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17 July 2017 Robin A thought provoking view on this topic.
Although far from complete, this page explains why torture is employed (not to gain reliable information, since it is not effective at this).
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==US== | ==US== | ||
| − | Torture carried out by US government agencies is | + | {{FA|US/Torture}} |
| − | + | The US is a signatory to the [[United Nations Convention Against Torture]], so torture carried out by US government agencies is generally carried out by proxy and/or in legally obscure jurisdictions, such as [[Guantanamo Bay]]. In 2014, [[US President]] [[Barack Obama]] brazenly admitted "we tortured some folks" but made no admission that such acts constituted crimes or that this wrong doing would be investigated.<ref>http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/08/obama-we-tortured-some-folks</ref> | |
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==See Also== | ==See Also== | ||
* [http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Category:Torture Set of radio shows on torture] | * [http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Category:Torture Set of radio shows on torture] | ||
Revision as of 08:13, 29 November 2014
 Torture  (Crime)  
| |
|---|---|
| Interest of | • Rebecca Gordon • Marnia Lazreg • Michael D. Lumpkin • Daniel Mitrione • Political Warfare Cadres Academy • School of the Americas • James Steele • John Yoo |
| Torture is the deliberate infliction of pain, used both as a means of obtaining information (though for this purpose it is notoriously unreliable) and (such as at Guantánamo Bay) to terrorise entire populations. | |
Contents
Official Narrative
The official narrative is usually maintained that countries such as US, UK etc. do not torture, since that would be illegal. Instead "enhanced interrogation" techniques are used to stay within the law. Not to use such methods would jeapordize "national security" and they are only used on "terrorist" suspects. Where admissions of torture are made, they are generally many years after the event, to prevent damaging legal investigations into what went on and who was involved.
Barack Obama's offhand admission that "we tortured some folks" on August 1, 2014[1] may be understood as a softening up for a change of this (centuries long) official narrative; possibly the strategy was to prepare the public for the release of a US Senate report into the CIA’s extensive programmes of torture and illegal detention.
Problems
"Enhanced interrogation" is readily understood to be a euphemism designed to minimize legal and public relations problems. The perception generally given by commercially-controlled media is that it is used for obtaining information, whereas in practice information obtained through torture is unreliable at best. A major function of torture is to terrorise - paradoxical if the claimed justification of the "War on Terror" is taken at face value - but logical from the point of view of the Terrorism industry; terrorising a population is an effective way to promote terrorism, which makes perfect business sense to an industry seeking rising anxiety about the danger of terrorism to increase profits.
United Nations Convention Against Torture
- Full article: United Nations Convention Against Torture
- Full article: United Nations Convention Against Torture
Since 26 June 1987, the UN Convention Against Torture has required signatory parties to take effective measures to prevent torture within their borders, and forbids them to transport people to any country where there is reason to believe they will be tortured. Almost all major nation states have signed and ratified it (with India being a notable exception) although its enforcement is openly flouted by many nations, most notably those which are promoting "War on terror" rhetoric.
UK
- Full article: UK Complicity in Torture
- Full article: UK Complicity in Torture
The last official torture warrant in England was issued in 1641. While stating to Parliament in 2009 that "Torture is abhorrent. Britain never supports or condones it. So it sticks in the gullet when people try to pretend we do." David Miliband also insisted that the UK's interrogation policy should not be made public.[2][3]
US
- Full article:
US/Torture
- Full article:
The US is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, so torture carried out by US government agencies is generally carried out by proxy and/or in legally obscure jurisdictions, such as Guantanamo Bay. In 2014, US President Barack Obama brazenly admitted "we tortured some folks" but made no admission that such acts constituted crimes or that this wrong doing would be investigated.[4]
Examples
| Page name | Description |
|---|---|
| Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse | Top level sanctioned torture on US prisoners, both to gather information about the effects of torture on victims and perpetrators as well as to intimidate and sew dragon's teeth. |
| Black site | Black sites are places where a black project or covert operation is executed, organized, or held. Locations can vary from an air force or other military base, plain library, a secret embassy wing to even a jet-plane itself. Some black sites do become known to the general public, although often as a modified limited hangout. |
| CIA/Torture | US foreign policy has made extensive use of torture since at least the 1960s, and continues to do so. Only since 9/11 has it been more or less openly admitted and have moves been made to try to secure legal justification. |
| Copper Green | 'Copper Green' was one of several codewords for a US Black Ops program, formed with the direct approval of the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who reportedly told special access members to “Grab whom you must. Do what you want.” |
| Electroshock | electrocution of the brain |
| Mind control | Mind Control aims to gain domination over the victim by making them cede their autonomy to the controlling person or group. Methods include lying, isolation, manipulation, indoctrination, electroshock, operant conditioning, coding / programming and "brainwashing". |
| Mind control/Child Abuse | Mind Control aims to gain domination over the victim by making them cede their autonomy to the controlling person or group. Children are especially vulnerable to spiritual, emotional, physical and sexual abuse. |
| Phoenix Program | A clandestine CIA research project into the use of terror as a means of social control. Techhniques from South East Asia, were later developed in Latin America |
| Sensory deprivation | A method of torture that leaves no marks on the body. |
| UK/Torture | Officially, the UK government has not approved of torture for a long time, and does what it can to prevent it being carried out. Various cases such as Binyam Mohamed's tell a different story, however. |
| US/Torture |
Torture victims on Wikispooks
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Shaker Aamer | The last UK national to be released from Guantanamo Bay, where he was held for 13 years and subjected to torture after refusing to spy for MI5. |
| Jack Agazarian (WWII) | UK spook of the SOE who was captured and killed in WW2. |
| Babar Ahmad | US pressure had Babar Ahmad arrested and held for 10 years in UK, although he had broken no UK law. He was beaten up by UK police in 2003. A petition signed by 149,388 people did not prevent his extradition to US - with no evidence of wrong doing provided - a country where it is likely he has been tortured. |
| Moazzam Begg | Moazzam Begg banged up in both Guantanamo Bay and HMP Belmarsh |
| Marc Bennett | Premature death of UK man in Qatar |
| William Francis Buckley | CIA Station Chief in Beirut, captured by Hezbollah. |
| Kiki Camarena | Undercover DEA agent who was abducted, tortured and murdered on assignment in Mexico in 1985 |
| Dilawar | A taxi driver who was in the wrong place at the the wrong time. Tortured while in US custody and dead within the week. A leaked autopsy revealed "homicide", but the US authorities have not taken any action in this regard. |
| Khalid El-Masri | Kidnapped for months by the CIA after a case of mistaken identity. His lawsuit was dismissed on grounds of "national security" |
| Emad Abdalla Hassan | A person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, sold to US for $5000 and has been subject to illegal imprisonment and torture in Guantanamo Bay for years. Cleared for release in 2010, he was transferred to Oman on June 13, 2015. |
| Kim Jae-gyu | As head of the KCIA he assassinated his boss, the South Korean president, Park Chung-hee |
| Omar Khadr | A Canadian citizen who has nearly spent 1/2 of his life in military detention, after being arrested as a minor caught in a firefight in which several of his adult companions and a US soldier were killed. |
| Patrice Lumumba | The first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, abducted, tortured and murdered. Foreign intelligence service involvement is strongly suspected. |
| Binyam Mohamed | |
| Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | Officially, due to be tried in 2021 |
| Baha Mousa | An Iraqi civilian tortured to death by UK soldiers. |
| Abu Omar | An Egyptian cleric who was kindnapped in Milan by the CIA in 2003 and sent to Egypt where he was subject to torture. |
| José Padilla | Subjected to Sensory deprivation for years before even being charged. |
| Gul Rahman | Kidnapped and tortured to death by the CIA. |
| Giulio Regeni | Italian spook who was tortured to death by intelligence services in Egypt |
| Inês Etienne Romeu | She is believed to have been the only captive to survive detention in a Brazilian torture centre known as the Casa da Morta, "the house of death" |
| Rubén López Sabariego | Cuban bus driver tortured and killed at US naval base Guantanamo |
| Yunis Abdurrahman Shokuri | Held in extrajudicial detention in Guantanamo Bay |
| Aafia Siddiqui | American-educated Pakistani cognitive neuroscientist, tortured and raped for years by US forces, now serving a life sentence after a trial of a highly questionable nature. |
| Josef Trimpert | |
| Eladio del Valle | An Operation 40 member involved in the JFK assassination. |
| Mordechai Vanunu | The former Israeli nuclear technician who, citing his opposition to weapons of mass destruction, revealed details of Israel's nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986.He was captured by Mossad, kidnapped and subsequently imprisoned for 18 years, including 11 years in solitary confinement. He continues to be subject to harrassment and forbidden to speak to foreigners or to leave Israel. |
| Abu Zubaydah | A prisoner of the deep state, subjected to torture, denied legal process, still in detention for over 20 years. |
| Khaled al-Maqtari |
Related Quotations
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mind control | “The goal and end of Mind Control is to control and bondage the victim or survivor both during abuse and ritual and during 'normal life'” | Ritualistic Abuse Consultancy Sydney . | |
| Mind control | “Basically, what we as therapists across the country are finding are a group of clients that formally were considered untreatable, that based on recent information we're finding are reporting having been subjects in mind control experimentation performed by the government, the CIA and the military establishment ... probably from about the late 1940's until middle 80's and may even be going on today.” | Valerie Wolf | 15 March 1995 |
| Mind control | “In late 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to command Guantanamo with wide latitude for interrogation, making this prison an ad hoc behavioral laboratory. Moving beyond the CIA’s original attack on sensory receptors universal to all humans, Guantanamo’s interrogators stiffened the psychological assault by exploring Arab “cultural sensitivity” to sexuality, gender identity, and fear of dogs. General Miller also formed Behavioral Science Consultation teams of military psychologists who probed each detainee for individual phobias[...].” | Alfred McCoy | 2006 |
| Mind control | “When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and those responsible deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man".” | Naomi Klein | 2005 |
| Mind control | “The aims of the concentration camp as an institution are to break the prisoners as individuals, to spread terror among the rest of the population, and to provide the Gestapo with a training ground and an experimental laboratory. [...] The typical initial reactions are feelings of detachment: 'this can't be true … things like this just don't happen'.
The first few weeks are the worst; persons who manage to live through the transportation to camp and the first three months thereafter, have a fair chance of surviving. If the tortures become too intense, indifference takes the place of anxiety. Prisoners are particularly sensitive to punishments resembling those a parent might inflict upon a child. Prisoners' dreams rarely deal with situations of extreme torture but instead with comparatively smaller maltreatment. Group formation, especially around a hero or martyr, is very effectively prohibited by means of group punishments. For only a short time do the new prisoners direct their hostility primarily against their real enemy; in many cases it is soon turned against former friends or members of the family by whom the prisoners feel deserted. Old prisoners come to direct their hostility mostly against themselves. Gradually a regression to infantile levels take place, turning many prisoners into willing tools in the hands of the Gestapo. In the phase of 'final adjustment', the strangest phenomenon of all could be observed: the prisoners' identification with the guards. Certain prisoners even tried to imitate the guards' uniforms, became cruel to their fellow-prisoners, partly accepted Nazi ideology. The author's conclusion is: What thus happens in an extreme fashion to the prisoners in concentration camps, happens also, in a somewhat less exaggerated form, to the inhabitants of the great concentration camp called 'Greater Germany'.” | M. Grotjahn | 1945 |
| Mind control | “Mind Control is a system of influences which break the identity of an individual (his/her beliefs, behavior, thoughts and feelings) and replace it with a new identity” | Steve Hassan | 1993 |
| Craig Murray | “Can I just say how pleasant it is to be vindicated ten years after being sacked by Jack Straw for opposing the torture and extraordinary rendition programme – which Blair and Straw claimed I was inventing.” | Craig Murray | December 2014 |
| Prison | “Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has warned, he will effectively have been tortured to death. Much of that torture will have taken place in a prison medical ward, on doctors' watch. The medical profession cannot afford to stand silently by, on the wrong side of torture and the wrong side of history, while such a travesty unfolds. In the interests of defending medical ethics, medical authority, and the human right to health, and taking a stand against torture, together we can challenge and raise awareness of the abuses detailed in our letters. Our appeals are simple: we are calling upon governments to end the torture of Assange and ensure his access to the best available health care before it is too late. Our request to others is this: please join us...” | 117 doctors | February 2020 |
| UK/Torture | “we don't use torture because it doesn't work. Like the CIA we had to learn the hard way. In Northern Ireland, IRA terrorist suspects were waterboarded in the 1970s. Even using such techniques, it took time to overcome the subject's resistance and by then the intelligence gained was virtually worthless.” | Harry Ferguson |
Related Documents
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:7/7 Terror and Torture | blog post | 7 July 2010 | Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed | |
| Document:A Long History of America's Dark Side | article | 7 October 2010 | Peter Dale Scott Robert Parry | Americans are encouraged to unquestioningly view their country and its soldiers as the "good guys" spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. When the US inflicts death and destruction, it’s viewed as a mistake or an aberration. This article reviews the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a “mistake” nor an “aberration” but a conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the "dark side". |
| Document:Child Soldier Coerced Into Plea-Bargain | article | 7 October 2010 | Keith Jones | |
| Document:Guantanamo SOP Confirms Psychological Torture | article | 17 November 2007 | Julian Assange Stephen Soldz | Standard operating procedures for military personnel running the Guatanamo Bay military prison confirm that the rules governing the treatment of its inmates amounts to systematic torture |
| Document:My CIA Rendition | statement | 17 March 2011 | Abu Omar | |
| Document:Obama to Aid Uzbek Dictatorship | webpage | 9 November 2011 | Stephen Zunes | |
| Document:Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report | webpage | 11 June 2007 | Dick Marty | |
| Document:The Rendition of Abu Omar | article | August 2007 | John Foot | |
| Document:Torture Inquiry must reveal the Truth | article | 7 July 2010 | Peter Oborne | |
| Document:Torture, Assassination and the American Way of Life | commentary | 17 February 2012 | Jacob G. Hornberger | |
| Document:Two letters from Guantanamo | letter | 14 February 2014 | Shaker Aamer Emad Abdalla Hassan | Two letters from Shaker Aamer and Emad Hassan sent on the ocassion of the 12th anniversary of the establishment of America's extra-judicial hell-hole at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.. |
| Document:We Are The Bad Guys | blog post | 12 August 2024 | Craig Murray | In the United Kingdom it falls to the Celtic nations to try to break up the state which is a subordinate but important imperialist engine. The paths of resistance are various, depending where you are. But find one and take one. |
| File:Children in Military Custody.pdf | report | June 2012 | 9 UK govt. appointed legal experts | |
| File:EstablishingNewNormal.pdf | report | July 2010 | American Civil Liberties Union | Under the Obama Administration |
| File:Mendez-Chatham House lecture.pdf | report | 10 September 2012 | Juan Méndez | |
| File:The Military and Halakhah.pdf | paper | 2006 | Dov Zakheim |
Convicted of Torture
| Person | Born | Died | Nationality | Summary | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| David Addington | 22 January 1957 | War criminal | The "most powerful man you’ve never heard of" (2006) who was an energetic supporter of torture under George W. Bush. | ||
| George W. Bush | 6 July 1946 | US | Politician War criminal Deep state actor | The 43rd US President, a bonesman, former oil businessman, now being pursued for war crimes. | |
| Jay Bybee | 27 October 1953 | Lawyer Judge War criminal | |||
| Dick Cheney | 30 January 1941 | Deep politician War criminal Businessperson | Neoconservative deep politician with close ties to the MICC. Vice President 2001-2009, under George W Bush. | ||
| Alberto Gonzales | 4 August 1955 | Lawyer War criminal | A "woefully incompetent" US Attorney General | ||
| William Haynes II | 30 March 1958 | Lawyer War criminal | A counsel of the US Defense Department | ||
| Donald Rumsfeld | 9 July 1932 | 30 June 2021 | US | Politician Deep politician War criminal | Senior member of the cabal, former US Defense Secretary, got aspartame approved |
| John Yoo | 10 July 1967 | Academic Lawyer Deep state functionary War criminal | The US lawyer whose name is now synonymous with the infamous "torture memo" which opened the door to legalising torture and lead to his conviction as a war criminal. |
Rating
17 July 2017 Robin A thought provoking view on this topic.Although far from complete, this page explains why torture is employed (not to gain reliable information, since it is not effective at this).
Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.
See Also
- Set of radio shows on torture
- Torture Timeline from Daily Kos
References
- ↑ http://time.com/3071149/obama-new-gaza-cease-fire-very-hard-after-hamas-breach/
- ↑ http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jul/08/government-response-to-torture-claims
- ↑ http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jul/08/mi5-mi6-acccused-of-torture
- ↑ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/08/obama-we-tortured-some-folks
