Tag Archives: Torture

The Demonic Style: Valentine On Military Historians, Avatars, and the CIA

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Insight into why the revisionist media never ‘gets’ it:

“The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than 500 CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that 40 CIA officers were posing as journalists.

“When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors. Continue reading →

American Pot Described By Chinese Kettle

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Veteran investigative journalist David Lindorff in 2005 on the Chinese turning the tables on the US on human rights:

” The New York Times was almost apoplectic Sunday over a human rights “report card” issued by China’s Foreign Affairs Department on the United States. That report, a response to the annual report on China’s human rights situation issued by the U.S. State Department, called attention to a number of areas where the U.S. is in violation of universally accepted norms of behavior.

Having lived for two years in China–a fascist-style military dictatorship where the law is simply another tool of repression for those in authority, and where people are routinely locked up, tortured, deprived of their livelihood and even their lives for such transgressions as posting comments on a website, protesting a corrupt boss or conducting prayer services in a private home, and a place where perceptions of America can be pretty bizarre–I was expecting something comic after reading in the Times that the report on the U.S. “approaches caricature.”
In fact, putting aside whom it was doing the talking, the report was pretty damned accurate, and devastating.
American society is characterized by rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people’s rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee of the right to life, liberty and security, the Chinese report said, noting that in addition to the threats from uniformed law enforcement, some 31,000 Americans were killed by firearms last year. The report also noted America’s record two million prison inmates, and the fact that three times that many are on parole or probation.
Caricature? Hardly. The number of people being jailed in the U.S. is a national scandal, particularly considering the percentage who are black and Latino, and the fact that most are there for non-violent offenses. And no surprise there: Nearly every time I am on the road and see a car pulled over by a trooper, I discover that the driver is black. Unless blacks are uniquely prone to speeding, there is an epidemic of racial profiling, and it’s not limited to highways.
American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractice is common, the report continues, noting that elections in the U.S. are “in fact a contest of money.” Really. Can anyone honestly call this a caricature? I remember when I was teaching a group of journalism graduate students in Shanghai, I received my mail ballot from home, which at the time was a small town in upstate New York. I was happy to receive it because I wanted to show it to my class, where the students were anxious to see first-hand how American democracy works. Imagine my chagrin when I opened the envelope and saw that the ballot was composed entirely of single candidates for each post. Republicans so dominated the upstate region that no one bothered to run against them for any town or county post! “These look just like our ballots!” the students said in amazement. Nor in our current red state/blue state polity, are things much different across most of the country, where campaign funding laws, or the lack thereof, make incumbency virtually a guarantee of re-election.
In the area of economic rights, the Chinese report said poverty, hunger and homelessness “haunt the world’s richest country.” Here I’d have to disagree. While the figure they used (from the U.S. Census Bureau—36 million living in poverty—is correct, it is hardly a condition that “haunts” the majority living above the poverty line, since our derelict corporate media don’t cover the poverty beat, and our economically segregated communities make it easy for people to ignore the suffering in the midst of plenty. Still, noting that a sixth of the nation lives in poverty is no caricature. It’s a fact.
Racial discrimination? The report says it permeates every aspect of society, while the new post 9-11 homeland security regulations especially target ethnic minorities, foreigners and immigrants. Does anyone want to challenge the accuracy of that depiction?
As for the rights of women and children, the report called attention to the deplorable rate of rapes and sexual abuse, with some 400,000 children forced into prostitution and sexual abuse. This ugly reality, while also true for China, cannot be brushed aside here.
Finally the Chinese report addressed the abuse of foreigners by U.S. authorities, noting the scandalous violations of the rights of prisoners of war, the history of invasions and unprovoked military assaults on other nations, and the estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.
For my part, I was surprised the Chinese report didn’t go further, to mention the failure of the U.S. to abide by international law in allowing foreigners arrested on serious criminal charges in the U.S., including murder, to contact their embassies, the shameful inadequacy of funding for schools in poor communities, the dumping of toxic waste and the siting of pollution-causing power plants in low-income communities, and the theft of private property through improper use of imminent [sic]  domain and draconian drug laws, the unconscionably high percentage of minorities on American death rows, as well as other abuses.
China is one of the world’s prime human rights offenders, but that ugly reality should not prevent us from looking honestly into the mirror that it has held up to our own society and government.
If anything is a caricature, it is the article on the Chinese report, in which The Times appears as a caricature of real independent journalism.”

Christians Should Look Outside the Two Parties…

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Greg at The Holy Cause writes this, after reviewing the GOP’s record during the Bush administration:

“Christians should be leaving the Republican Party in droves. Christians should be crawling on broken glass as penance for blindly supporting the Republican Party. Christians should be repenting in sackcloth and ashes for thinking the Republican Party was the party of God.

Instead, even as more and more crimes of the Bush administration come to light, I fear that Christians who are outraged, and rightly so, at the crimes of the Obama administration and the Democrats will look in the next election to the Republicans as their savior instead of the champions of war and torture….”

My Comment:

I agree with the post that neither party is consonant with Christian values. But I fear that the tendency to identify one’s party with “the good and the true” isn’t limited to Christians. Liberals are equally convinced of it. I also question the findings of the Pew study cited by Greg that finds that evangelicals are more likely to support torture. As I noted when I posted the study a while back, the sample size jt uses seems too small to be useful.

Elis Regina Sings “O Bebado e a Equilibrista”

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Brazilian pop singer Elis Regina (1945 – 1982) is one of my new finds. One half of an album Elis and Tom (with Antonio Carlos Jobim) that’s considered one of the best in bossa nova, Regina was a passionate, supremely gifted, and original performer. Not as overtly political as other singers, her own unconventional life and stage presence lent weight to her political engagement. She was once vilified for a public performance in support of Brazil’s military junta (1964-1985) that later turned out to have been coerced. After that, the cartoonist Helfil, one of her detractors, became her friend, and she joined him to support a popular movement demanding the amnesty of political prisoners and exiled artists and intellectuals.

This was the subject of her classic 1979 performance of “O Bêbado e a Equilibrista” (Blanc/Bosco), which refers to “the return of Henfil’s brother.” This was the cartoonist’s older brother, Betinho, a leading sociologist, who had been exiled. Regina’s campaign was an important contribution to some 5000 Brazilian political prisoners returning from exile.

O Bebado e a Equilibrista
The Drunk and the Tightrope Walker (1979)

Lyrics: Carla Cristina
Music: Aldir Blanc/João Bosco
Translation: Steven Engler

Evening fell like a bridge
A drunk in a funeral suit reminded me of Chaplin’s tramp
The moon, like some brothel madam
Begged a rented shine from each cold star
And clouds, up there in the blotting paper sky
Sucked at tortured stains
What insane pressure
The drunk with the bowler hat made a thousand bows
For Brazil, my Brazil’s night
Is dreaming of the return of Henfil’s brother
Of so many people who left, in a dangerous situation
Our country is crying, gentle mother
Marias and Clarices are crying on Brazilian soil
But I know that pain this sharp can’t be pointless
Hope dances on the tightrope with an umbrella
With each step on that rope you can hurt yourself
Bad luck, the balancing hope
Knows that each artist’s show must go on

Trauma and Brainwashing

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Since I’ve been posting about media spin and the brainwashing of the public, here’s an enlightening post at Humble Libertarian on post-traumatic stress disorder among vets, apparently at near-epidemic levels

What has that to do with brainwashing? Everything, as the video above shows.

Early victims of US brainwashing techniques were US army personnel, as experimentation in the CIA brain-washing program, MK-Ultra shows. They still continue to be victims of it.

Also read the CIA’s notorious Kubark manual on torture – which analyzes different techniques to induce compliance in subjects.

Repeatedly traumatizing someone (and sexual humiliation and violence are the easiest avenues to do this), breaks down their sense of identity. In all but the strongest people, it produces compliance, refusal to accept reality, escapism, psychosis, and addictions of all kinds.

In the strongest, it produces resistance. Either lawless resistance to the state, which is what we call criminal, or, in rare cases, the fierce concentrated resistance of the social or political activist, the revolutionary…and even the saint…

The victims produce the fodder that the state manipulates.
The survivors become the excuse for the state to ratchet up control.
Either way, the state grows.


England Unrepentant for Role in Torture

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Lynndie England is unrepentant for what she did, says this piece:

“We move on to another hideous image, in which the same group of prisoners – one of whom Graner had punched full in the face – were lined up and ordered to masturbate.

How long had this sick charade continued? ‘You are going to find this ridiculous,’ says England, half suppressing a snigger. ‘One guy did 45 minutes! Freddie [Graner’s fellow prison guard, Ivan Frederick] just wanted to see if they would do it – and all seven of them lined up doing this.

‘Well, six stopped after a few minutes, but the seventh carried on.’

Hearing this account for the first time, even Roy T. Hardy, her lawyer, who had thought himself beyond shock after representing England for five years, is clearly taken aback…..

‘Sorry? For what I did?’ she interjects, incredulous. ‘All I did was stand in the pictures. Saying sorry is admitting I was guilty and I’m not. I was just doing my duty’

……it is impossible to empathise with her, for she is such an unsympathetic character……”

More of the same at Drudge on England’s interview with the German news magazine, Stern.

My Comment

I read this report with interest for two reasons.

1. It substantiates, as many other reports have done since then, my early (July 2004) insight that there were pictures of women being abused that were being deliberately held back and that the key to understanding Abu Ghraib was that it was a deliberate policy.

2. It also vindicates the argument of an essay I contributed to “One of the Guys” (Seal, 2006), a piece called “The Military Made Me Do It,” that England got the benefit of double-standards that treated the women torturers as somehow victims themselves.

I was sympathetic to England, as far as she – and others low down in the pecking order – were made scapegoats for the military and government elites who actually developed the policy. I was also sympathetic about the class bias shown toward them (shown in  phrases like “trailer trash” that are used in this report as well).

But I thought England could still have behaved better than she did. I compared her to Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower, who did his duty despite all the dangers of being seen as a “snitch” by his colleagues. Both were about the same age. I thought England benefited from a double-standard exonerating the young women torturers.

I suggested in the essay that England’s sex was really as much an advantage as it was a disadvantage in the prison where she was a guard (female-deprived).

Another point of vindication: many journalists treat the story of Abu Ghraib as primarily a story about America. I find this somewhat narcissistic. The story is about the victims. To my mind, putting England and her colleagues at the center of Abu Ghraib adds a second injury to the victims.  And, as this report illustrates, the perps are rarely worthy of it, even as psychological case studies. Most evil is done by depressingly ordinary people.

A final point. I recall that some journalists made the culturally obtuse decision to interview the raped women, completely forgetting the consequences to the victims of such media exposure. Sure enough, some of the interviewed women ended up dead.

I have to wonder at journalists with so little imagination and compunction for the subjects of their stories…

‘Subjects’ are also subjects in the other sense – they have their own voices.

All this adds to my belief that the mediacrats can be as big a problem as the kleptocrats.

Torture Pictures You Can See and Torture Pictures You Can’t…

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In the news last month, was a torture tape that implicates a UAE royal sheikh (who isn’t in the government) in acts of sadism. In it a uniformed policeman watches as the victim (who shortchanged the Sheikh in a grain deal) is whipped, beaten, electrocuted, and run over by an SUV).  From an ABC report on the tape:

“The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrains the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly…..

He uses an electric cattle prod against the man’s testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man’s testicles and sets them aflame…….

The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail. At one point, he puts the nail next to the man’s buttocks and bangs it through the flesh.

“Where’s the salt,” asks the Sheikh as he pours a large container of salt on to the man’s bleeding wounds. The victim pleads for mercy, to no avail.

The final scene on the tape shows the Sheikh positioning his victim on the desert sand and then driving over him repeatedly. A sound of breaking bones can be heard on the tape.”

This is all pretty gruesome and horrific. The Sheikh is clearly a monster. But that torture exists in Arab countries is not new. Can there be more to explain the media highlighting of this tape? Remember, it took CBS several years before it got around to the Iraq torture story (it was first reported in the US in 2001. The CBS expose of Abu Ghraib was in 2004).

Could it have anything to do with a recent piece of legislation?

Barack Obama, is throwing his weight behind The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009,  passed on June 1, 2009. What this does is make the Secretary of Defense certify whether any images of prisoner treatment between September 11, 2009 and January 22, 2009 would endanger military personnel or US citizens, and at his discretion and without any possible review, prevent their disclosure. The certification lasts for three years and can be renewed indefinitely.

Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the subject:

“For decades, we had laws in place authorizing citizens to sue their telecommunication carriers if the telecoms allowed government spying on their communications in violation of the law, but when it was revealed that the telecoms did exactly this, the Congress simply changed the law retroactively so that it no longer applied.  For decades, we had laws imposing civil and criminal liability on government officials who engaged in or authorized torture, but when it was revealed that our government did that, the Congress just retroactively changed the law to protect the torturers.  And now that courts have ruled that our decades-old transparency law compels disclosure of this torture evidence, the Congress is just going to retroactively change the law — again — this time to empower the President to suppress that evidence anyway.”

Greenwald acts surprised, which is a bit funny. What did he think? That Obama was going to change things?

It makes you wonder if the Abu Dhabi tape was given airtime simply to provide enough impetus (as in, See, they do it too – and  so much worse ) to pass this horrible bill.

The New York Times Complains About Chinese Torture

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And no – I don’t mean that someone dripped water into the eyes of the editorial staff until they squealed. I mean they  referred to torture  – committed by the Chinese – and they did it without using quotes, their standard practice when referring to American torture.  The reference was in an obituary for Colonel Harold E. Fisher, an American pilot who died at the age of 83. Here’s what Fisher underwent:

“kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.”

Contributing to the general tone of hypocrisy, Barack Obama has recently ruled out holding the CIA responsible for torture, even though many experts have argued that at least the lawyers who wrote the authorizing memos, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, should be prosecuted.

Just for comparison, here’s what Human Rights had to say about the lack of accountability so far at every level:

“Since August 2002, nearly 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global “war on terror.”

Despite these numbers, four years since the first known death in U.S. custody, only 12 detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official. Of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half. While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a criminal charge. Crucially, among the worst cases in this list – those of detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment; the steepest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death: five months in jail.”

The HR report also specified just how brutal the torture could get:

“Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former Iraqi general beaten over days by U.S. Army, CIA and other non-military forces, stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord, and suffocated to death. “

Here’s the whole HR report.

Scott Horton has proved that the documentary evidence of wrong-doing goes straight up the chain of command to the President (I made that argument as early as 2005 based only the record available at the time). So the NYT’s selective treatment of the subject has simply no justification.

Fortunately Glenn Greenwald was at hand to give the paper a thrashing:

“The NYT’s incoherence and double standards, equally, are self-evident. But I would like to know if Bill Keller will remove the t-word from this obit and replace it with “harsh interrogations” as he does when referring to the US government’s use of identical techniques. If not, why not? Remember: these people won’t even use the word torture to describe a technique displayed in the Cambodian museum of torture to commemorate the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge – as long as Americans do the torturing.

I mean: the NYT isn’t just a vehicle for US propaganda, is it? It’s a newspaper, right? It has standards that it maintains across its copy. Right?”

My Comment:

We’re still waiting for the answer on that one. But, meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald and Salon prove that they’re the real press.

And talking about double standards, Al Jazeera poses this question: Torture still continues in Iraq (this time, at the hands of Iraqis), but why is there no global outcry over it?

Guantanamo Detainees Are Not “Persons”

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From Raw Story, Friday, April 24, 2009

“A Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit ruled Friday that detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not “persons” according to it’s interpretation of a statute involving religious freedom.

The ruling sprang from an appeal of Rasul v. Rumsfeld, which was thrown out in Jan. 2008. “The court affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the constitutional and international law claims, and reversed the district court’s decision that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) applied to Guantanamo detainees, dismissing those claims as well,” the Center for Constitutional Rights said….”