Iraq War Torture

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Tortures

“George W. Bush said the other day that the world should see his administration’s handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as a model of transparency and accountability. He said those responsible were being systematically punished, regardless of rank. It made for a nice Oval Office photo-op on a Friday morning. Unfortunately, none of it is true.”
~ New York Times, 2005-05-23

“Torture is wrong, even when Americans do it.”
~ God, 2007-10-01

It is natural to want to disbelieve accounts of torture. It is sickening to discover the depths of cruelty your fellow man can sink to. Watch yourself playing the denial game as you read on. If you are like most people, you will find the least offensive torture, or the least solidly documented and seize on it, then discount it, and then try to convince yourself all the horror has gone away. All you have done is sweep it under the carpet. You can’t stop the torture if you lie to yourself that it does not exist. It is real. There are even criminal convictions.

Diplomat Ann Wright argues the tortures concocted showed a deep understanding of Arab and Muslim culture. There is no way ordinary American soldiers came up with these on their own. They must have been taught them by their superiors who had access to experts.

Bush sent a directive in 2002-02 that the resistance in Afghanistan were to be treated as terrorists, unprotected by the Geneva conventions. This left the fighters and POWs open to any conceivable torture.

Navy Seal Dan Cerrillo, testified the CIA ordered the Seals to torture prisoners.

Sign at Guantánamo torture camp mockingly reads HONOR BOUND TO DEFEND FREEDOM, reminiscent of Hitler’s Arbeit Macht Frei he had painted over the gates to the Jewish concentration camps.

At Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib here is a partial list of the sexual abuse and torture:

1. Doctors tortured prisoners. 35 pages of government documents.
2. A US military investigation found Iraqi detainees were held with their Taping eyes shut in tiny box-like cells for up to seven days at a time while loud music blared at a special operations holding facility.
3. Government documents on torture obtained unde the freedom of information act by the ACLU.
4. The Washington Post reported that the CIA is hiding, interrogating and torturing captives in Thailand, Afghanistan and several countries in Eastern Europe. CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”; (aka torture) some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials. There are four main arguments against using torture.
   1. It is morally abhorrent. It is condemned by every major religion.
   2. It has no benefits. Under torture, you will say whatever you think the tormenter wants to hear to get them to stop. The information gleaned is worthless. Bush tortured Iraqis to get his phony evidence for war. A terrorist locked away in seclusion is out of the loop. All plans have been changed and the detainee is not up to date. Ask John McCain what he thinks of torture. He knows first hand how ineffective it is.
   3. Using torture lowers the bar. Your opponents then are obligated to use torture too, not only on P.O.W.s but on civilians and children, just as America has done.
   4. Using torture alienates your allies.
   Last revised 2005-11-08.
5. Italian TV broadcast a documentary. It is about the American atrocities and torture in Iraq. One of the most stomach-wrenching scenes is detainees who have been tortured by boring holes with an electric drill, burning, and cutting open and resuturing like turkey. You can play a low-res version of the movie on-line . You can download the movie with BitTorrent in either Microsoft or Apple QuickTime format  The movie deserves to be shown in IMAX, so please try for the hi-res version. Last revised 2005-11-10.
6. Rape, vaginal and anal of men, women and children. source : source : source : source.
7. Killing wounded prisoners.
8. Murder
9. Kicking prisoners to death
10. Sodomy with a broomstick and chemical light.
11. water-boarding, where a suspect is strapped to a board, turned upside down, and immersed in a wet towel to simulate the feeling of drowning until he loses consciousness.
12. Throwing off bridge into river and drowning
13. near suffocation
14. Parent forced to watch son being tortured.
15. oy 12 imprisoned. The Red Cross counted 107 juveniles in six American prisons in Iraq.
16. Government documents show soldiers were ordered to “beat the fuck out of” prisoners.
17. Chaining to the ceilings of cells for days at a time.
18. common peroneal strike, aimed at a point just below the knee and intended to disable. Basically pulpifying the legs so they look as though they had though they had been run over by a bus.
19. starvation
20. sleep and sensory deprivation: Covering the eyes, ears, wrapping the body in bubble wrap. After a few hours of this, hallucinations set in then eventually permanent insanity.
21. claustrophobic technique: stuffing POWs into a sleeping bag and winding them with an electrical cord.
22. Water pit in which detainees have to stand on tip-toe to keep from drowning.
23. breaking a teen’s jaw, then wiring it shut.
24. Pulling out fingers and teeth. See Page 49 of Chain of Command.
25. heat and light manipulation
26. “stress positions“, e.g. hands tied behind back hanging in the air by the wrists.
27. Severe beatings to the point of death.
28. Electric shock
29. Attaching electrodes to private parts. This causes sterility.
30. Using trained vicious dogs to anally and vaginally rape prisoners.
31. Severe burning
32. Setting vicious dogs on children.
33. Raping young Iraqi boys on video. 14 year old being raped. source. Pulitzer prize winner and breaker of Mai Lai, Seymour Hersch has seen one of the videos. The most horrifying part is the Americans raping a little boy in front of his parents as the little boy screamed. The irony is, this is the very tactic, in the very same torture chamber, that Saddam himself used. Judge Hellerstein is forcing Bush to release the rape videos. Bush is refusing to comply. Last revised 2005-11-21.
34. A 26 year old man, Arkan Mohammed Ali, was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked — hooded and naked — in a wooden, coffin-like box.
35. Exposure to fire and smoke.
36. Pulling out fingernails
37. Pushing lit cigarettes into ears
38. Chaining hand and foot in fetal position without food or water.
39. Forced standing on one leg in the sun
40. trampling underfoot
41. Gagging with duct tape
42. Tormenting with loud music and strobe lights
43. Prolonged sleep deprivation
44. punching and kicking detainees
45. jumping on the naked feet of detainees
46. covering prisoners in human feces
47. Hooding
48. Subjecting to freezing/sweltering temperatures
49. 'Dietary manipulation'. Forcing to eat pork and alcohol forbidden to Muslims. Forcing to eat disgusting things. Forced to eat the contents of a toilet. Forced to drink from a toilet bowl.
50. Forced to separate feces and urine using bare hands.
51. Women forced to stir pots of feces and urine mixed with lighter fluid.
52. Shabah, in which a prisoner is locked in tight handcuffs and leg irons and forced to sit in a contorted position with a stinking sack over the head and loud music playing nonstop.
53. Hanging by arms from hooks, Palestinian Hanging.
54. Permitting serious dog bites
55. Bending back fingers
56. Taping naked prisoner to board so that cannot move and leaving them there for weeks until they go insane.
57. Intense isolation for more than 3 months
58. Slamming the head into a wall until it bleeds.
59. Stacking of naked prisoners  in pyramids.
60. Injecting with drugs
61. Leaving bullet in body of wounded prisoner.
62. Beating prisoners to death
63. Locking prisoners naked in the dark for days at a time.
64. Shooting into containers with men inside.
65. Keeping prisoners in small, outdoor cages.
66. Pepper spraying in face
67. Forced public defecation by using dogs to terrorise.
68. Repeated, prolonged rectal exams
69. inserting suppositories in the anus, diapering, cutting the clothes off with scissors. page 54 of Chain Of Command.
70. Forced public masturbation
71. Grabbing genitals
72. Forcing heads into toilets and flushing
73. Riding a 70 year old woman like a donkey.
74. forced breast baring at gunpoint.
75. Threatening live burial, drowning, electrocution, rape and death
76. Telling a Guantánamo prisoner the Americans had murdered his family then presented him photos with animal heads superimposed on their bodies.
77. mock executions. Two US soldiers were convicted of mock executions. The names were not released.
78. Menstrual Blood. To break the prisoner’s reliance on God, a female interrogator would tell the detainee that she was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so he couldn’t wash. Strict interpretation of Islamic law forbids physical contact with women other than a man’s wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean. At Guantánamo, a prostitute menstruated on a man strapped the floor.
79. Psychological tortures
80. handcuffs tight enough to cut the skin
81. “inappropriate behaviour” with a corpse.
82. sexual touching
83. Confining in outdoor cages without protection from the sun.
84. Forced exercising to the point of heart attack.
85. Forcing detainees to perform exercises such as deep knee bends for hours on end, to the point of exhaustion.
86. Blowing cigarette smoke into the sandbags the prisoners were forced to wear as hoods.
87. Throwing cold water on the prisoners in a room that was between 40 degrees and 50 degrees Fahrhenheit.
88. Blasting the detainees with heavy-metal music, yelling at them and banging on doors and ammunition cans.
89. hair pulling
90. Making child prisoners bark like dogs before being given candy as food.
91. Flushing the Qu’ran (the sacred text of the Muslims) down the toilet. Leaving it out as the only toilet paper. This is equivalent to making Americans shit on or burn the flag. Oddly, this more than any other humiliation or torture, has the Muslims of the world up in arms. 100 people were hurt in protests in Iran. Clerics have even threatened jihad over it. There are also reports of standing on the Qu’ran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and urinating on it. There have been many reports of the Qu’ran being stepped on, tossed on the floor and placed in latrines. The LA Times confirmed dozens of such reports not only at Guantánamo, but also at American-run detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq. Britons too corroborate the story. The Pentagon lied when they said they had received no reports of Qu’ran desecration. The Red Cross informed them as early as 2002. FBI documents confirm widespread Qu’ran desecration. Brigadier General Jay W Hood acknowledged incidents of Qu’ran abuse. On 2005-06-03, the Pentagon described five confirmed incidents of Qu’ran mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay, in which the Muslim holy book was kicked, stepped on, soaked by water balloons, defaced with a scrawled obscenity, and sprayed with urine. Ironically many of those on the newsgroups asserting that it was a preposterous lie than Americans had desecrated the Qu’ran had previously posted their own Qu’ran desecrating fantasies, and acknowledged atrocities and tortures far worse in American eyes than that. Others asserted flushing a Qu’ran down a toilet was impossible ignoring that some Qu’rans you can buy on the net are only 3x4" and that it is quite possible to tear out and flush pages of even the largest Qu’ran.

    “The Koran needs to be flushed.”
    ~ Sign on Danieltown Baptist Church in Forest City Alabama

92. snakes
93. Major General Antonio M. Taguba wrote a report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib between 2003-10 and 2003-12. Here is a section of it: “Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees, pouring cold water on naked detainees, beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair, threatening male detainees with rape, allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”
94. the abuses listed here are just the tip of the iceberg.
95. These abuse may sound too outrageous to believe. Have a look at the routine use of torture and abuse in domestic prisons in the USA.

Nearly all the links above discuss more than one form of torture. Read the lot to get the big picture of what is going on. Here is a list of resources to find out more.

Guilty of Torture

“I think about over 20% of the people thus far that have been held to account as a result of the Abu Ghraib issue have been officers. I’m comfortable that we’re getting to the bottom of the situation. And I know we’re doing so in a transparent way.”
~ George W. Bush, commenting on the fact finding of probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted soldiers with offences ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter in the Dilawar torture case and charges recommended against 15 of them for the Habibullah torture case.

After much denial, Bush finally regretted the torture at Abu Ghraib, or more specifically regretted the scandal 2006-05-25.

Charged with torture at Abu Ghraib are Lynndie England and Charles Graner. Like many other US soldiers, Graner is a psychopath who used to send pictures of his bloodied torture victims home to his children. Lynndie England pleaded guilty at her trial on 2005-05, but the military judge threw out the plea saying she “did not know what she was doing”. She will face 2 to 11 years in jail. Her married boyfriend, Charles Graner was sentenced to ten years in prison. See photos of some of the torturers. Brits have been charged too including Corporal Daniel Kenyon, 33, and Lance Corporals Mark Cooley, 25, and Lance Corporal Darren Larkin, 30. Daniel Kenyon was sentenced to 18 months, Mark Cooley to two years, and Dannir Larkin to 5 months. Chip Frederick was convicted of taking sadistic photos. photo. Javal S. Davis : : has been charged with conspiracy to maltreat detainees, dereliction of duty for failing to protect detainees from abuse, maltreatment of detainees, rendering false official statements and assault.

Sabrina Harman was convicted on 2005-05-16 of 6 of 7 counts of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. She was the photographer of some of the most famous Abu Ghraib abuse pictures.

See Torturers.net for a rogue’s gallery of who has been charged and convicted with what. Remember the faces. Make sure if you ever run into these sadists after they get out of prison to make their lives highly inconvenient.

The surprise is, they look like ordinary nice people. The men who ordered them to do the atrocities got medals. The ACLU is suing Donald Rumsfeld for his part is ordering the Abu Ghraib tortures : details. It seems every week they subpoena another government document confessing more torture. The US Navy was so horrified at the interrogation techniques and Guantánamo, they considered refusing to have anything to do with the camp.

The 2003-09-14 memo by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez clearly establishes that Gen. Sanchez authorized unlawful interrogation techniques for use in Iraq, and in particular these techniques violate the Geneva Conventions and the Army’s own field manual governing interrogations. This puts a lie to Bush’s claim the tortures were the results of a few renegades. In a rape case, normally you interview both the accused and the victims. Americans seem to think the Iraqis have no right to be heard.

The bitch of Abu Ghraib, Janis Karpinski gives here excuses for the abominations in this essay. She has fingered General Geoffrey Miller.

The torture was not just a few bad apples. It goes right to the top. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA say there is prima facie evidence against Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture. And Amnesty International USA says there is also prima facie evidence against Bush for war crimes and torture.

The British have been almost as bad. 18 men were charged with sexually abusing and beating to death Iraqi civilians.

“These so-called ill-treatments and this torturing in concentration camps, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners that were liberated by the occupying armies, were not, as assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual leaders, subleaders, and men who laid violent hands on internees.”
~ Testimony of Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, 1946-04-15

For a while Bush denied this was happening.

“The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and they don’t have to worry about their husbands and brothers being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over.”
~ Paul Bremer, Administrator, [Iraq] Coalition Provisional Authority, 2003-09-02

“Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers.”
~ George W. Bush, remarks to 2003 Republican National Committee Presidential Gala, 2003-10-08, lying through his teeth. He had videos made of child anal rapes in his possession.

Why Torture?

• As part of Shock & Awe. American routinely torture all detainees, including children. The idea is to demoralise the Iraqis by convincing them that Americans are even more cruel and brutal that Saddam or the Nazis, and thus that resistance is futile. After surviving that experience the idea is an Iraqi would lick the boots or nether parts of an American rather than suffer than way again.
• To get “confessions” to use for political purposes.
• For entertainment and sexual pleasure. The sort of people who go into soldiering are natural bullies and sadists. Psychologists tell us that whenever you give absolute power of one group over another, sadism, abuse and torture develop within days. The Americans have overwhelming technological superiority over the Iraqis. This tendency to sadism in that situation is part of human nature. There is nothing unusual about Americans.

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