned at CIA “Black Sites” Tells His Story of Kidnapping and Torture is an interview with Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah concerning his imprisonment and torture by U.S. forces. It appears from this interview that the treatment by U.S. forces did not include beating or physical torture, but psychological torture. In the earlier article, Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites", it appeared from the Salon.com article that U.S. forces had done beating and other physical torture. Instead he described that the Americans recognized he was not in a condition for rough treatment, and that psychologists were frequently with him.

There has been a controversy over the participation by psychologists in torture. Perhaps psychologists don't swear the Hippocratic Oath, but "first, do no harm" is a very good attitude to have regardless of whether they do or not. It appears that psychologists are involved with the military in designing torture techniques that don't require physical beatings, but instead work towards inducing insanity in the prisoner. Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah describes the techniques as sleep deprivation and playing loud raucous music constantly, and how it drove him to suicide attempts and to hitting his head against the walls.

Article Reference: 

BROADCAST EXCLUSIVE: Yemeni Man Imprisoned at CIA “Black Sites” Tells His Story of Kidnapping and Torture

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Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites"

Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites" is, for me, an introduction to one of the Extraordinary Rendition cases. Extraordinary Rendition is a U.S. Government (CIA) practice of essentially outsourcing torture. A person will be captured somewhere and then enter into a system of secretly operated airplanes being flown around the world to secret prisons operated by the CIA.

This article deals specifically with Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah. He is a 38-year-old Yemeni national who lived with his wife Zahra in Indonesia, where he ran a small clothing store with his uncle. In October 2003 he flew to Jordan to visit his mother, and through a series of misunderstandings became implicated as a terror-activist trained in Afghanistan, which led the Jordanians to turn him over to the CIA who flew him to Baghram Air Force Base in Afghanistan for "interrogation".

The interrogation which ensued included some standard techniques of psychological manipulation which tend to incite psychological damage to the point of becoming crazy. Many believe these techniques are torture. The techniques include sleep deprivation, beatings, threats against his family members, threats against himself, playing loud music constantly, and more. At one point he signed a confession, which he did not read, just due to the promise that the treatment would end.

'The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal suit claiming Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. enabled the clandestine transportation of five terrorism suspects to overseas locations where they were subjected to "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."...The U.S. government has asked a federal judge to throw out the lawsuit on the basis that trying the case would result in the release of sensitive state secrets....The ACLU countered in its filing Friday that the clandestine transfer of terrorism suspects to U.S.-run overseas prisons or foreign intelligence agencies, known as extraordinary rendition, is already a matter of public record "confirmed by documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony," along with Federal Aviation Administration records.'

Amnesty International: United States of America / Yemen: Secret Detention in CIA "Black Sites" 'The goal of the network is not just to hold terrorist suspects and their supporters, but to collect intelligence through long-term interrogation, free from any legal restrictions or judicial oversight. The bulk of the work is carried out at facilities under US military control in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Iraq, which together hold at least 11,000 people.6 Most of them were detained in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, but others were transferred from countries including Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Gambia, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Pakistan, Macedonia, Malaysia, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zambia... Long before Guantánamo opened its gates to “war on terror” detainees, however, the USA had been secretly transferring terror suspects into the custody of other states, states where physical and psychological brutality feature prominently in interrogations. Known to the US Administration as “extraordinary rendition,” and to its critics as the “outsourcing of torture”, the program has expanded considerably, reportedly under a classified directive signed by President Bush in late September 2001.8 It has been estimated that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), often using covert airplanes leased by fictional front companies,9 has flown hundreds of war on terror suspects to countries including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.10'

This fellow is not the only such person held in U.S. Custody, as you can see in the Wikipedia page for Category:Yemeni extrajudicial prisoners of the United States

Links: 

Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites"

Links: 

Biography of Plaintiff Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah

Links: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Farag_Ahmad_Bashmilah

Links: 

Ex-Worker: Air Firm Aided CIA Renditions

Links: 

Iraqi, Yemeni men join lawsuit over CIA flights

Links: 

Detainees and the "War on Terror"

Links: 

DOJ urges court to dismiss lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary for CIA rendition role

Links: 

Jeppesen Dataplan

Links: 

Rendition Lawsuit Against Boeing Subsidiary Grows

Links: 

Amnesty International: United States of America / Yemen: Secret Detention in CIA "Black Sites"

Links: 

Category:Yemeni extrajudicial prisoners of the United States

Links: 

http://ghostplane.net/yemen

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orture Taxi: Extraordinary Rendition in the Crosshairs

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United Kingdom: Deportation of terror suspects

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Secret Prisons Timeline

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Headlines for August 02, 2007

External Media

Waterboarding = Drowning = Torture = Illegal = Immoral

A lot of discussion in the news this week concerned torture, conducted by U.S. soldiers in the conduct of this war on Terror. The context is the confirmation hearings of the new Attorney General, Mukasey. See: Despite Waterboarding Stance, Senate Committee Approves Mukasey’s Attorney General Nomination During the hearings Mukasey was questioned about his stance on torture, whether waterboarding is torture, etc.

There's a lot of pussyfooting around this issue... is it torture or is it not. Is it simulated drowning or the real thing. The Democracy Now story linked above does some truly excellent coverage of this issue.

Sen Ted Kennedy had some excellent things to say including:

...My concerns began with Judge Mukasey's answers to our questions about waterboarding. Waterboarding is a barbaric practice in which water is poured down the mouth and nose of a detainee to simulate drowning. It’s an ancient technique of tyrants. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, it was used by interrogators in the Spanish Inquisition. In the nineteenth century, it was used against slaves in this country. In World War II, it was used against us by Japan. In the 1970s, it was used against political opponents by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina. Today, it’s being used against pro-democracy activists by the rulers of Burma. When we fail to reject waterboarding, this is the company that we keep.

Make no mistake about it: waterboarding is already illegal under United States law. It’s illegal under the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit outrages upon personal dignity, including cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment. It’s illegal under the Torture Act, which prohibits acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. It’s illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. And it violates the Constitution. The nation's top military lawyers and legal experts across the political spectrum have condemned waterboarding as torture. And after World War II, the United States prosecuted -- prosecuted -- Japanese officers for engaging in waterboarding. What more does this nominee need to enforce existing laws?

It is the job of the Attorney General to enforce our Constitution laws. The Attorney General must have the legal and moral judgment to know when an activity rises to the level of a violation of our Constitution, treaties or statutes. But this nominee wants to outsource his job to Congress. That passing of the buck is completely unacceptable by a nominee who wants to be the highest justice official in our country. ...

A few days earlier Democracy Now interviewed a French journalist who had been tortured, with waterboarding, in Algiers. French Journalist Henri Alleg Describes His Torture Being Waterboarded by French Forces During Algerian War He made it clear, this is not simulated drowning, it is actual drowning, and that often it results in real death.

Likewie this interview with Stephen Grey, New PBS Documentary Gives Voice to Victims of U.S. “Extraordinary Rendition” also goes into not just the waterboarding and other torture techniques but the whole practice of extraordinary rendition.

In this weeks On The Media they discussed the media coverage of waterboarding in: Word Watch: Waterboarding To them this was an exercise in word definitions. Maybe that's a fair tact since that's what the inside-the-beltway-types in Washington DC are doing, parsing words carefully to tread a very narrow line of definition over what is or is not torture. But it seems to me that a practice that often results in death can not in any way be considered anything but torture. And listening to it I felt outrage that they skipped over the excellent coverage by Democracy Now.

Waterboarding is 'drowning', 'water torture': expert testimony is a recounting of a TV appearance by an expert who was also interviewed in the On The Media piece. Interrogation expert Malcolm Nance, who serves as a counterterrorism and intelligence consultant for the U.S. government and was formerly an instructor at the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school in California, did not mince when detailing the dangers of waterboarding, the highly controversial interrogation technique to which he was previously subjected.

Waterboarding Used to be a Crime (digg) "The United States military justice system has prosecuted "waterboarding" as a form of torture since the Spanish-American war. " An article by a former JAG who says "The media usually characterize the practice as "simulated drowning." That's incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is, the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding's effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years."

The presidency is now a criminal conspiracy is Keith Olbermann going through his rage routine, raging at Bush's cowardice and the nonsense of this "debate" on whether waterboarding is torture or not. Daniel Levin, a former Acting Assistant Attorney General who asked the Army to waterboard him so he could understand the process. They did it, and he came out utterly convinced of it being torture, and when he started pushing that agenda the Bush Administration fired him. Bush Administration Blocked Waterboarding Critic is coverage of the same issue from ABC News. December 30, 2004 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL is a memo written by Daniel Levin in 2004 concerning torture. In the memo he goes through several court cases describing how different regimines of treatment were considered torture, including waterboarding. CooperativeResearch.org has a profile of Daniel Levin, Profile: Daniel Levin, making it clear this memo was meant to be written to supersede the infamous memo previously written by Alberto Gonzales

August 1, 2002: Justice Department Approves Torture of Terrorism Suspects is the CooperativeResearch.org coverage of that memo. The Aug 2002 memo defines torture as “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” and that it "...appear to conclude that any act short of torture, even though it may be cruel, inhuman or degrading, would be permissible". But even under this definition waterboarding would be torture because it regularly causes death. In any case this Aug 2002 memo was used as cover for the CIA and other military agencies to "get more aggressive" with their techniques resulting in all the torture techniques we now know are being used.

Former Assistant AG Daniel Levin and the Importance of Hands-On Experience in Advising on the Law is a legal experts discussion of his experience and bravery in exploring just what waterboarding really is.

Wikipedia: Waterboarding, for reference purposes.

I remember from childhood hearing reference to "Chinese Water Torture" being described as an incessant dripping of water. My imagination had it pegged as something which I now recognize it is not. I thought, oh, they're just dripping water somewhere on the body, and that over a period of hours it will drive someone batty. Hurm, was I wrong. I now understand this is pouring water into someone's mouth, nostrils, throat, and into their lungs (if done long enough). That it is indeed a drowning which, if done properly, is interrupted before the drowning causes death. How this can be condoned as anything but torture, how it can be allowed as appropriate behavior by American military, that is beyond me. I don't think my idealism is misplaced in this case. If America is to stand as a model for the rest of the world, if we are to have the moral high ground with which to condemn other countries for torture, then we must also disallow our own people the practice of torture.

Links: 

Despite Waterboarding Stance, Senate Committee Approves Mukasey’s Attorney General Nomination

Links: 

French Journalist Henri Alleg Describes His Torture Being Waterboarded by French Forces During Algerian War

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New PBS Documentary Gives Voice to Victims of U.S. “Extraordinary Rendition”

Links: 

Word Watch: Waterboarding

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Waterboarding is 'drowning', 'water torture': expert testimony

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Waterboarding Used to be a Crime

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The presidency is now a criminal conspiracy

Links: 

December 30, 2004 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL

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Profile: Daniel Levin

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August 1, 2002: Justice Department Approves Torture of Terrorism Suspects

Links: 

Former Assistant AG Daniel Levin and the Importance of Hands-On Experience in Advising on the Law

Links: 

Wikipedia: Waterboarding

External Media

Redefining torture, or "The Constitution is just a piece of paper"

One of the threads of abominations done by the Bush administration is the use of torture by the American Government. In pursuit of the War On Terror we've had this extraordinary rendition program where "terror suspects" would be flown to secret prisons around the world and tortured. The torture was often outsourced to other countries.

Currently there's a legislative move for a U.S. law that "clarifies" the Geneva conventions. Supposedly common article three of the convention is unclear, according to the Bush Administration. Here is a video showing G.W. Bush explaining it

Their argument seems to be ... the U.S. believes common article three of the Geneva Convention is unclear, and that the U.S. is going to interpret that law. The questioner in that press conference has an interesting point, doesn't that leave the door open to other countries interpreting that article differently? I see this as an attempt by the Bush administration to undermine the Geneva Convention, by fracturing the interpretation and enforcement. And this strikes me as being so much like the Signing Statements which this same Bush administration has been issuing with almost every law they sign into effect.

A signing statement is a document a President can issue when signing a law describing how the law will be put into practice. It has been rarely used by previous Presidents, but in the Bush administration it is widely and routinely used. In some cases the effect of the signing statements is that basically they feel free to completely ignore the law they're signing. So if they're going to ignore the law, then why are they signing it? Why not veto it instead? In fact, the Bush administration has not issued any vetos in 6 years of holding office.

This practice seems to me to make a statement that the Bush Administration holds its views as paramount over the laws that have been passed by Congress. That it knows better than Congress. Or in the case above, that the Bush Administration knows better than the Geneva convention what the law should be.

This MoveOn.org advertisement says it very well ... they have a quote of President Nixon saying "When a President does it, it's not illegal":

Congress, the Geneva Conventions & Torture: Bush vs. McCain: Is more coverage, including John McCain standing to protect the Geneva Conventions.

Powell opposes Bush plan for harsh interrogations: Covers a letter and actions by Colin Powell taking a stand against the torture.

Bush admits CIA has secret prisons: He finally admitted to what the rest of us already knew. But he gives a very slanted view of the torture prisons. He doesn't discuss the extraordinary rendition. He doesn't discuss all the people who were captured, taken through rendition to torture prisons, and later determined to have been an accidental or mistaken capture.

Countdown's report on Bush's Constitutional issues: Keith Olbermann's analysis of this situation, along with a constitutional law expert. The argument is that there is a rush to legislation to change the law, because the Administration knows that they have been violating the law and they want the Congress to retroactively approve those violations of the law. Part of the context is a transfer of 14 detainees from the secret prison system to the one at Guantanamo Bay Cuba (GITMO). Once these prisoners reach GITMO the Red Cross will have access to them, and in the Red Cross interviews it's expected that news of the torture practices like waterboarding will come to light in official records, and the U.S. will be accused of violations of human rights laws and committing torture.

"The Constitution is just a piece of paper" - G.W. Bush: Is Keith Olbermann again talking with Jonathan Turley about the Bush Administration fondness for hiring leaders who want to go to the edge of the law, and beyond. In particular the issue is General Hayden who had been the head of the NSA and is now the Director of the CIA. While heading the NSA he oversaw the illegal warrantless wiretaps system.

Lou Dobbs Slams Bush On 'Signing Statements': A discussion of the signing statements and an assertion that George W. Bush is routinely violating the Constitution. It's largely a "line item veto" but the Supreme Court had previously ruled line item veto's were unconstitutional.

Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the 'War on Terror': Is an interview of two detainees subjected to the extraordinary rendition system.

Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights: Is a discussion of how the extraordinary rendition system was exposed. The airplanes in question are run by private contractors working for the CIA. But even though they're CIA flights the planes have to file flight plans, and flight plans are public knowledge which can be tracked by the public.

Bush/Torture related blog posts