The United States of Torture.

Incredibly the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney is attempting to set into law the approved torture of foreigners by the CIA. This despite all the international treaties the US signed against it.

Please read this article and think about what the consequences will be once America becomes the Torture State!

WASHINGTON -- Dick Cheney is, by all accounts, probably the oddest -- and the most dourly ambitious -- duck in the administration's pond of wing-flapping, sky-diving and prideful birds.

He rarely speaks, running things quietly and secretly from behind the White House's closed doors, where he maintains his own administrative staff (roughly 60 persons, almost as many as the president's). When he does speak, it is usually either a sarcastic observation or rejoinder. As to his knowledge of Iraq, many remember how, on "Meet the Press" just before the Iraq war, he told Tim Russert, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

He is an enigma to many who have known him. President George H.W. Bush almost pleaded with a friend of mine, a journalist, in Houston recently: "Please -- tell me -- what has happened to Cheney?"

There was always a brooding, Hobbesian Cheney just beneath the misleading openness he learned in his native Wyoming. But this week, the vice president took a turn into the deepest heart of human darkness. This week, unprecedented in history, an elected vice president of the United States of America proposed that Congress legally authorize the torture of foreigners by Americans.

The Washington Post titled its devastating editorial "Vice President for Torture." I would say that the deceptive man from sunny Wyoming has become the Marquis de Sade of America. Think about it -- he is insistent upon making torturers of many of our young soldiers -- your children.

In both the Afghan and the Iraq war, the U.S. has been involved -- as never before in ANY war -- with carefully conceived methods of torture -- "waterboarding" or simulated drowning, mock execution, beatings until death, the deliberate withholding of pain medication, the burning and desecration of enemy bodies, and every possible form of sexual perversion.

These acts were the direct outcome of the president's, Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's errant dismissal of the Geneva Accords, to which we are a signatory, of an international treaty against torture negotiated and ratified by the Reagan administration and, not least, of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids "cruel and unusual punishment."

Although such directions would HAVE to have come from the top, not one top-ranking general or officer has been punished. Only the privates from West Virginia and the Carolinas, who would be protected by a responsible military from debauching their service -- and themselves -- with such sick acts, are in jail.

But now the grand inquisitor Cheney, who took five deferments in the Vietnam War rather than experience it for himself, wants more. Sen. John McCain, who DOES know what war is all about, put forward an amendment to the $440 billion military spending bill banning the military and all government agencies from engaging in torture. Ninety senators voted for the new law, including 46 Republicans. So Cheney stepped in with a further amendment to the McCain amendment, which transfers torture to the CIA to use against the many foreign prisoners it is secretly holding abroad. These men have "disappeared," just like they do in the old banana republics and the gulags of the totalitarians.

"I suspect what Cheney's been saying to McCain is that we've got a few people who know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and the others," political scientist Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institution mused with me. "That we've got to use any means necessary to get information from very specific people. He's looking toward short-term goals without any understanding of the long-term consequences, which gets to the underlying reason why McCain is pushing ... The rules are in place to protect US. If this becomes official policy, then the enemy says that they can do the same thing."

But anyone who has studied the use of torture knows it doesn't work. Prisoners will tell their tormentors exactly what they want to hear. Among Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, too often, torture has become the "sport" of sociopaths. (According to Cherif Bassiouni, the renowned human rights and international law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, with fully 30 percent of our army recruits being kids with criminal sentences who were allowed to work their way out in the military, we are already courting trouble.)

Bassiouni told me that he has been called in as an expert witness on some of the trials of the foreigners held at Guantanamo. "You look at them," he told me with a deep impatience, "and you see how insignificant they are! One guy was a driver in Kandahar for one of the terrorists -- for a week. In my No. 2 case, the fellow operated a video shop."

Bassiouni then told of the private contractors who operate wholly on their own. He outlined how team after team of interrogators comes in. The first team says they "got something," so the second has to "get something," too. They charge $200 per hour per person to interrogate, and more than likely, they draw out their time clock by torturing prisoners. For four men for four hours, that's $3,200 of taxpayer money paid for the ugly demeaning of everything America once stood for. With the neocons and Cheney and their dark lusts, we are eating our own principles alive.

"America has lost its capacity for being indignant," Dr. Bassiouni summed up. "Where has our capacity for indignation gone? When a nation loses its respect for the Constitution and its treaties, what is next? And leaving even that aside, the next American serviceman who is being tortured -- and we can't go to his rescue -- will show us exactly what we have done."

COPYRIGHT 2005 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

 

And by hiring outside contractors to do the Pentagon's dirty work, the military considers itself absolved of responsibility. Meanwhile these contractors can use any methods they choose, and many of the prisoners die without so much as anyone knowing they're being kept prisoner in a secret place and tortured by American policy (from the very top), without so much as having any access to a lawyer or legal process.

This is American democracy? This is what the 'greatest country on earth' does to people who haven't been tried and convicted?

Our leaders have no humanity left, only greed and fear.

 

Actually it's just come to light that both the US & UK approved and instituted torture during WWII on german soldiers and civilians. So this is really nothing new, but Cheney would have it codified in law, making it legal.

So if it currently is ILLEGAL as it should be, then it should be obvious that Cheney and those who carried out his instructions are criminals and should be put on trial immediately for crimes against humanity and violations of the Geneva Conventions.

 

Looks like the US is also caging prisoners and flying them around Europe to various secret torture bases in Eastern Europe. This coincides with the recent revelations that the US has such secret bases, and Spains investigation into the US transporting such prisoners and landing on Spanish soil without informing the authorities in violation of Spanish sovereignity.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code= MA20051115&articleId=1255

by Wayne Madsen

November 15, 2005

Although The Washington Post failed to report on the details of CIA (now Pentagon-run) "black" interrogation sites in eastern Europe, WMR is able to report on the particulars of the covert operation. According to a well-placed intelligence source who served in eastern Europe, prisoners from Iraq and elsewhere have been flown from airport to airport in eastern Europe on board C-130 planes. Placed in what were described as "dog-sized" cages, the covert operation became fully operational after the disclosures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, Baghdad and Camp Bucca, Umm Qasr, Iraq. The "crated" prisoners were either removed from the C-130s for interrogation at Soviet-era detention centers that were in various states of repair or were kept on board the aircraft and subjected to brutal interrogation by U.S. and/or contractor personnel, who, in some cases, were ex-members of the Soviet KGB, Stasi, and other eastern European security services. C-130s are used because of their short take-off and landing capabilities on short air strips located in remote regions.

The source, who spoke on a condition of anonymity, witnessed the ground work being laid for the "black sites" in a number of countries and locations. These include the Taszar airbase in south-central Hungary, near the town of Pecs; Lv'iv, Ukraine; Szczynto-Szymany, Poland; Skopje, Macedonia; Mihail Kogalniceanu airbase in Romania; Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia; Shkoder, Albania; Burgas, Bulgaria; and the Markuleshti air base in Moldova.

Crating prisoners hearkens back to the Vietnam War when the U.S. used "tiger cages" installed by the French on Con Son island off Vietnam to hold political prisoners. The U.S. used the tiger cages to detain and torture suspected Viet Cong sympathizers. Many of the prisoners were merely innocent Buddhists and anti-war activists. The flying of caged prisoners from airport to airport on chartered C-130s is yet another indication of what military judge advocate general (JAG) lawyers have cited as the Bush administration's penchant for placing prisoners in "law free zones."

 

Ply, that's just one treaty, which Bush knew the US would violate all the way back then. That's why they had to reverse position on it. Cause the plans were in place to invade Iraq already, and they were already torturing "terrorism" suspects.

But there are other treaties such as the Geneva Conventions & human rights accords that the US has signed. Not to mention all the US propaganda for decades about "human rights", when we are the most systematic abusers of such rights besides China.

 

Yes, the US, the world policeman as you say, completely ignored the Hutu massacres. You should be asking yourself why that is. Perhaps because the US only gets involved when there is a profit to be made by the cronies of the US leadership or to protect US corporate investments. Otherwise the populations of countries can be decimated, and the US government will only pay lip service to such crimes against humanity.


Indeed the world's policeman has found profit in committing crimes against humanity, violating human rights, starting wars on lies, supressing free speech, torturing innocent people in secret prisons, fixing elections, etc., etc.

These crimes involve contractors close to Cheney and Bush, and they are now making record profits thanks to US foreign policies. And as long as there's a drop of oil to be stolen from Iraq, US troops will be there ensuring megaprofits for Halliburton, et. al.

That is why the war in Iraq will continue indefinitely. And you will continue to pay so Halliburton & Cheney can get even richer.