MPs cast doubt on Iraq torture denials (warning:graphic)

[Solly Mack]

http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/world/gallery/2008/may/14/iraq/[e-mail]

MPs cast doubt on Iraq torture denials

Ministers and senior military officers are today challenged over discrepancies in evidence they gave to a parliamentary committee on the use of torture techniques by British troops in Iraq.

Evidence given to MPs by the former armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, and Lieutenant General Robin Brims, former commander of UK forces in Iraq, failed to address concerns over whether the Ministry of Defence gave soldiers permission to abuse detainees in Iraq ("a few bad apples" defense coming).

Both Ingram and Brims, who won the Distinguished Service Order for his leadership in Iraq, assured the committee that interrogation techniques such as hooding and sleep deprivation, banned under the Geneva convention, would never be used and that troops received training to that effect. ("We don't torture")

Yet MPs said their claims contradicted evidence that British soldiers in Iraq routinely used such methods based on legal advice (They have their own Yoo)received from Brigade headquarters. The report adds that even at the start of 2008 an official army investigation had found that the prohibition on their use was still not 'clearly being articulated' to ordinary soldiers.

Photos

[flashl]

1. The cure all 'bad apple' theory in overtime. nt

[madokie]

2. The man in that picture looks to be young

if he survives all this just think about all the terrorist he will likely create during the remaining time of his life. Possibly thousands, maybe even tens of thousands. Chances are he never done a thing to us or the british either. It looks more and more each day to this old man that the drive of the war on terror is to create as many as is humanly possible. There is no way in hell that anyone can tell me that the way the british and us governments have treated these people for years now is not as wrong as it gets. I am beginning to wonder if its not all a game with them to see who can do more for their plight, which is starting to look like population control. As it stands now the perpertrators are immune to any back lash from any of this too and thats what allows it to continue. Nancy Pelosi needs to fess up as to what it is they are holding over her head and start impeachment hearings not shams like the other days one was.


I want my country back and I want it back now

Hope all is well with you. :hi:


The man there is justified in doing anything he does to us now, anything. IMHO

[Solly Mack]

3. He's dead, madokie. That's his post-mortem picture after having been beaten to death.

[treestar]

5. But he has brothers and cousins and friends

Sometimes I think the bastards are deliberately creating new terrorists. Then just sit back and let another attack happen, so they can use it, like 911, to consolidate more power.

[Solly Mack]

6. It's a cycle and they are feeding it

[dailykoff]

9. Creating actual terrorists is an incidental benefit of these techniques,

but not the primary one. The primary purpose is to elicit false confessions. That came out in Jane Mayer's recent book "The Dark Side." The "curriculum" was originally called SERE, and its one and only purpose is in its current use is to get detainees to give false confessions. The torture techniques, which are mainly psychological, were developed in the Cold War, and the SERE program was originally implemented to train US military to resist them:

SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) was a program developed by the military to train soldiers to resist torture or other rough treatment if captured. After 9/11, as Ms. Mayer first reported in The New Yorker, it was “reverse-engineered” into an offensive weapon. Under the influence of James Mitchell, a former military psychologist hired to supervise the project despite his lack of experience with either interrogations or Islamic extremism, the black sites, Guantánamo and eventually Abu Ghraib became a bizarro world where detainees were kept on dog leashes, subjected to “invasion of space by female” and bombarded with intolerable sounds, including “meows from cat-food commercials, Yoko Ono singing and Eminem rapping about America.” Prisoners were sometimes held in tiny coffinlike boxes or forced to stand until overcome by the “self-inflicted pain.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/books/22schuessler.html?em&ex=1216872000&en=e637dab4e243197e&ei=5087%0A

If you don't know why the intel guys need false confessions, check out the 911 forum.

[madokie]

11. I spent a tour of duty at the Navys S.E.R.E school in Warner Springs California

Left there after my tour and went to Vietnam for 15 months. To be stationed there at the school I had to complete the school myself and let me tell you that back in '68 it was no piece of cake either. 6 weeks total of hell is how I would best describe it culminating with a week of prisoner of war camp complete with torture rooms. By the time we were captured and imprisoned if you weren't totally convinced it was real you were not in the program and would be removed. It was all a very life altering ordeal for me as I was at that point in time neither headed to a war zone nor was I a pilot or was I to be a commander of a Navy base, as for the most part that was who made up the bulk of the people in the class. It was I was to be staying on there for a tour of duty as the reason for my having to go through that. I kept asking myself why, why, what did I do wrong to be sent to this but upon graduation when I found out the plans for me then I understood. It was great duty once I was one of the 95 give or take a few folks running the camp. except'n of course it was out in the boonies a hundred miles or so from any social life. John mcCain had to go through this same school and my bet is he would have flunked if not for some help somewhere along the way. Name rank and serial/service number is all that a captured American soldier was authorized to say and best I remember reading after he was captured he talked, he confessed. For that alone in my eyes he will never be my President, never, ever.

[pleah]

4. K&R If the British, US and others

Have to continually deny that they torture, then they are definitely doing it.
I am so sick of these people.

[Solly Mack]

7. What struck me is the almost identical excuses

almost like both are reading from the same playbook

[pleah]

8. Yep, same playbook.

:)

[Contrary1]

10. This man was an Iraqi hotel receptionist...

obviously an imminent danger to Amurkins' freedom. :eyes: