Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, the government of the United States is torturing a young man -- one of its own soldiers -- whom it has incarcerated but not indicted. He has been held in solitary confinement for months on end, subjected to techniques of sleep deprivation taken from the Soviet gulag, denied almost all human contact except from interrogators, constantly harassed by guards to whom he must answer every few minutes -- all in an attempt to break his mind, destroy his will, degrade his humanity and force him to "confess" to a broader "conspiracy" against state power.

His name is Bradley Manning. He is 23 years old. The "crime" he is accused of committing is releasing video evidence of an American atrocity committed years ago in Iraq: the murder of Iraqi civilians by helicopter gunships. Under the American system of jurisprudence, of course, he is considered innocent until proven guilty of this heinous 'crime' of truth-telling. He has not been tried or convicted of this charge, or any other crime.

Yet tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, in the United States of America, under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama, 23-year-old Bradley Manning is being subjected to same tortures routinely inflicted on other unindicted, untried captives of the militarist state.

Journalist Andy Worthington, who has been one of the most thorough and assiduous chroniclers of the modern American gulag, has noted the parallels between the treatment imposed on Manning and that doled out to earlier prisoners of the bizarre, lawless limbo concocted by the American war machine for those who threaten -- or are perceived to threaten -- its ever-expanding, ever-more corrupt operations around the world. Worthington states that the conditions of Manning's imprisonment

bear a marked and chilling resemblance to the conditions in which a handful of US citizens and residents were held as “enemy combatants” under the Bush administration. The key elements here are the elements of profound isolation and suffering ... not just the solitary confinement, with no other human being for company, but also the refusal to allow Manning to have a pillow, sheets, or any access to the outside world through the reporting of current affairs.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

24 is an American television series starring Kiefer
Sutherland as federal agent Jack Bauer. Bauer a
highly proficient agent, but one taking an "ends
justify the means" approach regardless of the per-
ceived morality of some of his actions. WikiPedia

'Enhanced interrogation techniques.' -This phrase represented virtually a literal translation of the term used by the German Gestapo 60 years earlier, Verschärfte Vernehmung, also as a bureaucratic euphemism for torture. The US media fell dutifully into line with this attempt to deny torture with a terminological sleight of hand. This complicity in and indifference towards the crime of torture pervades all sections of the US ruling elite, its government, its political parties and its media.

In a memoir to be released next week, former US President George W. Bush boasts of having personally given the order to the CIA to employ the torture method of waterboarding.

The book, titled Decision Points, includes Bush’s recounting that when asked by the CIA whether it could subject Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an alleged leader in the September 11, 2001, terror plot, he gave the reply, “Damn right.” The former president added that he would do the same thing again to “save lives.”

The passage constitutes an even more explicit admission than Bush’s flip statement in a speech to an audience of businessmen in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last June. The ex-president then declared: “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.”

The claim that suspects were being tortured in order to “save lives” is entirely self-serving. In reality, Mohammed and others were subjected to waterboarding and other torture methods by interrogators who were told to come up with evidence linking the 9/11 attacks to Iraq in order to provide a pretext for the war that the administration was determined to launch in pursuit of US strategic interests.

In a country governed by laws, international treaties and democratic principles, such admissions would provoke a public outcry, an intense political debate and the arrest and prosecution of George W. Bush.

In the United States of America of 2010, however, the former president’s bragging that he ordered his subordinates to carry out torture has been greeted within the political establishment and the corporate media with an audible yawn of indifference.

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Andy Worthington

Last week, Truthout published an important article by Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy Managing Editor, and psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye, revealing, for the first time, a secret memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which authorized human experimentation on detainees in the “War on Terror.” The release of the memo followed some little-noticed maneuvering in Congress in December 2001, when the requirement of “informed consent” in any experimentation by the Defense Department (introduced in 1972) was quietly dropped.

The article — which involved over a year of research, as Leopold and Kaye persuaded former officials to open up to them — not only adds to Leopold’s important work and to Kaye’s formidable track record as a chronicler of the development of human experimentation in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” torture program (which he has also revealed as part of an obsession with human experimentation reaching back to the 1950s), but also confirms the existence of an important new front in the struggle to raise awareness of the horrors of torture, and the requirement that those who authorized it be held accountable for their crimes.

Leopold and Kaye delivered a presentation about their article the day after its publication, as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and their work on human experimentation added to a compelling catalog of the many reasons why the acceptance of torture must continue to be opposed, which I developed during the week: namely, that it is not only illegal, morally corrosive, counterproductive and unnecessary, but also that, at its heart, the Bush-era torture program continued work in the field of human experimentation that the US took over from the Nazis, and also involved treasonous lies on the part of senior officials, who pretended that the program was designed to prevent future terrorist attacks, when, from the very beginning (in late November 2001, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff), it was actually being used to extract false confessions about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could be used in an attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The article is cross-posted below (and I’ve added some additional links).

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Paul Craig Roberts
VDare.com

Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce one of the most important articles of our time, "Obama’s US Assassination Program."

It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.

Nothing was done about it. "National security" placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.

Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a "threat." "Threat" was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.

There was hardly a peep out of the public or the media. Americans and the media were content for the government to summarily execute traitors and turncoats, and who better to identify traitors and turncoats than the government with all its spy programs. The problem with this sort of thing is that once it starts, it doesn’t stop.

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Andy Worthington

Saturday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established twelve years ago to mark the day, in 1987, when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment came into force, but you wouldn’t have found out about it through the mainstream US media.

No editorials or news broadcasts reminded Americans that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that anyone responsible for authorizing torture must be prosecuted, and no one called for the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or their supportive colleagues and co-conspirators, including, for example, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos,” or other key figures in Cheney’s “War Council” that drove the policies: David Addington, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney general, and William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former Chief Counsel.

Instead, two mainstream newspaper articles revealed the extent to which President Obama has, over the last 17 months, conspired with senior officials and with Congress to maintain the bitter fruits of the Bush administration’s torture program — and its closely related themes of arbitrary detention and hyperbole about the perceived threat of terrorism.

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Stephen Lendman

Nazi and imperial Japanese doctors performed horrific human experiments on unwilling subjects. At Auschwitz and other death camps, Josef Mengele, Carl Clauberg, Herta Oberheuser, Karl Brandt, Aribert Heim and others conducted ones involving freezing temperatures, toxic chemicals and gas, sterilizations, high altitudes, radiation, electroshock, starvation, amputations, bone, muscle and nerve transplants, and numerous other atrocities called crimes of war and against humanity at Nuremberg.

At its infamous Unit 731, Japanese doctors and scientists did their own, involving vivisections, germ and other forms of biological warfare, toxic chemicals, and other atrocities causing severe pain, disease and certain death. Yet in 1945, General Douglas MacArthur agreed secretly with Dr. Shiro Ishil to turn over 10,000 pages of human experimentation information in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Justice for their victims was denied.

Today and since the early 1950s, CIA operatives conducted physically harsh and psychologically crippling mind control experiments, turning human beings into mush, a topic this writer addressed earlier, accessed through the following link.

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Chris Floyd

This is the language of power – unfiltered, unadorned, dispassionate, professional – discussing how best to inflict tortures on helpless captives without causing "long-term" damage that might be visible later:

But as we understand the experience involving the combination of various techniques, the OMS medical and psychological personnel have not observed any such increase in susceptibility. Other than the waterboard, the specific techniques under consideration in this memorandum— including sleep deprivation—have been applied to more than 25 detainees.… No apparent increase in susceptibility to severe pain has been observed either when techniques are used sequentially or when they are used simultaneously—for example, when an insult slap is simultaneously combined with water dousing or a kneeling stress position, or when wall standing is simultaneously combined with an abdominal slap and water dousing. Nor does experience show that, even apart from changes in susceptibility to pain, combinations of these techniques cause the techniques to operate differently so as to cause severe pain. OMS doctors and psychologists, moreover, confirm that they expect that the techniques, when combined… would not operate in a different manner from the way they do individually, so as to cause severe pain.

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Chris Floyd

Dante Alighieri, "THE VISION OF HELL", CANTO XXXII. (G. Doré)

"Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer...." ~ Brother Bob

Illness and other aggravations have hindered the blogivating of late, so below are some choice items from other quarters that are well worth your attention.

The Children's Crusade
Andy Worthington tells the truly horrendous story of Omar Khadr, who was taken captive as a child by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and has now spent eight years in the lower depths of the American gulag. He is now being "tried" in the kangaroo "tribunals" of the Bush-Obama Continuum, under arbitrarily concocted, illogical "laws" whose cruel absurdity would shame a Stalinist show trial, including this arbitary ruling by the Department of Defense: “a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.” You must read the whole piece to see the abysmal depravity that now reigns supreme throughout the highest, most respectable reaches of the bipartisan American estabishment.

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Andy Worthington

So will the Chilcot Inquiry into the illegal invasion of Iraq actually do anything when it finally reaches its conclusions? It seems unlikely. Over the last two months, we have had some fascinating moments: on November 26, for example, when Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the US, delivered testimony which, as I explained at the time, “demonstrated, without a shadow of a doubt, how ‘regime change’ in Iraq was agreed between George W. Bush and Tony Blair in April 2002, and how the rush to war by the US meant that furious attempts to justify the plan were doomed to fail, ‘because there was no smoking gun.’”

Last week, we had the disturbing testimony of Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign Office’s Legal Adviser, and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst. Wood was revelatory about how Jack Straw, who has, at times, portrayed himself as the highest profile dissenter in the Cabinet, had, in an unprecedented manner, turned down his legal adviser’s recommendations. On January 24, 2003, Wood wrote to Straw telling him the UK “cannot lawfully use force in Iraq in ensuring compliance” on the basis of existing UN resolutions, including resolution 1441, which, in November 2002, gave Saddam Hussein a “final opportunity” to comply. He added, “To use force without Security Council authority would amount to the crime of aggression.” In his reply, Straw wrote that he “noted” Sir Michael’s advice but did “not accept it.”

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Andy Worthington

With a stunning lack of sensitivity, President Barack Obama's Guantánamo Review Task Force chose the anniversary of the president's failed promise to close the prison to announce its conclusions regarding the eventual fate of 196 prisoners.

As the Washington Post explained, the Task Force said, with no trace of irony, that "nearly 50" of the men still imprisoned at Guantanamo "should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war."

The administration's invocation of the laws of war actually refers to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which authorized the President "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001" (or those who harbored them), as interpreted by the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which it was asserted that "Congress has clearly and unmistakably authorized detention" of individuals covered by the AUMF.

This may technically be legal in the United States, but it is at odds with everyone else's understanding of the laws of war. As every other civilized country understands them, the laws of war involve holding combatants for the duration of hostilities according to the Geneva Conventions, which, under Common Article 3, prohibits the "humiliating and degrading treatment" and coercive interrogations to which the men in Guantánamo were subjected, after President Bush declared in February 2002 that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Moreover, these men were never screened to ascertain whether they were actually combatants in the first place.

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