Torture – Page 4 – Prog Gold

Torture porn

Published on July 16, 2008

During World War 2, Hitler and his pals liked nothing so much as have a nice little torture film after dinner, recordings made during Gestapo interrogation sessions. Would it go too far to believe Bush and Cheney may have done the same with videotapes from Guantanamo Bay, for example this video of the interrogation by Canadian intelligence agents of Omar Khadyr:

TORONTO—Burying his face in his hands, a 16-year-old captured in Afghanistan sobs and calls out “Oh Mommy!” in a hidden-camera video released Tuesday that provides the first look at interrogations inside the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

[…]

The seven hours of grainy footage, recorded over four days of questioning by Canadian intelligence agents in 2003, shows Khadr breaking down in tears. At one point he pleads for help and displays chest and back wounds that he says had not healed six months after his capture.

Peeling off his orange prisoner shirt, he shows the wounds and complains he cannot move his arms, saying he has not received proper medical attention, despite requests.

“They look like they’re healing well to me,” the agent says of the injuries.

“What you see in the video is a teenager begging for help and what you see is an interrogation that violates U.S. law and any international law concerning the rights of children,” said Wells Dixon, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantanamo prisoners.

“If this is the way a teenager in Guantanamo has been treated, you can just imagine how anyone else has been treated.”

It honestly would not surprise me at this point if Bush, Cheney et all collectively popped a stiffy over videos like this. There seems to be a deep sexual perversion at the root of the War on Terror, ever so often surfacing in e.g. the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Supposedly the naked pyramids and forced simulated fellatio of prisoners is done to soften them up for interrogation “because Arabs are uniquely shamed by sexual matters”, but you do wonder whether the incessent fascination with sexual humiliation isn’t much more present in the minds of the interrogators themselves…. As if 9/11 gave a certain part of America carte blanche to force its power fantasies on an unending supply of helpless victims.

Meanwhile the treatment of Omar Khadr is justified on him supposedly being a murderer, but as Eli notes:

George Bush (and Barack Obama and the Congress and the media and etc.) insist the U.S. is at “war” in Afghanistan, and they don’t mean that metaphorically as in the “war on drugs,” they mean it literally. Well, if the U.S. is at “war,” then Omar Khadr is a prisoner of war and has to be treated as such. If every single person captured by the U.S. in such a “war” is an “illegal combatant” and not a prisoner of war, then the U.S. can’t possibly be at war, since there is no opponent in this war. You can’t have it both ways.

Deporting people difficult? Not if you drug them

Published on May 15, 2008

Reason 1,567,801 not to move to the US anytime soon:

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government’s forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the “pre-flight cocktail,” as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

“Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac,” says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was “dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose,” according to an airline crew member’s written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards “taking down” a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse’s account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, “Nighty-night.”

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 — the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

It’s tempting to lay this yet again at the feet of the Bush administration, but I doubt it would’ve been any different under a Democratic president. The entire justice and law enforcement industry in the US operates on a level of casual cruelness that is unthinkable here. Police officers can taser or murder people with impunity, prison rape is at best seen as a joke, at worst as an extra punishment and in general there’s a culture that demands the complete and utter subjugation of a detainee or suspect and which harshly punishes anybody who steps out of line. The news that returned asylum seekers are routinely drugged therefore should come as no surprise.

So much for the “bottom up” theory of torture

Published on April 11, 20081 Comment

When the first reports about the use of torture and worse came out it was dismissed by the Bush administration as just the work of a few rotten apples. Once that story became untenable, an alternate defence was brought out. Supposedly the use of torture, sorry, “enhanced interrogation techniques had not been approved by the top, but had been invented by agents in the field desperate to get information from high level Al Quida and Taliban members. As far as I know this defence is still being maintained, despit the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

but now ABC news has revealed what should be the final nail in the coffin of that defence: Bush’s top advisors met regularly to discuss torture:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Show trial

Published on February 11, 2008

The Washington Post reports that the US military is ready to start its 9/11 show trials. Well, what else do you call a trial in which much of the evidence has been extracted by torture, the suspects have been kept imprisoned for years without being charged and it’s only through a Supreme Court ruling that the defendants even have a semblance of a proper trial, rather than a military tribunal?

It’s quite obvious that these trials are intended primarily for propaganda, another feature it has in common with the show trials of Stalin. This was so obvious even the hapless BBC reporter I heard on the subject this afternoon acknowledged it, though he missed the point by assuming it was meant for international consumption. Which of course it isn’t.

Instead its meant for internal use, a little booster for the coming elections to help the Republicans regain some of their mojo as the big daddy security party. The last eight years under Bush II have been a bit of a disaster in this regard, what with 9/11, the failure in Afghanistan and the Iraqi clusterfuck, so much so that even the biggest Bush cheerleaders have long ago hung up their pompoms (with some exceptions). They need closure, to make Bush look a little bit less like a miserable failure and to make his successors look slightly more appetising. Good thing they have all those dangerous terrorists on ice at Guantanamo….

Set Incoherent Outrage Meter To Stun

Published on December 12, 2007

Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, courtesy Moby in Sadly No’s comments.

This really is a forthcoming movie. I can’t begin to articulate my what, rage? Sickness? No, neither are quite it. That someone in Hollywood apparently thinks routine torture and injustice are are just a normal hazard of life to make comedy (and a buck) out of speaks volumes to me about just how far down the rabbithole we’ve gone.

What kind of bizarro world are we in when scriptwriters see torture as normal?

From that limited clip that movie doesn’t look much like satire to me; it looks like a moviie whose makers, far from recoiling from torture, are revelling in their government’s criminality, treating crimes against humanity as just another saleable commodity to yuk it up over and market. No doubt they’d say if challenged that they are telling necessary truths through the medium of comedy.and that even mentioning Guantanamo Bay and US torture in a mainstream movie is transgressional and satirical in itself.

I’d say bollocks to that.

The creators of this movie – who surely know their intended audience down to the tiniest demographic – have shown their deep and abiding cynicism by adding gratuitously large amounts of and tits and ass. Oh and pussy too, just to make assurance doubly sure that it sells.

They’ll make milions, how can they fail? Harold and Kumar Gitmo has everything to appeal to the nihilistic, materialistic and disaffected young – torture, cheap anal rape jokes, tits and ass, torture, cheap dick jokes, more torture and plenty of drug references so mviegoers can turn and look at each other with a complicit smile and go heh, yeah, cool.

The whole movie’s an aknowledgement that OK, our government are torturing murdering bastards, but so effing what? Eat cockmeat suckers! Who could ask for more? It’s the perfect movie. Pass the popcorn, whoop, whoop! Go Hollywood, Go, go USA!