Republicans have a hard on for torture

[Kidlicious]

[Dinner]

Which individuals who were tortured do you know, as a certainty, had had training to resist interrogation techniques ?

Tell me how, as an oft-proclaimed Christian, the torture and degradation of a fellow human being fits into Christ's plan for humanity. With specific references to Christ's own words and actions as related in the New Testament.

Being a keen student of history I can tell you that torture is a very blunt and unreliable instrument- if we look just as far back as the campaign against the Knights Templars, we can see that under torture many individuals will simply relate what their captors and torturers want to hear or have told them to say.

There's no shame in this, because not everyone has a high pain threshold.

If you think that participating in torture somehow leaves an individual unaffected, then you're clearly unacquainted with the career of Richard Topcliffe, who dealt out punishments for the government of Elizabeth I.

Or for that the matter the likes of the various South and Central American paramilitary/government torturers, kindly trained with American assistance.

If you are talking about the school of the Americas, no, no one was ever trained in torture. I do get tired of the endless ignorant accusations made about what is a good organization. Mostly, the spend a few months trying to teach foreign officers about the proper role of the military in a democracy then providing them with free technical training. There have been hundreds of thousands who went throw the school over the years and so it isn't surprising that some of them reverted back to their old ways and that two months of trying to teach them not to do such things didn't stick.

[N35t0r]

Sorry that preventing harm to civilians sickens you.

So you mean you are against all the torture that the CIA committed?

[N35t0r]

If you are talking about the school of the Americas, no, no one was ever trained in torture. I do get tired of the endless ignorant accusations made about what is a good organization. Mostly, the spend a few months trying to teach foreign officers about the proper role of the military in a democracy then providing them with free technical training. There have been hundreds of thousands who went throw the school over the years and so it isn't surprising that some of them reverted back to their old ways and that two months of trying to teach them not to do such things didn't stick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_and_CIA_interrogation_manuals

[molly bloom]

If you are talking about the school of the Americas, no, no one was ever trained in torture.

I'll pass on what you've been smoking, thanks. Apparently whatever it is, it seems to prevent you from reading or seeing certain news items, or indeed keeping up with modern times.

The Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, wept on Wednesday as she unveiled the findings of a Truth Commission investigation into the systematic murder, torture and other abuses carried out during the country’s military dictatorship.

After a nearly three-year study, the commission confirmed that 191 people were killed and 243 “disappeared” under military rule, which lasted from 1964 to 1985. More than 200 have never been found.

The 2,000-page report named 377 officials who were blamed for serious human rights violations and recommended a revision to the 1979 Amnesty Law so that perpetrators can be prosecuted.

It also called on the military to recognise its responsibility for “grave violations” of the law and human rights, noting that even today the armed forces were uncooperative in providing materials and granting interviews about alleged abuses.

A share of the blame went to the United States and the UK, which were found to have trained Brazilian interrogators in torture techniques.

Among the victims of abuse was Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who was beaten and jolted with electric shocks during her three-year detention at Tiradentes prison in the 1970s.

The president was visibly moved as she released the report of the seven-member commission, which she set up in 2012.

“Brazil deserves the truth,” she said as tears welled up in her eyes. “The truth means above everything the opportunity to reconcile ourselves and our history.”

As was the case elsewhere in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, the elite and middle class aligned themselves with the military to stave off what they saw as a communist threat. Killings, torture and detention were commonly used against political enemies. In Argentina and Chile, the toll of dead and missing were proportionally higher than in Brazil.

Many of the worst crimes in Brazil were already known, but the commission emphasised the political motives and organisation behind them, dismissing claims that the killings and other abuses were isolated acts of overzealous individuals.

“Under the military dictatorship, repression and the elimination of political opposition was because of the policy of the state, conceived and implemented based on decisions by the president of the republic and military ministers,” the commission concludes.

Several other countries have been implicated by commission members. The Brazilians initially used French counter-insurgency techniques developed in Algeria, but in the 1960s US influence became stronger.

Many Brazilian officers went to Panama to train at the School of the Americas, alongside military and police officers from almost every other Latin American country, whether run by dictators or not.

Courses they were given included training in “counter-insurgency techniques, command operations, intelligence and counterintelligence, psychological warfare operations, police-military operations and interrogation techniques,” the report says.

Secret instruction manuals used at the school were declassified by the US department of defence in the mid-1990s, revealing training in torture and other serious violations of human rights.

In the 1970s, Brazilian officers were sent to London for training in torture techniques. A former president, General Ernesto Geisel, who ruled from 1974-79, is quoted as saying, “The English, in their secret service, acted with discretion. Our people, inexperienced and extroverted, did it openly. I don’t justify torture, but I recognise there are circumstances when the individual is impelled to practise torture, to obtain certain confessions and so avoid a greater evil.”

The report also quotes former general Hugo de Andrade Abreu, who said “at the end of 1970 we sent a group of army officers to England to learn the English system of interrogation. This consists of putting the prisoner in a cell incommunicado, a method known as the ‘refrigerator’.”

In 1971, the “English system”, as it became known, was put into practice in Rio army HQ in Barão de Mesquita street, which had become a torture centre. Four new cubicles were built. One, lined with polystyrene and asbestos, was a “cold room”, another a “sound room”. A third was all white and the fourth all black.

Each cubicle was monitored to enable interrogators to listen to the prisoners’ heartbeats.

“They were variations on the techniques used by the British army against Irish terrorists,” said Amílcar Lobo, an army psychiatrist who worked in a torture centre at Petrópolis known as the ‘house of death’. “They were destined to destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them.”

To uncover the truth about such abuses, the commission questioned victims and former officers, combed archives and re-examined medical records.

Many activists, however, said the truth was not enough. After the report was unveiled, a group of 10 protesters waved banners and shouted demands for punishment of those responsible for executions and torture.

Members of the commission also called for punishment. They said abuses continue today because the dictatorship era set an example of impunity.

“Amnesty does not extend to the agents of the state who put in practice excesses of violence,” said the former minister of justice José Carlos Dias, one of the six out of seven commission members to call for a lifting of the amnesty.

But there are many obstacles to doing so. Supreme court justices have previously rejected requests to lift the amnesty and described the issue as a “page that has been turned”.

Rousseff has also previously indicated her reluctance to settle old political scores, saying national unity was a higher priority.

The report notes that even though the widespread torture and executions were not covered in the Brazilian media due to censorship, “surprising” details of how they worked were revealed in a recently declassified telegram by the US consul general, Clarence A Boonstra, in Rio de Janeiro in 1973.


The commission notes that Boonstra told his superiors about a crackdown in which there was an increase in arrests, mostly of college students. Their interrogations, he noted, were carried out under “a system of intensive psychophysical abuse, developed to extract information without leaving visible and lasting marks on the body”. The detainees suspected of being “hardline terrorists” continued, according to the report, “to be submitted to old methods of physical violence that sometimes cause death”.


One of the few former military officers who agreed to talk to the Truth Commission was ex-colonel Paulo Malhães, who was among those sent to the UK for training. Malhães told the commission “psychological torture was best, and England was the best place to learn it”.

“It didn’t leave physical marks, and it was much more efficient than brute force, especially when you were trying to transform militants into infiltrated agents.”

Malhães, by his own admission was also a sadistic physical torturer, who used snakes, crocodiles and rats to terrify prisoners. Two weeks after giving evidence to the Truth Commission in Rio, he was found dead at his home in mysterious circumstances. Former political prisoners believe he was eliminated to stop him talking more to the Truth Commission and providing the names of torturers.

Some of the information in the report came from diplomatic correspondence in the UK National Archives at Kew, but the commission notes that a request for access to still-classified British documents, sent to the British government, has not yet been answered.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/10/brazil-president-weeps-report-military-dictatorship-abuses

[C0ckney]

Malhães, by his own admission was also a sadistic physical torturer, who used snakes, crocodiles and rats to terrify prisoners. Two weeks after giving evidence to the Truth Commission in Rio, he was found dead at his home in mysterious circumstances. Former political prisoners believe he was eliminated to stop him talking more to the Truth Commission and providing the names of torturers.

this case was somewhat odd. there were two interpretations put forward: the first was that he was killed by people taking revenge for his crimes; the second was that he was killed to shut him up. soon afterwards some people, including a servant, were arrested for the crime, which apparently was a simple robbery gone wrong. the whole thing stank to high heaven, but i doubt we'll ever know what really happened. i suppose it's rather ironic that his family are experiencing what many of his victim's families went through during the dictatorship.

one of the recommendations made by the committee is that the military police be disbanded. i wholeheartedly support this aim, but it's never going to happen. in fact what is happening is that the military police is being expanded to deal with the violence in major cities and to occupy the favelas. at the same time, there's very little action on inequality and none at all on the ridiculous drug war, i.e. the root causes, so the violence continues while the military police strut around with their shiny guns intimidating workers and students, and supported by politicians of (almost) all stripes who are too stupid/cowardly/corrupt to grasp the issue.

[DaShi]

All republicans should be jailed.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/11/watching-cheney-hes-got-nothing/

Watching Cheney: He’s Got Nothing
DEC 11 2014 @ 8:09PM

His interview last night is worth revisiting again. He says what he has previously said – adding nothing to the factual record, and addressing none of the specifics in the report. But he is also clearly rattled. He is used to proclaiming categorical truths about things he knows will never be made public. He is used to invoking what he says he knows from secret intelligence without any possibility of being contradicted. This interview is the first time he has made statements about torture that can be fact-checked by the record. And, he is proven to be a liar, as shown below.

When someone presents a public official with a large tranche of the CIA’s own documents and operational cables and internal memos, and that paper-trail contradicts previous statements by the public official, he has a couple of options. The first is to point out where any particular allegation is factually wrong, to show a flaw in the data, to defend himself factually from the claims presented. The second is to flail around, dodge any specifics and double-down on various talking points that evade the central facts at hand.

Cheney picked the second path. That tells you a huge amount, it seems to me. He doesn’t address abugrahib4_gallery-dish-SDthe mountain of evidence. He is simply ruling it out of bounds – after admitting he hasn’t even read it! If you had a two-bit tax evader who is presented by the IRS with a tranche of his own tax records proving he was delinquent, and he simply insisted that he hadn’t read them and still emphatically denies the charge, he’s self-evidently guilty. Why is this not self-evidently the case with Cheney?

His response to the facts as documented is simply: I know otherwise. He gives no specifics. He merely invokes other CIA official denials as an authority – when they too are charged with war crimes. That’s like a gangster claiming he is innocent on the basis of his gang-members’ testimony. He blusters on. In a court of law, his performance would be, quite simply, risible as an act of self-defense. It becomes some primal scream version of “Because I said it worked!”

Now look at what else he said. He describes this as a classic example of politicians throwing the “professionals” under the bus. One is forced to ask: what professionals? All the professionals in interrogation in the military and the FBI were kept out of the torture program, which was assigned to two contractors, who assessed themselves, who had never interrogated anyone in their lives, and who had no linguistic or interrogation backgrounds. What this report does is throw the amateurs under the bus, and among those rank amateurs is Dick Cheney.

When Cheney is asked about a prisoner chainedAbu_Ghraib_56 to the ceiling in a cell and forced to defecate on himself in a diaper, he says “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” As if that is relevant. If he hadn’t heard of such a thing, he should have. And if he hadn’t until this week, he could have read about it in the report. And then, revealingly, he immediately gets angry. He expresses no regret and no remorse about another human being’s unimaginable suffering. He cites the alternative to torture – legal powerful, effective interrogation that the report proves gave us great intelligence – as “kiss him on both cheeks and tell us, please, please tell us what you know”. Again, this is risible as an argument.

In fact, it is prima facie evidence that torture was used as a first resort, and it was a first resort because Cheney already knew it was the only way to get intelligence. How he knew we don’t know. No one in professional interrogation believed or believes it. So you have clear evidence that the decision to torture was taken early on – and nothing was allowed to stand in its way. This was an ideological decision – not a policy judgment based on evidence.

Here’s the truly revealing part. Cheney is told about a prisoner, Gul Rahman, who died after unimaginable brutality – beaten, kept awake for 48 hours, kept in total darkness for days, thrown into the Gestapo-pioneered cold bath treatment, and then chained to a wall and left to die of hypothermia. The factors in his death included “dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to ‘short chaining.” This is Cheney’s response:

3,000 Americans died on 9/11 because of what these guys did, and I have no sympathy for them. I don’t know the specific details … I haven’t read the report … I keep coming back to the basic, fundamental proposition: how nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3000 Americans?

But Gul Rahman had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 plot.

He had engaged in no plots to kill Americans. He was a guard to the Afghan warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, part of an organization that began by fighting the Soviets in occupied Afghanistan. It had alliances with al Qaeda at the time, but subsequently engaged in peace negotiations with the Karzai government. His brother claims Rahman was even involved in rescuing Hamid Kharzai in 1994. To equate him with individuals who committed mass murder of Americans or who were actively plotting against Americans is preposterous. He was emphatically not a threat to the US. Yet we tortured him to death. And the man running the torture camp was promoted thereafter.
To put it more bluntly, Cheney’s response is unhinged. It is suffused with indiscriminate rage which is indifferent to such standards as whether the prisoner is innocent or guilty, or even if he should be in a prison at all. He is acting out a revenge fantasy, no doubt fueled in part by the understanding that 3,000 Americans lost their lives because he failed to prevent it – when the facts were lying there in the existing surveillance and intelligence system and somehow never got put together.

What we have here is a staggering thing: the second highest official in a democracy, proud and unrepentant of war crimes targeted at hundreds of prisoners, equating every single one of the prisoners – including those who were victims of mistaken identity, including American citizens reading satirical websites, including countless who had nothing to do with any attacks on the US at all – with the nineteen plotters of one terror attack. We have a man who, upon being presented with a meticulous set of documents and facts, brags of not reading them and who continues to say things that are definitively disproved in the report by CIA documents themselves.

This is a man who not only broke the law and the basic norms of Western civilization, but who celebrates that. If this man is not brought to justice, the whole idea of justice in this country is a joke.

For the safety of the real Americans!

[Kidlicious]

Does it take that much writing to say the lie that he told?

[dannubis]

Does it take that much writing to say the lie that he told?

In your case a drawing should have sufficed, we know.

[ricketyclik]

Does it take that much writing to say the lie that he told?

For the TLDR crowd it goes something like "I didn't do anything, don't know anything, but if I did it was totally justified, and I don't really know what the context is because I'm too busy to read the report on my alleged crimes".

Or "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth".

[Kidlicious]

For the TLDR crowd it goes something like "I didn't do anything, don't know anything, but if I did it was totally justified, and I don't really know what the context is because I'm too busy to read the report on my alleged crimes".

Or "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth".

All of that seems reasonable and not at all shocking since the report says there were no benefits to the program and puts the blame on the CIA. Plus democrats knew all about this when it was happening and said nothing. It was only when Americans became war weary that people like Obama started to oppose it.

[ricketyclik]

It is indeed damning of the Dems if they knew and turned a blind eye. My vague recollection differs, however. I seem to recall allegations being made at the time (although admittedly I can't remember by whom).

Kid, care to break the habit of a lifetime and cite evidence for this particular accusation (or recite if you have already)?

[Kidlicious]

K. The CIA didn't do that.

Anyway, this has not been posted

http://www.examiner.com/article/pelosi-congress-approved-of-enhanced-interrogation-cia-documents-show

Democrats knew all about this. Pelosi and others put their fingers in their ears. Now they say they knew nothing. Liars!

It wasn't politically correct then. Why is it now?

This post was totally ignored.

[molly bloom]

All of that seems reasonable and not at all shocking since the report says there were no benefits to the program and puts the blame on the CIA. .

The C.I.A. ? Not that well-known non-partisan body, the C.I.A. , surely.

Bush became involved in politics and was active in the Republican Party. He was elected to the Ninetieth Congress Congress. He was appointed to a series of high-level positions: Ambassador to the United Nations (1971-73), Chairman of the Republican National Committee (1973-74), Chief of the U. S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China (1974-76), and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1976-77).

George H.W. Bush

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbushG.htm

[Kidlicious]

Nice resume.