-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: October 8, 2007 8:35:52 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: Bush's Torturers Follow Where the Nazis Led
George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase "enhanced
interrogation technique." By relying on it, the White House
spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the
administration strongly opposed torture and that "any procedures
they use are tough, safe, necessary, and lawful."
So is "enhanced interrogation" torture? One way to answer this
question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage.
Verscharfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was
the exact term invented by Hitler's Gestapo to describe what became
known as the "third degree." The United States prosecuted it as a
war crime in 1948.
The penalty for those who were found guilty was death.
This is how far we've come.
See what's new at AOL.com and Make AOL Your Homepage.
From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: October 7, 2007 6:24:13 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Bush's Torturers Follow Where the Nazis Led
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they
don't have
any."-- Alice Walker
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18515.htm
*Bush's Torturers Follow Where the Nazis Led*
By Andrew Sullivan
10/07/07
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/
andrew_sullivan/article2602564.ece
"The Times" -- I remember that my first response to the reports of
abuse and
torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of
exaggeration or
deliberate deception. I didn't believe America would ever do those
things. I'd
also supported George W. Bush in 2000, believed it necessary to
give the
president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew Donald
Rumsfeld as a friend.
It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by
the far left
or was part of Al-Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train captives
to lie about
this stuff, dont they? Bottom line: I trusted the president in
a time of war to
obey the rule of law that we were and are defending. And then I
was forced to
confront the evidence.
From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the Bush
administration made a strong and formative decision: in the absence
of good
intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after 9/11, it would do
what no
American administration had done before. It would torture
detainees to get
information.
This decision was and is illegal, and violates America's treaty
obligations, the
military code of justice, the United Nations convention against
torture, and U.S.
law. Although America has allied itself over the decades with some
unsavoury
regimes around the world and has come close to acquiescing to
torture, it has
never itself tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from
the evils of
Nazism and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done
more than any
other nation to banish torture from the world. George Washington
himself vowed
that it would be a defining mark of the new nation that such
tactics, used by the
British in his day, would be anathema to Americans.
But Bush decided that 9/11 changed all that. Islamists were
apparently more
dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom Americans fought and
defeated
without resorting to torture. The decision to enter what Dick
Cheney called "the
dark side" was made, moreover, in secret; interrogators who had no
idea how to do
these things were asked to replicate some of the methods U.S.
soldiers had been
trained to resist if captured by the Soviets or Vietcong.
Classic torture techniques, such as waterboarding, hypothermia,
beatings,
excruciating stress positions, days and days of sleep deprivation,
and threats to
family members (even the children of terror suspects), were
approved by Bush and
inflicted on an unknown number of terror suspects by American
officials, C.I.A.
agents and, in the chaos of Iraq, incompetents and sadists at Abu
Ghraib. And
when the horror came to light, they denied all of it and prosecuted
a few grunts
at the lowest level. The official reports were barred from
investigating fully
up the chain of command.
Legally, the White House knew from the start that it was on
extremely shaky
ground. And so officials told pliant in-house lawyers to concoct
memos to make
what was illegal legal. Their irritation with the rule of law, and
their belief
that the president had the constitutional authority to waive it,
became a
hallmark of their work.
They redefined torture solely as something that would be equivalent
to the loss
of major organs or leading to imminent death. Everything else was
what was first
called "coercive interrogation," subsequently amended to "enhanced
interrogation." These terms were deployed in order for the
president to be able
to say that he didnt support "torture." We were through the
looking glass.
After Abu Ghraib, some progress was made in restraining these
torture policies.
The memo defining torture out of existence was rescinded. The
Military
Commissions Act was crafted to prevent the military itself from
being forced to
violate its own code of justice. But the administration clung to
its torture
policies, and tried every legal manoeuvre to keep it going and keep
it secret.
Much of this stemmed from the vice-presidents office.
Last week The New York Times revealed more. We now know that long
after Abu
Ghraib was exposed, the administration issued internal legal memos
that asserted
the legality of many of the techniques exposed there. The memos
not only gave
legal cover to waterboarding, hypothermia and beating but allowed
them in
combination to intensify the effect.
The argument was that stripping a chained detainee naked, pouring
water over him
while keeping room temperatures cold enough to induce repeated
episodes of
dangerous hypothermia, was not "cruel, inhuman, or degrading." We
have a log of
such a technique being used at Guantanamo. The victim had to be
rushed to
hospital, brought back from death, then submitted once again to
"enhanced
interrogation."
George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase "enhanced
interrogation
technique." By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week
was able to
say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed
torture and
that "any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary, and lawful."
So is "enhanced interrogation" torture? One way to answer this
question is to
examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verscharfte Verneh-
mung, enhanced or
intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the
Gestapo to
describe what became known as the "third degree." It left no
marks. It included
hypothermia, stress positions, and long-time sleep deprivation.
The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948.
The victims
were not in uniform -- they were part of the Norwegian insurgency
against the
German occupation -- and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done,
that this put
them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the
Geneva
conventions).
The Nazis even argued that "the acts of torture in no case resulted
in death.
Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in
permanent
disablement." This argument is almost verbatim that made by John
Yoo, the Bush
administration's house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the
Washington think
tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
The U.S.-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheneys
arguments. Base-line
protections against torture applied, the court argued, to all
detainees,
including those out of uniform. They didn't qualify for full
P.o.W. status, but
they couldnt be abused either. The court also relied on the
plain meaning of
torture as defined under U.S. and international law: "The court
found it decisive
that the defendants had inflicted serious physical and mental
suffering on their
victims, and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the
punishment ..."
The definition of torture remains the infliction of "severe mental
or physical
pain or suffering" with the intent of procuring intelligence. In
1948, in other
words, America rejected the semantics of the current president and
his aides.
The penalty for those who were found guilty was death. This is how
far we've
come. And this fateful, profound decision to change what America
stands for was
made in secret. The president kept it from Congress and from many
parts of his
own administration.
Ever since, the United States has been struggling to figure out
what to do about
this, if anything. So far, Congress has been extremely passive,
although last
week's leaks about the secret pro-torture memos after Abu Ghraib
forced Arlen
Specter, a Republican senator, to proclaim that the memos "are more
than
surprising. I think they are shocking." Yet the public, by and
large, remains
indifferent; and all the Republican candidates, bar John McCain and
Ron Paul,
endorse continuing the use of torture.
One day America will come back -- the America that defends human
rights, the
America that would never torture detainees, the America that leads
the world in
barring the inhuman and barbaric. But not until this president
leaves office.
And maybe not even then
~~~
Andrew Sullivan is an author, academic and journalist. He holds a
PhD from
Harvard in political science, and is a former editor of "The New
Republic." His
1995 book, "Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality,"
became one of the
best-selling books on gay rights. He has been a regular columnist
for The Sunday
Times since the 1990s, and also writes for Time and other
publications.
---- Msg sent via CWNet -
http://www.cwnet.com/
www.ctrl.org
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/
<A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
