Just what *is* going to happen when US citizens/soldiers are captured and “interrogated” by a foreign nation or terrorist organization using the same methods as the CIA and its cohorts?
Will we shrug it off as a “few bad apples” who got out of hand or claim the methods were systematic and approved and demand retribution and payback in blood?
Will we even catch the irony and hypocrisy of it all?

Posted by: ralphieboy | Sep 22 2006 20:34 utc | 3

Why do I keep hearing The Doors ‘This Is The End’ in my head?
.

Posted by: RossK | Sep 22 2006 20:37 utc | 5

This article in the Guardian encapsulates the horror of what republican and democrat politicians alike are trying to divert their voters attention away from.
Three years on Guantánamo detainee, 78, goes home
Hero’s welcome for ex-Mujahideen commander with failing eyesight and a walking frame

It’s hard to picture Haji Nasrat Khan as an international terrorist. For a start, the grey-bearded Afghan can barely walk, shuffling along on a three-wheeled walking frame. His sight is terrible – he squints through milky eyes that sometimes roll towards the heavens – while his helpers have to shout to make themselves heard. And as for his age – nobody knows for sure, not even Nasrat himself. “I think I am 78, or maybe 79,” he ventures uncertainly, pausing over a cup of green tea.
Yet for three and a half years the US government deemed this elderly, infirm man an “enemy combatant”, so dangerous to America’s security that he was imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.
Arrested in early 2003, Nasrat – or “detainee 1009” as he was officially known – always insisted he was innocent. But recently his hopes started to slide and he feared dying far from his home in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
Then late last month, without warning, the US military let him go. Nasrat was flown to Bagram airbase, north of Kabul, the same way he had left: blindfolded, handcuffed and with his swollen half-paralysed legs chained to the floor. His lawyer was informed of the release, by email, after Nasrat had left Guantánamo Bay. . .
. . .A former Mujahideen commander during the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s, Nasrat has been incapacitated since he suffered a stroke about 15 years ago. His troubles started in early 2003 when American soldiers arrested his eldest son, Izatullah. They accused him of links with al-Qaida based on his affiliation with the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Three weeks later the Americans returned, this time for Nasrat. “They said I would be back that evening,” he said ruefully. “It turned out to be a very long evening.”
He was initially sent to Bagram airbase where, he said, American soldiers inflicted numerous indignities. They confiscated his crutch and pushed him to the toilet in a cart, he said. On one occasion two female soldiers forced him to strip naked and wash before them. “An awful humiliation,” he said.
Although infirm, Nasrat retains vivid and bitter memories of his detention. One time, he said, he laughed at an officer who asked how he was doing. “I told them, ‘you are very stupid’,” he recalled. “I am on the floor in shackles and you are in a chair. I am paralysed but you have tied me like a dog. So why are you asking me how I am?” . . .

The article goes on and I strongly suggest that it be read in full, even if possible used as buttress during debate with others on the reality of the global war on Terra.
Let’s be real and have no illusions about the outcome of any debate given that the citizens of Haditha are being told at the inquiry into that desperate, despicable and cowardly act, that they are lucky they didn’t get a few tonnes of high explosive shoved up their collective wazoo, courtesy of the U.S.A.F.
Still you never know maybe one day someone may decide that waiting for someone else to begin the fightback is fruitless and so they need to begin the work themselves. It sure beats the insanity of hoping that a mob whose leadership has squandered the last couple of days while the dog turds are being slipped under the rug, calling one of the few leaders on either american continent who deserves the support of the population a a “thug” for likening Bush to the devil.
But the article touches on a rather large elephant in the living room known as Bagram. The 78 year old hostage (because that’s what he was) implies that he was subjected to beatings and torture at Bagram.
As far as the media is concerned Bagram is a more difficult nut to crack than Guantanamo. The reason that Guantanamo is such as issue is purely BushCo hubris. After the WTC murders a decision was made to parade some of the alleged ‘terrorists’ captured in the Imperial expansion that 911 excused. It was a poor choice of venue because the feature that initially made it ‘good’ was the proximity that cameras could get to the action. Amerika has these little stateless outposts littered around the planet from Antarctica to Diego Garcia, it would have been much smarter to have been able to control the cameras access to the site. At Gitmo the next door neighbours were very unlikely stop anyone who wanted to film.
So Bagram must be the next target of concerned humans. It is bagram that has hosted many murders, don’t forget that until the suicides a few weeks ago nobody had ever died at Gitmo. That is most certainly not the case at Bagram and if CIA operatives were genuinely concerned about criminal charges being laid against them (which they should be but their fantasy world obcures them to that reality) they would pull the pin on Bagram in a heart-beat.
it must be recognised that we are playing catch up football here. Gitmo gets turned into a home for lost republican donors, then Bagram becomes a medium security rehabilitation facility; would mean that, this shit hasn’t stopped, it is merely being done elsewhere.
If the rendition hostage holding centres in “allies” countries don’t exist any longer my money would go on Diego Garcia being the next concentration camp and torture facility. Given that Bagram probably provides Musharraf with all the support he needs to be able to boost his book sales with a bit of sensationalist anti amerikan empire rhetoric, Diego Garcia will appear very attractive for a 21st century purpose built HUMINT Extraction Centre .
It is so isolated and so far from any landmass that detecting any approach is a doddle. Still it is also open to an unfavorable decision regarding it’s legitimate ownership.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 22 2006 22:41 utc | 7

John Warner-Taylor used to be General Counsel for the CIA. After Congress started investigating them in wake of rampant criminality of 60’s etc., they decided to pack Congress w/members of their own. But the boy had a problem – how to run saying “Hi, elect me, I was CIA General Counsel”…so, he seduced Elizabeth Taylor, and ran initially as Mr. Elizabeth Taylor. I’ve never forgiven her… (No, I’m not exaggerating – I read about his campaign – everyone couldn’t wait to go to his fund raising cocktail parties so they could meet her…) He was trying to protect CIA guys from prosecution here period end of discussion…
@RossK – I was going to come home today & post the same…many of the Doors songs are apropos, but that’s the best…
Just what *is* going to happen when US citizens/soldiers are captured and “interrogated” by a foreign nation or terrorist organization using the same methods as the CIA and its cohorts?
You might also ask what is going to happen when a peace protester is kidnapped from their home in AnyCity, USA & tortured? It’s as legal as it was in any of the Hideous Torture states the US foced down the throats of Latin America. Perhaps it’s time to move to Chile til things cool off up here …
Canadians should definitely be taking note, since the Lootocracy (Kleptocracy is too elegant a word for these sewer rats) plans to merge the states. Canada, after all, as a good jr. partner in the making, is already taking over in Pipeline&Poppyistan so xUSA can push on to devastate ever more nations…At least it cannot be said that they are treating “America” as an exception to the Loot’n’Torture States they’ve setting up around the globe….

Posted by: jj | Sep 23 2006 1:10 utc | 9

Damn. We really are toast. Intellectually, I knew that, but it took a while for my heart to catch up.

Posted by: misc. | Sep 23 2006 1:50 utc | 11

@edwin, I hate to break the news to you, but what the people of Canada think is as irrelevant to Canadian policy, as it is to xUS policy. It’s Lootocrats -r-us time baby…They’re currently gutting your Fantastic medical system, stealing yr. grain & preparing to annex your oil/shale deposits & water, w/more to follow. After all, your reasonably priced pharmaceuticals can’t be allowed either. The council overseeing your destruction, which I linked to yesterday, has members from at least 2 co. from Big Pharma. Follow the action/get involved via Maude Barlow’s organization, Council of Canadians; and for more news of elite capitulation you can follow it daily in the Continents best newspaper, saltspringnews.com.

Posted by: jj | Sep 23 2006 2:33 utc | 13

As we slide down that slippery slope to torture in general, we should realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency’s gulag full of dozens of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and incovenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. Illegal rendition or legal deportation is a possibility for some low-ranking suspects at Guantanamo — but not for the hundred or so top Al Qaeda prisoners who are too dangerous for release, too tainted for trial. The ideal solution to this conundrum, from a CIA perspective, is extrajudicial execution. Indeed, the systematic French torture fo thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed over three thousand “summary executions” as “an inseparable part” of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to insure that “the machine of justice” not be “clogged with cases” and free terror suspects to launch other attacks. For similar reasons, the CIA’s Phoenix program of torture-interrogation in Vietnam during the late 1960s produced over twenty thousand extrajudicial killings. In effect, the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder.
alfred mccoy, a question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the cold war to the war on terror

Posted by: b real | Sep 23 2006 4:09 utc | 15

The new “compromise” law also is very weak on rape. As an NYT editorial points out

In the bill, rape is narrowly defined as forced or coerced genital or anal penetration. It utterly leaves out other acts, as well as the notion that sex without consent is also rape, as defined by numerous state laws and federal law. That is the more likely case in a prison, where a helpless inmate would be unlikely to resist the sexual overtures of a guard or interrogator.
The section on sexual abuse requires that the act include physical contact. Thus it might not include ordering a terrified female prisoner to strip and dance, which happened in Rwanda, or compelling a male prisoner to strip and wear women’s underwear on his head, or photographing naked prisoners piled together, both of which happened at Abu Ghraib.
…

Posted by: b | Sep 23 2006 10:10 utc | 17

Nice job there Clueless. Attack and alienate the one group of people that most wants the same type of changes in US policy that the majority of the rest of the world is looking for. Did you work for the CPA in Iraq?

Posted by: mats | Sep 23 2006 16:21 utc | 19

The 1984 Convention against Torture defines:
For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person..
insists that:
No State Party shall expel, return (“refouler”) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
and so on.
link
The US has signed and ratified this convention (1994).
Will the US’ moral clarity stretch to – argh when I’m angry I loose my English – denouncing, renouncing (frenchisms) abrogating ?? – this convention?
As we have seen, the discussion in the US, and elsewhere, has focussed on Article 3 of the Geneva conventions, which applies to:
Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause…
(google will provide..)
and forbids torturing (etc.) them. Fine.
While it is relevant in many situations, it leaves a large loophole, which has been sneakily exploited both by the Admin. and the rabid right, because it raises the question of who exactly can be classed as a civilian (that is the basic category Article 3 pertains to), a non-combatant, an ex-combatant, etc. i.e. all those not, or no longer, involved in hostilities.
The argument, whether stated directly or only hinted at, goes, to put it briefly: ‘terrorists’ are not civilians, not prisoners of war, just ‘terrorists’ – a new category of enemy combatants. Therefore, Article 3 does not apply to them, and the Geneva conventions are dusty documents, as they don’t take the essentials of modern warfare into account (though this last is not often stated directly.) Inventing a new category which destroys a previous classification criteria often leads to endless argument.
In this way, the US can state it upholds the law, or the ‘spirit’ of the GE conventions, but its application to x or y must be challenged, as everyone knows that, well, terrorists are terrorists, and the door is left open for discussing ‘exceptional circumstances’ which will appeal to emotion.
Another outcome is that objections to torture are then thrown into the moral, or ethical, arena – e.g. it is always wrong! – and thus tied to personal opinion, feeling, rather than texts of ‘international law’ (whatever that is..), a reasonable consensus, etc. Torture becomes an issue like abortion – contraception is OK but morning-after pills are not! A cacophonous muddle is guaranteed, which leaves authorities looking sincere and deeply concerned (or whatever) while at the same time allowing them a free hand.
In the US, all parties have been complicit in framing the debate about torture into article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, thereby side stepping or ignoring the relevant texts.

Posted by: Noirette | Sep 24 2006 14:29 utc | 21