Torture

The sort of “dialogue” the US so far has encouraged the Egyptian government in

Real Life Revolutions, Torture, US Foreign Policy, War on Terror
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“So I’m lying on the floor, stomach down, legs up, hands behind my back, my cheek on the floor, and then all of a sudden, the closest thing that I could think of really, to describe it, was someone pouring lava on my soles. That felt like nothing I could describe. I flipped from the pain. I just flipped and grabbed my legs. Of course, during all that time it’s insults, calling me names, kicking me. So they got me back down, but now so that I don’t flip again, one guy stood over my head, one guy stood over my back, and the others were kicking me with their wooden soled shoes, and another guy was beating my soles with the cables he had…”

What happened to victims of the US’ War on Terror who were sent to Egypt: “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.” – Robert Baer, former CIA case officer. One more reason for the US to keep supporting Mubarak and not be too keen on a genuinely democratic revolution as is happening now to actually succeed. Who knows what will come out…

A concrete example of US leadership on human rights

Civil liberties, Torture, War on Terror
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This op-ed by the US ambassador to the UN human Rights Commission Eileen Donahoe is devoid of reality that you have to laugh, if you don’t want to cry. Every paragraph is an exercise in chutzpah and quote worthy but this is I think the worst:

Time and again human rights defenders underscore the importance of our public statements as an essential tool against government repression. The power of truthful words, spoken by the United States, should never be denigrated or underestimated. Those words provide hope and courage to those who fight against the worst rights abuses.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth:

Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a “black site” detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as “Albert” tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland.

Al-Nashiri is the suspected mastermind behind one of the first large al-Qaida attacks, which targeted the US destroyer USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in October 2000. According to former CIA agents who prefered to remain anonymous, Albert tortured the suspect for two weeks in December 2002. The claim is backed up by a review by the CIA’s inspector general, which reads: “The debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded.”

Sure, apologists will claim that this was an “isolated incident”, a “bad apple”, that this does not happen anymore under Obama. Yet Guantanamo Bay is still open, the Obama administration uses the same excuse of national security Bush used to hide the details of what’s going on in its War on Terror and nobody is even talking about any of the other nodes in the American gulag. The United States is not leading the world in human rights, it’s leading the world in ignoring them.

How to torture children the ministry of justice approved way

Policing, Torture, UK politics
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More news to make you forget any nostalgia for New Labour you may have had. It turns out the Ministry of Justice has written a torture manual on how to restrain children in private prisons, according to the Observer:

Some of the restraint and self-defence measures approved by the Ministry of Justice include ramming knuckles into ribs and raking shoes down the shins. Other extraordinary passages in the previously secret manual, Physical Control in Care, authorise staff to:

â–  “Use an inverted knuckle into the trainee’s sternum and drive inward and upward.”

â–  “Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person’s ribs until a release is achieved.”

â–  “Drive straight fingers into the young person’s face, and then quickly drive the straightened fingers of the same hand downwards into the young person’s groin area.”

[…]

Published by the HM Prison Service in 2005 and classified as a restricted government document, the manual guides staff on what restraint and self-defence techniques are authorised for use on children as young as 12 in secure training centres. The centres are purpose-built facilities for young offenders up to the age of 17 and run by private firms under government contracts.

Locking up children as young as twelve is not enough for these sadists, they have to be handed over to for profit jails to be tortured there because obviously keeping order normally is too difficult or too expensive for these fuckers. And it wouldn’t have come to light if some of the poor kids tortured like this hadn’t killed themselves in desperation, leaving their parents devastated and looking for answers. One more piece of the sordid lawandorder legacy New Labour has left behind.

Concern troll is concerned

Civil liberties, Forward March of Decentism, Torture, Wingnuts
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Aaronovitch Watch draws my attention to the latest Decent crusade against Amnesty International for having the audacity to actually, you know, work with an ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner in getting this prison and torture site closed as well as persuading European countries to take in ex-prisoners. According to The Times AI is “damaged” by their partnership with Moazzam Begg, providing as evidence the innuendo and assertions of “A SENIOR official at Amnesty International”, one Gita Sahgal:

Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation.

In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.

Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban”. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.

It’s all the usual guilt by association and scary buzzword — Taliban, Al-Qaeda, jihadi, served up in that undercooled semi-objective writing style the Times is so good at; all done nicely and proper with both sides of the story presented, but you still know what to think just from the headline. That said, it’s still a lot more sane than Martin Bright’s rant about it, as noted on Aaronovitch Watch:

Bright’s prose is somewhat over-caffeinated: “… blowing the lid… rightly sick of the lazy alliance… blown the whistle [hmm, lots of ‘blowing’ going on here – Ed] … Begg is now an integral part … she has been deeply frustrated by the way the British liberal intelligentsia gives house-room to right-wing Islamists … Jamaat-i-Islami, the south Asian blood-brothers of the Muslim Brotherhood… It is Gita Sahgal who should be the darling of the human rights establishment, not Moazzam Begg.” What, I wonder, is giving “house-room”? Until today, when, according to Bright, Ms Sahgal was suspended she was a ‘senior official at Amnesty’ (Sunday Times). So which of them, if either, was a ‘darling’ of the “liberal intelligensia”?

All the usual stuff from those who want Amnesty International to be the cheerleader for US-led human rights imperialism, who want AI to denounce the enemy-du-jour and then shut up, who want AI to mention Iranian torture, not Israeli torture. It infuriates somebody like Martin “not too” Bright, that AI does not distinguish between torture done in the name of Allah or torture done in the name of anti-terrorism. With his Us vs Them mentality, his worldview of a civilised west in conflict with barbaric Islam he’s the spiritual descendant of the Cold Warriors who in the seventies and eighties accused AI of being communist dupes, as he now accuses them of being jihadist dupes. What has changes is the reification of human rights — back then Cold Warriors could still argue that the fight against communism justified the occasional human rights violation, even if they tried to bagatalise them, but today Bright and others like him have to pretend they are the real human rights defenders.

Accusations like these are nothing new therefore. hey tend to pop up whenever AI or HRW or any other human rights organisation focuses attention on the wrong sort of human rights violations, those perpetrated by the US or its allies (especially Israel). First these crimes are denied, then once that becomes impossible they’re minimalised, then AI is accused of paying undue attention to them and not enough to other crimes (usually said by people too stupid to even scan their website which always proves the opposite) and finally it is accused of being a (willing/unwilling) tool of the enemy. Lather, rinse, repeat; concern trolling on an international scale. It’s a transparent ploy that has never worked in the past, but as long as you sling enough shit something will stick in the end. And that’s the real crime, if fake scandals like this persuade people not to support AI anymore.

Guantanamo suicides likely murder

Torture, War on Terror
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Via Naked Capitalism comes the news that three Guantanamo Bay detainees who were supposed to have committed suicide together as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us” according to Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the then commander of the prison, were more likely to have been murdered:

The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated.