America's dirty torture secret

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1038845,00.html

Henry Porter
Wednesday September 10, 2003
The Guardian

Remembering al-Qaida's attacks on America tomorrow, many will wearily note that the world did indeed change that day two years ago and that our newspapers are still full of the reverberations. Without 9/11 there would have been no Iraq war. Without Iraq there would be no Hutton, and without Hutton, TB wouldn't be looking quite as weak as he is.

The American press betrays the same pattern, but there is one important and - to me - astonishing absence. Weeks go by without serious newspapers investigating or commenting on human rights abuses by the American government. At home and abroad, hundreds, maybe thousands, of men are being held in camps and prisons by the military, by the CIA and by the justice department, incommunicado, without legal representation or hope of release, there to endure prolonged and terrifying interrogation. Alone, this is enough for the US government to place itself in contravention of the Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which it is obligated to uphold. But that is not all. There is evidence that the US authorities have encouraged the use of torture and may indeed have participated in the torture of those men they believe to hold information on past and future terrorist attacks.

We surely didn't imagine two years ago that this would be an outcome of 9/11 and yet it has happened with such ease, the once rights-conscious American public turning its gaze the other way, along with the self-regarding worthies of the American newspaper industry. The one exception has been the Washington Post, which alone has pressed the US government on the legality of Guantanamo Bay and the processes instituted there, not by lawyers, but the jesuitical neo-conservative mandarins of the Pentagon, and it has gone some way to exposing the "stress and duress" techniques applied to prisoners at the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan.

Researching my book Empire State, a novel set against the background of these abuses, I discovered that the information is not terribly difficult to come by. In March, prisoners at Bagram reported being beaten, deprived of sleep and made to lie naked on a sheet of ice. The same month, US military coroners ruled that the deaths of two prisoners in mysterious circumstances were homicides. Just before the invasion, I met an American who is attached to a shadowy military/espionage operation; I asked him about the rumours of torture. He replied with a look of astonishment, "Are you crazy? Of course. That's the war we've got on our hands. We didn't ask for it this way."

more

[Pale_Rider]

1. Torture might explain the rash of false alerts ...

... given by Gitmo prisoners trying to avoid torture. 'Tell them what they want to hear to stop the torture.' 'Reliable military sources say that interrogation is producing results.'

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2. secret?

http://www.humanrightswatch.org/

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3. How about Dr. KKK on 9/11 investigations

http://www.etan.org/news/kissinger/default.htm

http://www.etan.org/news/kissinger/chile.htm

Kissinger covered up Chile torture
by Lucy Kosimar
(The Sunday Observer, February 28, 1999)
A newly declassified cable obtained by The Observer reveals the lengths to which Henry Kissinger went to cover up atrocities in Chile and give comfort to the regime of General Pinochet.

The cable, describing their only meeting in 1976, shows how Kissinger bolstered Pinochet while hundreds of political prisoners were still being jailed and tortured.

The then American Secretary of State assured Pinochet that President Gerald Ford's administration would not punish him for violations of human rights. He told him he was a victim of Communist propaganda and should not pay too much attention to American critics.

The cable is among files being declassifed for the Spanish prosecutor seeking Pinochet's extradition from London to face trial in Spain. The Law Lords' revised judgment is expected within three weeks.

Pinochet led the coup which overthrew the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973. Kissinger's complicity has always been suspected, but the cable reveals details which will cause him deep embarrassment.
(snip)

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4. I've been naive -

Nixon woke me up. I thought we cleaned that mess up, but here it is again worse than before, with some of the same
players.

As children most of us were taught that America was honest and truthful and had faith in god. How silly! So in reality we were
brainwashed into lacking worldliness and sophistication.

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5. "most of us were taught that America was honest and truthful "

Could I help with in rephrasing that sentence,
how about > most of us learned that a lot of America was honest and truthful<

The truth is the people that are afraid for things to see the light of day are the weak ones.

Chilling as I found this site
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Dungeon/9363/history.htm

This little excerpt from this link is telling
http://www.torture-museum.com/general.htm

Why does man torture? Is it pleasurable? Is it a show of power? Does it get results? Perhaps it is a little of everything.

Some would say that torture is conducted because someone can. Someone has power over another. This is certainly a valid argument in many torture cases. (snip)
(snip)
But torture can also be a means to an end. Some of the Nazi and Japanese torture of prisoners for medical research had a goal of trying to improve their ability to give medical care. The torturers simply did not feel that their victims were totally human, so their pain had little consequence.

Military services have often used torture against prisoners to extract information which might be helpful to their mission. Once again, as prisoners, their "rights" were non-existent.
(snip)

But when I punch up the History on Revolutions, I realize they don’t have enough fingers to fill all the holes in the dike.

The Characteristics of Revolutions in Military Affairs
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1029/

The Revolution: Opening Events and Causes
http://www.usahistory.info/American-Revolution/

Thomas Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions
http://www.horuspublications.com/guide/cm106.html

History and the Computer Revolutions
http://www.mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCII1/ARTICLESII1/Trinkle/Trinkleindex.html

Hundreds of other different types of Revolutions are going on now (could spend all day listing), the control freaks (fascist corporate capital pigs) just don’t want them looked at, while they are busy sucking on the nipple of the monopoly controlled mass media of the US. They are doing the rest of the uninformed US citizens a great disservice by trying to keep them in the dark about what is really going on in this world. That large blob of overload is coming as fast as we can speak, it just isn’t being noticed by most (yet).

I am not indorsing anything myself, except for the fact one needs to watch out, be prepared and stay informed.

Btw I write this because I was totally grossed out about some of the things I heard about torture that happened in Chile, with the assistance of Dr.KKK.

If there is place called hell there will not be enough of it for some of these people.