By Larry Jones
Often when I talk to people about the U.S. torture program, a number of them say, “But it’s good Obama put an end to that.” The President, immediately upon his January inauguration, did sign an executive order ostensibly banning torture. The problem is that he has not been willing to hold accountable the Bush era torture criminals, beginning with Bush and Cheney, and he is allowing various torture programs to continue in his ongoing role as head of U.S. imperialism. People say, “How do you know?”
Here’s a list to help answer that question.
THE ONGOING TORTURES AT GUANTANAMO
In a recent interview reported by the Center for Constitutional rights (CCR), Spc Brandon Neeley, a former guard at Guantanamo, reported on the horrors in the treatment of prisoners there.
“CURRENT AND FORMER PRISONERS HELD IN U.S. CUSTODY REPORT BEING
Prisoners who go on hunger strikes, especially, are subjected to forced feeding in the most painful way, never in the careful and gentle way you might see on Discovery Medical or ER. The purpose is not to keep them alive, but to punish them for attempting to bring public attention to the fact that torture is still going on months after the so-called “President for change” took office. As one U.S. official said, “It’s terrible PR.”
THE BLACKSHIRTS OF GUANTANAMO are officially known as the Immediate Reaction Force. I have written briefly here before about the IRF, but investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill in a May 17 article more deeply exposes what this torture squad has done and continues to do under Obama.
Scahill reports that “IRF teams [dressed in Darth Vader-like uniforms] in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner’s head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them – sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.”
In early February, weeks after Obama was inaugurated, Scahill reports that “at least 16 men were on hunger strike at Guantanamo … and refused to leave their cells for ‘force feeding.’ IRF teams violently extracted them from their cells with the ‘men being dragged, beaten and stepped on, and their arms and fingers twisted painfully. Tubes were then forced down their noses, which one prisoner described as ‘torture, torture, torture.’” In earlier instances prisoners were urinated upon as they were dragged back to their cells.
These operations are still going on under Obama.
RENDITION WILL CONTINUE UNDER OBAMA
It was commonplace under Bush and his henchmen, to pick up suspected terrorists or their supporters and send them to unannounced foreign countries, known as black sites, to be tortured and interrogated. And then tortured again and again and again. During the Bush regime the U.S. paid up to $5,000 to Pakistanis who kidnapped people and turned them over to American officials, who then labeled them “enemy combatants."
According to a January, 2007 report, Claudio Cordone, Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research, “hundreds of people have been picked up in mass arrests and many have been sold to the US as terrorists simply on the word of their captors, and transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Airbase [in Afghanistan] or secret detention centres run by the U.S." The victims even included some women and children.
In a June 22 issue of the New Yorker magazine, LEON PANETTA, OBAMA’S HEAD OF THE CIA, TOLD JANE MAYER THAT RENDITION WILL CONTINUE, but not to secret sites. “The worst part of rendition was rendition to a black site. That will not be the case anymore. The Obama Administration will take precautions to insure that rendered suspects are treated humanely, as the law requires,”
The problem with that claim is that President Bush said the same thing. Mayer wrote that, “During the Bush years, however, some of the most horrific allegations of abuse were made by detainees rendered not to black sites but to Egypt, Syria, and Morocco. The Bush Administration professed to be taking similar precautions.” I really doubt that Democrats are congenitally more honest than Republicans.
IS TORTURE CONTINUING AT BAGRAM PRISON IN AFGHANISTAN? PROBABLY.
Last year the Supreme Court ruled that al-Qaida and Taliban suspects at Guantanamo had the right to challenge their imprisonment. But what about the hundreds held at Bagram prison? Do they have the right of habeas corpus under the Obama regime? The answer is a loud NO.
The Bush administration argued that detainees at Bagram had no legal right to challenge their detention and the Obama administration has agreed with that position. On February 20, President Obama’s Justice Department in a two-sentence filing backed the Bush administration’s position that the detainees held at Bagram are not entitled to any constitutional rights and may not challenge their detention in a U.S. court.
Bagram prison is being greatly enlarged and it is projected that over one thousand more people may be held there when the project is completed. The administration may well need that space given their capture of more “suspected terrorists” in its rapidly expanding war on Afghanistan.
In the meantime, the Obama regime is keeping secret all information about Bagram. On March 9, Karen Greenberg stated on Salon.com, “A federal judge recently asked for ‘the number of detainees held at Bagram Air Base; the number of Bagram detainees who were captured outside Afghanistan; and the number of Bagram detainees who are Afghan citizens,’ but the information the Obama administration offered the court in response remains classified and redacted from the public record.”
The Guardian UK reported on June 24 that “Tina Foster, of the
So much secrecy about Bagram prison leaves open the door to continued torture there, which in the past has been ongoing. The BBC interviewed 27 former prisoners who reported that they were “subjected to physical abuse, excessive temperatures and loud noise, forced into stress positions and ordered to undress in front of female soldiers. Four detainees claim they were threatened with death at gunpoint.”
One detainee said: "They did things that you would not do against animals, let alone to humans. They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death. They put some
Every truly professional interrogator says that torture does not lead
Has this torture stopped at Bagram? Obama won’t say.
KILLING AND INJURING HUNDREDS OF INNOCENT CIVILIANS IS TORTURE IN THE
Here’s a very partial list of civilians killed by the U.S. in
Jan. 24 An unspecified number of civilians killed in unmanned drone
Jan. 24 22 killed in U.S. raid in Afghanistan, said village elders;
Feb. 21 13 civilians killed in U.S. “precision” strike in Afghanistan
May 4 140 civilians killed in Afghanistan air raid; Kabul pays
May 8 70 – 75 civilians killed in U.S. led airstrike in Afghanistan
June 9 147 civilians killed in U.S. battle in Afghanistan
June 23 35 Pakistani civilians killed by unmanned drone at funeral
According to a report compiled by Pakistani authorities: “Of the 60
Where is the outrage? Remember SILENCE = COMPLICITY