Émission de radio L'Autre Monde

Émission de radio L'Autre Monde

mercredi 16 juin 2010

Torture

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Torture




La torture: elle nous rebute et fait frémir, mais pourtant, elle est maintenant sanctionnée officiellement et officieusement par les États-Unis et le Canada. Le Canada, un pays neutre et pacifique? Laissez-moi rire! Les États-Unis? La torture est à la mode depuis Bush et Obama la poursuit de plus belle. Une honte sans nom.


50-100 Guantanamo inmates can't be tried, freed: Gates

US officials planning the closure of Guantanamo prison are weighing the cases of about 50 to 100 detainees who cannot be tried or released, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

Webmaster's Commentary:

If they cannot be tried it means there is no evidence against them.

If they cannot be freed it means they were tortured.


American Detained, Tortured in UAE at U.S. Govt's Behest, ACLU Says

An American citizen has been detained and tortured in the United Arab Emirates at the behest of the U.S. government, according to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed in federal court.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The judge has already refused to force the US Government to release the relevant documents. The government is circling the wagons on this torture issue.

But here is the important point for all of you who thought the US Government was only torturing foreigners in far off lands.

The US Government tortured an American.

The US Government tortured an American.

The US Government tortured an American.


Democrats were routinely briefed on Bush ‘torture’ techniques, document shows

The document is explicit (PDF here). Most damningly, perhaps, is its description of a meeting held between CIA staff and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which shows that Pelosi was briefed on the Bush Administration’s torture techniques in 2002 — even though she’s publicly said she was never told about the use of waterboarding.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This is why we will never see prosecution of anyone for war crimes; the Democrats are just as culpable as the Republicans in allowing the CIA to continue to torture.

And that's a damned shame.

Because until and unless these activities are investigated and prosecuted to the highest extent American law allows, this country will never again be able to represent itself as holding dear those values of human rights and human dignity, as embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.


New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

Since the story first emerged last month that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (whose real name was Ali Abdul Hamid al-Fakheri) had died in a Libyan prison, speculation has been rife that the Libyan newspaper Oea, which claimed that he had died by committing suicide, was covering up the fact that he had actually been murdered.

Once the Bush administration?s most famous "ghost prisoner," al-Libi had been the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, but his notoriety stemmed not from his own activities, but from the fact that, after his capture in December 2001, he was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where, under torture, he made a false confession that two al-Qaeda operatives had been receiving information from Saddam Hussein about the use of chemical and biological weapons, which was subsequently used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The reason for the government's justification of the invasion of Iraq was a lie based on a confession coerced under torture.

This was the stunt the American government pulled to get a war going in Iraq.

I have to wonder just how long it's going to take the American people to wake up, and just what form their rage will take when they finally comprehend what has been done in their names, with the blood of their families, and their tax dollars to the Iraqi people, all based on a lie from a tortured confession.


FLASHBACK - Torture was taught by CIA; Declassified manual details the methods used in Honduras; Agency denials refuted

The 1983 manual was altered between 1984 and early 1985 to discourage torture after a furor was raised in Congress and the press about CIA training techniques being used in Central America. Those alterations and new instructions appear in the documents obtained by The Sun, support the conclusion that methods taught in the earlier version were illegal.


CIA torture manual circa 1983

The Sun’s story noted the admonition on page 46 of the 1963 manual that when planning an interrogation room, “the electric current should be known in advance, so that transformers or other modifying devices will be on hand if needed.” The Sun reported that “...this referred to the application of electric shocks to interrogation suspects.”


U. S. Army Torture Manuals


FLASDHBACK - School of the Americas CIA Torture Manual

Manuals used by the U.S. Army's School of the Americas between 1982 and 1991 appeared to condone executions, beatings and other human rights abuses, the Pentagon said in a disclosure that prompted renewed calls for the school's closure.

The Pentagon on Friday disclosed English translations of portions of seven training manuals it said were pulled from use in 1991 by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. He determined that the language violated U.S. policy.

Webmaster's Commentary:

So, back in 1996, Cheney was OPPOSED to torture?


Why torture questions must be answered

The idea that our country does not torture is based on World War II policies, but since 1950 the CIA has been studying torture techniques and has been exporting its knowledge abroad through the Office of Public Safety and the School of the Americas. However, torture was not our official policy, until the George W. Bush administration.


A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA?s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA?s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.


Bush: I Personally Authorized Torture Of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

BUSH: One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. … And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, following a month of waterboarding, subsequently confessed to 9-11, the assassinations of both Kennedys, the Jack the Ripper murders, blowing up the Hindenburg, Challenger, and Columbia, disguising himself as an iceberg to destroy the Titanic, and the extinction of the dinosaurs.


Waterboarding was ‘well done,’ Cheney says

Webmaster's Commentary:

"We used Perrier!"


CIA Says It Briefed Congressional Leaders

The document appears to conflict with recent statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was then the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. Ms. Pelosi has said she hadn't been told that the CIA was using the technique known as waterboarding, or simulated drowning. According to the document, Ms. Pelosi was one of the first lawmakers briefed on the interrogations in 2002.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Now we know why Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, worked so hard to protect President Bush, a Republican, from investigation; because her own complicity in war crimes would have been exposed!


Conservative radio hosts gets waterboarded, and lasts six seconds before saying its torture

Chicago radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided he'd get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn't torture.

It didn't turn out that way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUkj9pjx3H0&feature=player_embedded


For tortured detainees, U.S. considered life sentences on boats

For tortured detainees, U.S. considered life sentences on boats

Webmaster's Commentary:

Apparently, along with "enhanced" interrogation (waterboarding), there were two other classifications, "Robust" and "Special." These supposedly employed even more severe techniques of which the American people are still unaware. But clues to the meanings of "Robust" and "special" lie in reports of released prisoners whose testicles have been completely destroyed, as well as Binjam Mohammed, whose genitals were repeatedly sliced with a knife over a period of many weeks.

The plan to keep the rest of the detainees on boats is not a plan to keep the prisoner but to keep them unseen by the public and the press. Clearly they bear scars which the US Government wants hidden.


Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM.


Pentagon Official Admits U.S. Engaged in Torture of Guantanamo Bay Prisoner

It's official: Top Bush Administration military personnel are now international war criminals. That's the upshot of an admission by senior Pentagon official Susan Crawford who has gone on the record today, admitting that the U.S. military engaged in the torture of at least one captive at Guantanamo Bay (and common sense tells you it wasn't limited to just one).


CIA reveals it has 3,000 pages of documents relating to destroyed interrogation tapes

The Central Intelligence Agency disclosed Friday that it has 3,000 summaries, transcripts, reconstructions and memoranda relating to 92 interrogation videotapes that were destroyed by the agency, the American Civil Liberties Union revealed Friday evening.

The agency, however, says they won't make them public or provide them to the civil rights group. The disclosure came as part of a lawsuit.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The CIA is guilty of obstruction of justice, and is at the very least an accessory to torture and murder after the fact.


President Obama Reverses Course on Releasing More Detainee Abuse Photographs

The president "believes their release would endanger our troops," a White House official says, adding that the president "believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court."


IVAW members lobby against more military funding for Afghanistan and Iraq

You can take action today

Urge your representatives in Congress to vote "NO" on a $94.2 billion supplemental wartime spending bill by emailing https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
or calling. http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/mcapdir.html

Tell them no more blank checks for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Webmaster's Commentary:

With the revelation that prisoners were tortured into making false confessions that were the foundation for the war in Iraq, the fact is that this is and always has been an illegal war and the time to stop it is right now.

Nobody can make any argument as to why our young men and women should continue to be killed in Iraq.

There were no weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.
The only link between Al Qaeda and Iraq was a "confession" extracted under torture.
Al Qaeda appears to be a front group for CIA and Mossad.

Iraq has been ruined, which is what Israel so clearly wanted.

Mission accomplished.

President Obama (or Mr. Waffles, as we call him around here) has no option but to end the war and bring the kids home. Or he is an accessory to a continuing war crime.


Dear Corporate Media, Now That You're Connecting Torture to War, Can We Talk?

Now that you're beginning to talk about the fact that our country tortured people in order to elicit war rationales, can we talk for a minute? I'd like to point a few things out that you can verify without spending a dime on investigative reporting. First, we now know that we tortured in hopes of producing justifications for a war. Let's suppose that this was done in "good faith" and that the lies al Libi told to stop the pain were actually true. We know that the torturing preceded and exceeded the OLC memos, the OLC memos were themselves insane (I think that's the legal term for it, but you can ask your lawyers), and dozens of people were tortured until they were dead. Let's suppose none of that to be the case.

Webmaster's Commentary:

None of that would change the fundamental fact that we were not torturing for defense of this nation but for an offensive attack on another nation.

None of that would change the fundamental fact that we were not torturing for defense of this nation but for an offensive attack on another nation.

None of that would change the fundamental fact that we were not torturing for defense of this nation but for an offensive attack on another nation.

None of that would change the fundamental fact that we were not torturing for defense of this nation but for an offensive attack on another nation.


A startling expose of the CIA development of psychological torture from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib.


CIA mercenaries attempted to assassinate McCoy more than 30 years ago.— Click Here


Obama Didn’t Ban Torture

In fact, the President has not “banned” torture. Torture was illegal before President Bush came to office, through our incorporation of the Geneva Convention into domestic law. (This is to say nothing of centuries of American custom and tradition holding that torture is unconscionable and morally abhorrent.) Members of the Bush administration did not somehow “unban” torture; they simply chose to ignore the law.


They Still Think This Is About Politics

At some point they are going to figure out that for most of us, we don’t care if the person has a ( R ) or (D) behind their name when they were instituting a policy of torture. That is what is so depressing (to me, at least) about the Ari Fleischer’s and the Thiessen’s of the world. They honestly seem to think this is nothing more than a partisan witch-hunt, the same old Washington gotcha poltics. It isn’t. When you torture people, you have crossed a really clear line. Innocent people are dead. Lives have been ruined. Our international reputation has been destroyed. Yes, the Bush administration will get most of the blame, but that is because they were in charge and they did this, not because of what party they happen to belong to.


Waterboarding Approved Specifically To Justify Iraq War

I have just learnt something which has convinced me that Bush, Cheney and Rice are indeed evil in the sense that Hitler was evil. I did not actually believe that until today.

The excellent and much-respected Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild of the USA and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has discovered that waterboarding was first approved in July 2002 by Condoleeza Rice, specifically to force confessions of links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Just keep that evil in mind when deciding whether to go along when the government insists that drastic changes are needed to deal with the flu pandemic.


Humanitarian Aid Worker: Torture Only Stopped When I Pretended I Was In Al Qaeda

More importantly, Boumediene confirms that telling the truth got him tortured more, while lying and saying what the interrogator wanted him to say got it to stop.

Webmaster's Commentary:

If torture really does work, then in the middle ages, women were able to turn themselves into animals and fly over the rooftops of their villages on broomsticks.


The Big Lie About Torture

"The Americans had used methods similar to those employed by the SS in Dachau." When abuse of German prisoners was investigated in the US-run Schwaebisch Hall prison near Stuttgart in 1945, " of the 139 cases examined, 137 had had their testicles permanently destroyed."


U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

One torture victim was Fernando Gabeira, a young reporter for Jornal do Brasil who was recruited by a resistance movement and later arrested for his role in the 1969 kidnapping of Charles Burke Elbrick, the U.S. ambassador. (Elbrick was released after four days.) In custody, Gabeira later told me, he was tortured with electric shocks to his testicles; a fellow prisoner had his testicles nailed to a table. Still others were beaten bloody or waterboarded. When Gabeira's captors said anything at all, they sometimes boasted about having been trained in the United States.


Military attorney: Waterboarding is ‘tip of the iceberg’

Bradley told CNN that when she was first assigned to represent Mohamed, she did not question he was a hardened terrorist, because “my government was saying these were the worst of the worst.” However, she now says, “There’s no reliable evidence that Mr. Mohamed was going to do anything to the United States.”

According to Bradley, when Mohamed was first held at a CIA prison in Morocco, “They started this monthly treatment where they would come in with a scalpel or a razor type of instrument and they would slash his genitals, just with small cuts.”


U.S. Officials Admitted that Boys Were Sodomized In Iraq Prison

Many people think that they'll believe it when and if they ever see the video. But we don't need to wait for the military to release the videos. There is already proof that Hersh is right.

For example, the Guardian wrote in 2004:

The October 12 memorandum, reported in the Washington Post...came to light as more details emerged of the extent of detainee abuse. Formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator...


U.S. Relies More on Allies in Questioning Terror Suspects

The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials.

The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Translation: if we are outsourcing "interrogation", you can bet your backside that we're outsourcing torture as well, just so Obama can say with a reasonably straight face that "The United States doesn't torture!!"

But we are still responsible for what happens to people rotting away at various so-called black sites.


Spain's Judges Prosecuting American's Who Tortured Gitmo Detainees

Spanish judges are boldly declaring their authority to prosecute high-ranking government officials in the United States, China and Israel, among other places, delighting human rights activists but enraging officials in the countries they target and triggering a political backlash in a nation uncomfortable acting as the world's conscience.

Judges at Spain's National Court, acting on complaints filed by human rights groups, are pursuing 16 international investigations into suspected cases of torture, genocide and crimes against humanity, according to prosecutors. Among them are two probes of Bush administration officials for allegedly approving the use of torture on terrorism suspects, including prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes ofboys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."


Vice’s Secret Vices

“Those insects weren’t even poisonous,” Cheney growled. “Facial slaps? Abdominal slaps? Throwing a naked man into a wall? Kid stuff. Those methods worked. They kept us safe for seven years. Safer than with that delicate Hawaiian orchid in the White House. America is coming across as weak and indecisive. Just when Rummy and I had stomped out that ‘Blame America First’ flower-child culture, Obama has dragged it back, apologizing profusely all over the world for the country he’s running, canoodling with greasy dictators, kissing up to those weasels in Europe, which is only free today because of our military. Friends and foes alike will be quick to take advantage if they think they’re dealing with a Creamsicle.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

When you defend the indefensible, you can wind up looking like a real jerk.


Were Democrats Aware About the CIA's Torture Program?

According to former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the brutal interrogation methods, such as slamming a detainee’s head against the wall dozens of times and the use of waterboarding, "were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006."

Webmaster's Commentary:

No congress person walks away clean on this.

An American which tortures can no longer be the "land of the free and the home of the brave".

Through the allowing and enabling the use of torture and intrusive surveillance, congress allowed this country to become "the land of the cowed and the home of the snitch."


Obama Exceeds Bush in Lawlessness

On Thursday, April 16, in response to a lawsuit initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union, President Barack Obama released four redacted Office of Legal Counsel memoranda from the Bush administration to the CIA justifying torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. (The CIAs enhanced interrogation techniques were modeled on the Chinese Communist coercive brainwashing program against Americans captured in the Korean War to induce false confessions.) Each memorandum hedged its conclusions with substantial caveats, such as the absence of judicial precedents and concessions that reasonable persons could dispute their exculpatory conclusions. The memoranda were later renounced as bad law.


CIA terror suspects 'kept awake for 11 days'

More than 25 of the CIA's war-on-terror prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation for as long as 11 days at a time during the administration of former president George Bush, according to The Los Angeles Times.

At one stage during the war on terror, the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to keep prisoners awake for as long as 11 days, the Times reported, citing memoranda made public by the Justice department last month.

The limit was later reduced to just over a week, the report stated.

Sleep deprivation was one of the most important elements in the CIA's interrogation programme, seen as more effective than more violent techniques used to help break the will of suspects.


EXCLUSIVE: Recently Released Gitmo Detainee Talks to ABC News

Asked if he thought he was tortured, Boumediene was unequivocal.

"I don't think. I'm sure," he said.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Kudos to ABC for having the gonads to report this.


Military force-feeding 10 percent of Guantanamo detainees

Ten percent of captives at the US Guantanamo Bay prison -- many of whom have never been charged of a crime -- are having their heads velcroed to chairs and forced to take in nutritional supplements by a tube forcibly inserted through their noses by US guards.

Webmaster's Commentary:

"American Justice" at Gitmo: you've just gotta love it!


New Torture Memos Outline Black Sites, Ghost Prisoners

Three human rights groups released more than a thousand pages of Department of Defense and CIA documents Thursday that outline how closely the two agencies worked in rendering terrorism suspects to black sites, keeping detainees' identities secret, and tempering bad publicity for inmate treatment at Guántanamo Bay.


Unredacted documents reveal prisoners tortured to death

The American Civil Liberties Union has released previously classified excerpts of a government report on harsh interrogation techniques used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. These previously unreported pages detail repeated use of "abusive" behavior, even to the point of prisoner deaths.

The documents, obtained by the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act request, contain a report by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, who was tapped to conduct a comprehensive review of Defense Department interrogation operations. Church specifically calls out interrogations at Bagram Air base in Afghanistan as "clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved interrogation policy or guidance."


Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Gitmo are innocent

Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. "There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."

Webmaster's Commentary:

The US has tortured innocent people.

Some of them to death.


The long and sadistic history behind the CIA's torture techniques

All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details.


U.N. special rapporteur on torture calls on U.S. to prosecute Bush and Rumsfeld.

In remarks that aired on German television last night, Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, urged the U.S. to pursue former President George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on charges that they authorized torture and other harsh interrogation techniques


Aid workers 'abuse kids as young as six'

Webmaster's Commentary:

I have had a bunch of these mailed to me today. The UN starts talking about war crimes charges against Israel and Bush, and all of a sudden there is a flood of articles about sex scandals involving UN personnel.


Ex-Guantánamo detainee describes torture

When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in U.S. custody, including five at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.

In November, a Pakistani surgeon operated on his ear, physical therapists were working on lower back problems, and a psychiatrist was trying to wean him off the drugs he carried around in a white plastic shopping bag.

The maladies, said Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the U.S. government.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Dick Cheney admits authorizing the torture. Sue HIM!

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