Torture – Page 9 – Prog Gold

Chickens, Meet Roost

Published on July 3, 2007

Could they by chance be connected?

Missing US diplomat found dead in Cyprus
By George Psyllides, Associated Press Writer
Published: 03 July 2007

The US defence attache in Cyprus was found dead in a remote rural area of the Mediterranean island on Monday, four days after he disappeared with his diplomatic car, sparking an island-wide search.

A postmortem showed Lt. Col. Thomas Mooney, 45, bled to death from a cut to the throat, according to a police statement released late Monday. It did not clarify whether foul play was suspected, adding that the diplomat was identified by his dental records.

However, a Cypriot official involved in the autopsy said the diplomat fatally wounded himself.

“There is no evidence of foul play,” the official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “He had a wound in the neck which is compatible with self-infliction.”

Mooney disappeared with his car, a black Chevrolet Impala, on Thursday, and a ground and air search operation turned up nothing until Monday.

Police said Mooney’s decomposed body was found near his car, which was parked on a dirt road in the Lefka area, a remote region of rugged, hilly terrain around 28 miles west of the capital, Nicosia.

Hours later the US Embassy confirmed that the dead man was Mooney – who is married with children.

“After the notification of next of kin, with deep sadness, I announce that Lt. Col. Thomas Mooney, who served his nation with distinction as our defence attache, was found dead by Cypriot authorities on Monday,” US Ambassador Ronald Schlicher said in a written statement..

And this:

Greece, Cyprus may have allowed secret CIA flights: European MPs

Greece and Cyprus are among 14 EU member-states suspected of turning a blind eye to secret CIA flights taking terror suspects to countries where they could face torture, according to a report approved by a majority of MEPs in the European Parliament on Wednesday.

The EU parliament voted to accept a resolution condemning member states who accepted or ignored the practice, according to Athens News Agency reports.

The EU report said the US had operated 1,200 flights, flying suspects on to states where they could face torture.

The report was adopted by a large majority, with 382 MEPs voting in favor, 256 against and 74 abstaining.

A paragraph referring to Greece said that aircraft used by the CIA had made 64 stops in Greek airports. It expressed grave concerns regarding the purpose of flights coming from or flying to countries linked to the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” circuit, as the prisoner transfers were termed.

In the case of Cyprus, the report pointed to 57 stops at Cyprus airports of CIA-operated planes.

The US embassy in Cyprus gave this statement:

The US State Department said there was no indication of terrorist involvement.

“I wouldn’t point you in the direction of an act of terror,” US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Well, no, of course he wouldn’t and for once I agree: sounds like either revenge or remorse to me.

The Texas Taser Terror: Coming To A Town Near You

Published on June 21, 20072 Comments

Word to the wise: don’t be a diabetic in Texas and call for an ambulance.

Lester Haines in The Register:

Texas cops taser diabetic seizure man

‘We just took care of him’

By Lester Haines

A Texas man who called 911 to request medical assistance for a diabetic seizure earned a tasering from local cops for his trouble, the Waxahachie Daily Light reports.

Allen Nelms, 52, was suffering said seizure “during the early morning hours of April 28 when his girlfriend, Josie Edwards, called 911 to request paramedics”.

A police officer duly turned up at the house on Waxahachie’s east side, “inquired as to what was going on”, then called for back-up. Shortly after, and as Nelms was “in his bed in the couple’s bedroom”, cops “burst in with their guns drawn and yelling at him to get on the floor”.

Edwards recalled “about six or seven police officers kicked the front door in and stormed the back bedroom where she said she could hear one telling Nelms to get on the floor”. Her statement, which forms part of an written complaint made by Nelms to the Waxahachie police department, says: “Allen was shouting, ‘Please don’t do me like this. I just need help.’ Next thing I heard some ‘zing’ noise and Allen was shouting. I asked what were they doing to him. One policeman replied, ‘We just took care of him.’ … After they did their shooting and laughing, they came out [of] the rooms. The paramedics had to pull out the Tasers.”

Nelms claims he was “struck by Taser barbs on his left side, his back and his shoulder” as he went to roll over, and subsequently handcuffed, with “paramedics intervening when the officers began trying to yank the Taser barbs from his skin”. The paramedics removed the barbs, checked Nelms’ blood sugar level, and the cuffs came off. He was neither arrested nor charged.

They called for medical help and got paramilitaries? WTF?

Nelms has contacted Waxahachie attorney Rodney Ramsey, who told the Daily Light he has “filed notice with the city on Nelms’ behalf to preserve all documentation and evidence relating to the incident”. Ramsey said: “This police department has a bad history of disparate treatment on the east side. They’re not treated fairly. They’re not treated justly. I bet the police wouldn’t kick in a white man’s door on Spring Creek at 4:30am and Taser him three or four times.”

Ah, OK, I see what’s happening here: he was guilty of the crime of existing in Texas while black. Oh well, that’s all right then. As you were, officers:

The Waxahachie police department conducted an internal investigation into the matter, and informed Nelms: “A review regarding your written complaint dated May 3, 2007, was conducted. After careful consideration of your allegations we have found that the officers were within our departmental policies regarding the use of a less than lethal force option (TASER) on you during an event at your residence on April 28, 2007.”

And with that he’s supposed to shut up and just suck it up? Attorney Ramsay isn’t letting this one go, though:

Ramsey declared: “I don’t care if I make a dime on this case. I don’t care if this costs me money. I want to know what policy says you can kick somebody’s door down and Taser them for asking for medical help. This is not going to happen in this town anymore.”

Ramsey added that he “wants the names of the officers involved in the incident and that he will renew his efforts to see a citizens review board of police established in the city of Waxahachie, saying that while the majority of the department’s officers are good officers, there are some whose actions are questionable”.

[…]

Ramsey warned: “They better have everything they have on this. There had better not be one piece of evidence that is shredded in this case.”

More lawyers like this, please.

There’s a screaming need for specialist taser lawyers in Texas if the news is any guide; this sickening incident wasn’t the only tragic Texas taser news this week. Lubbock police also managed to apparently set a man on fire with a taser:

Police investigate fiery death of Texan man struck by their taser gun
Last updated at 12:23pm on 20th June 2007

Police in Texas are investigating whether a Taser stun gun that police used to subdue a man ignited gasoline he had poured over himself.

Juan Flores Lopez, 47, died Tuesday at a hospital in Lubbock, Texas.

Police initially used pepper spray when they tried to take Lopez into custody Monday evening.

Then they used the Taser. Some stun guns emit an electric spark when they deliver the jolt of electricity.

The Texas Rangers were also investigating whether a lighter that was on the porch could have contributed to the fire, Lt Bob Bullock said.

“We don’t know what ignited the fire,” police Lt Curtis Milbourn said.

No one else was injured in the confrontation. It was unclear whether Lopez had been charged with anything.

Two of his sons who live nearby said their father had been threatening for months to burn himself and his house.

His wife was seeking a divorce, and he did not want to have to leave the house, the sons said.

‘Neofascist police state’ is a pretty hackneyed phrase, but sometimes those are the only appropriate ones to use – and Texas appears to be a neofascist police state, if ever there was one.

These are just the latest in a whole slew of cases in which various Texas police departments and sherriffs are alleged to have used tasers as the first line of policing. They’re hardly the only state to do this, but they do seem to be producing the most egregious examples of meatheads using weapons first and asking questions afterwards – with predictably fatal results.

But it’s not just Texas and not just America. It’s a British issue too, UK Indymedia alleges:

A 15-year-old boy has been shot with a Taser gun during a police raid in Moss side Manchester.

Police “”claim”” the teenager began threatening officers during the search of a property on Broadoak Road in Moss Side on Monday the 15 year old child had to have a ambulance called after police appear to have used the Tazer on the unarmed child because he was dis-obeying officers after he became concerned at having the front door smashed in.

And Amnesty International reports:

Amnesty International today (16 October) expressed concern after a man died in County Durham, three days after he was shot with a Taser electro-shock weapon and a baton round. Brian Loan, 47, is believed to be the first person in the UK to die after being shocked with a Taser. A Home Office post-mortem reportedly found that he had died of natural causes.

It doesn’t take a degree in jurisprudence, criminology or psychology to realise that if you give people (and people inclined towards militarism and authoritarianism at that) weapons, tell them they are the less-lethal option and then put those people in stressful situations, that they’ll use them.

If it were just the stupidity, perhaps it could be dealt with by legislation banning the sale and use of the device.

Fat chance.

Taser has made multiple millions from producing and marketing cattle prods for controlling the populace and it’s had the help of many prominent government figures to do so: not least the horribly corrupt Bernie Kerik, (who Bush tried to make director of Homeland Security before his exposure) as have a host of other Republican worthies.

WASHINGTON – Bernard Kerik, President Bush’s choice to run the Homeland Security Department, made $6.2 million by exercising stock options he received from a company that sold stun guns to the department — and seeks more business with it.

Taser International was one of many companies that received consulting advice from Kerik after he left his job as New York City police commissioner in 2001, when he was earning $150,500 a year. Kerik remains on Taser’s board of directors, although the company and the White House said he planned to sever the relationship.

Partnering with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and also operating independently, Kerik has had business arrangements with manufacturers of prescription drugs, computer software and bulletproof materials, as well as companies selling nuclear power, telephone service, insurance and security advice for Americans working abroad.

Even the UK police have made money from coercive technology:

THE American manufacturer of Taser, the controversial stun gun, gave the exclusive British distribution rights to a senior serving police officer who helped win Home Office approval for the weapon.

Inspector Peter Boatman had a 50% share in a company that sold Tasers at the same time as devising Britain’s first police training programme for the use of weapons.

Boatman was in charge of assessing the merits of Taser as head of operational training for Northamptonshire police and was regarded as an impartial expert on the weapon.

Since he left the force a little more than three years ago, his firm has provided 1,500 Tasers worth about £1m to 20 British police forces. It is the exclusive UK distributor for the US company, Taser International.

Disclosure of the apparent conflict of interest comes after Taser International, the US manufacturer, was accused of providing American police officers with share options potentially worth $1m.

Police repression is a dirty business all right:

Companies House records show that Boatman took a 50% stake in a start-up company, Pro-Tect Systems, in December 2000. He became a director of the firm on December 5 and resigned three weeks later, on December 27, but held on to his stake in the company.

In February 2001, Pro-Tect received the Taser contract for the UK. Within two months Boatman was acting as an adviser to the Home Office on whether to issue Tasers to British officers. He was “regarded as a national and international expert” on Tasers, Chris Fox, the former chief constable of Northamptonshire, said yesterday.

In December 2001, three months after the Home Office approved trial imports, Boatman publicly rebutted claims by Police Federation officers that Tasers could be dangerous. Boatman wrote “with sadness” to Police Review that “this technology is very effective — more than any other technique, device or equipment for establishing control over violent and dangerous subjects”.

He retired from the police on April 16, 2002. Two days later he was installed as chairman of Pro-Tect Systems. His fellow founding director and friend, Kevin Coles, had been running the firm in the meantime.

More…

The development sale and use of coercive technologies for controlling rebeliious civilians is a big business and a dirty business. If this were just an issue of a a few rogue cops acting outside their remit, then the problem could be solved by better training, legislation and codes of practice.

But there is just so much money involved and there’s so many vested interests in the sale and use of these torture gadgets, that their use will only proliferate.

When shooting an innocent man seven times in the head on a tube train while he’s going about his lawful, innocent private business attracts no opprobrium whatsoever for the guilty officers, then I don’t hold out much hope for any redress against an illegal police tasering.

Much more on police taser incidents at Bad Cop. No Donut!

Must-Read Of The Day: Seymour Hersh On Abu Ghraib

Published on June 17, 2007

“These were people who were taken off the streets and put in jail—teen-agers and old men and women,” he said. “I kept on asking these questions of the officers I interviewed: ‘You knew what was going on. Why didn’t you do something to stop it?’ ”

– Gen Antonio Taguba, iquestioning US army torture suspects about Abu Ghraib

Yes, why didn’t they?

Since it’s bucketing down with rain, why not stay in and read something to get your teeth into and get your ire up: Seymour Hersh’s latest piece in the New Yorker, on General Anthonio Taguba, the officer tasked to investigate torture by US troops at Abu Ghraib.

Really, you should read the whole thing to get the full, ripe flavour of the blatant and foul lies told by Rumsfeld and his senior officers about the orders they gave to torture captives. Here’s a short excerpt:

[…]

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

[…]

… he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

[…]

Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”

At best, Taguba said, “Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it.

[…]

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.

Like Blair Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush are trying to say they didn’t know. They knew all right, they ordered it.

In subsequent testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in January information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

Rumsfeld lied and the proof is right there to be seen in his own words. His aides, senior officers, chiefs of staff: they all lied too to back him up.

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.”

Go read the whole thing.

British Government Blocks UK Resident’s Return Home From Gitmo – Because He’s Been In Gitmo

Published on June 15, 2007

Kafka is alive and well and working for the Home Office. From the Independent:

Guantanamo inmate told: You can’t return to UK, you’ve been away too long By Ben Russell, Political Correspondent
Published: 15 June 2007

Gordon Brown is being urged to intervene to stop the Home Office banning a British resident from returning home after more than four years at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

Campaigners expressed fury after ministers said Jamil el-Banna’s permission to stay in Britain had lapsed during the four-and-a-half years he has been held without charge at the US detention camp. [My emphasis]

Mr Banna’s son, Anas, 10, will deliver a letter to Gordon Brown today, asking the prime minister-in-waiting to let his father return home for Father’s Day on Sunday. Anas asked Mr Brown:

“I hope you won’t say that my dad was away from the country for more than two years as they say. My dad was only out of the country because he was locked up over there. They stopped him from coming back to us. Now my Dad can leave and we hope he comes back to us. I hope he comes back to us before 17 June, before Father’s Day. Every year this day is very sad for us. I hope that this year, this day will be the best day of my life.”

Mr Banna was arrested in The Gambia in 2002 with another former Guantanamo detainee, Bisher al-Rawi, who has been freed. The two men had travelled to west Africa to set up a peanut processing plant but were arrested and taken to Afghanistan and Guantanamo after an MI5 tip-off.

More…

Result

Published on June 13, 2007

The House of Lords has just ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights applied in Southern Iraq.

The House of Lords has delivered a resounding blow to British conduct in the war in Iraq by ruling that human rights law applies in the case of an Iraqi civilian killed by UK troops.

The law lords decided that the UK was obliged to conduct an independent investigation into the death of Baha Mousa, who died in British custody in Basra in 2003.

In a four to one verdict, the lords ruled that the UK’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights applied to the conduct of British troops.

They upheld a court of appeal ruling of December 2005 that the UK authorities had “extra-territorial jurisdiction” concerning Mr Mousa, a 26-year-old hotel worker.

But the families of five other Iraqi civilians killed in different incidents in Basra, who were not being detained, were told their cases were not covered by UK human rights law.

This means that there will finally be accountability for the torture and muder for sport by British soldiers of just one innocent Iraqi .

The others, not so much.