The CIA torture report summary released today was heavily redacted: one shudders to think what they took out, when one considers the brutality they left in.
The summary shows the CIA carried out some of the most brutal torture imaginable, sexually assaulting detainees and forcing others to stand for long periods of time on broken legs.
Many of the worst abuses weren’t even done specifically for information gathering, as the summary details the practice of punishing detainees who “partially refused liquids” with rectal force-feedings.
The practice, discredited medically for nearly a century, was favored by interrogators on the grounds that it was more painful than the traditional force-feedings or IV feedings, and would scare detainees away from refusing orders.
One unnamed chief interrogator was even quoted in the summary as saying it would make detainees more cooperative afterward, on the grounds that it demonstrated “total control.”
There’s no sign any intelligence was gathered through this torture, and indeed some detainees ended up with significant medical problems as a result.
How did those a__holes even come up with that stuff? Must be what they fantasize about while they're self-abusing.
It's disgusting and says a lot about the moral psyche of the people who would do that. Being that deep in the closet shouldn't turn you into a monster.
If they had gotten information to help keep their disgusting selves in power by doing this, that would definitely make it ok.
In Enemas We Trust
We pledge allegiance to the scatology of the United States of America…
Oh say can you see, by the dungeon's dim light, what so proudly we expelled…
It reminds me of that popular but probably fictional history "Sibyl" in which a young girl splits into multiple personalties due to the forced enemas and other sadistic things done to her by her insane mother. These prisoners have been soul-murdered, and some are now disabled for life (or nearly so) by what was done to maim their psyches. It's one thing to shoot a man dead, it's another to turn him into the living dead, like the omnipresent zombie of youthful popular imagination. But the real zombie is the patriotic American who accepts all of this. It is he whose soul is really dead and he who is the undead. The American flag should come with black bunting from now on.
We arraigned the monsters of Germany at Nuremberg. They did not personally perpetrate the horrors of their concentration camps but were correctly held liable. Who will be correctly held liable for the physical obscenities of the CIA?
Why, that's easy…innocent Americans will take the brunt of any blowback from these nefarious actions. Those responsible for ordering these actions and those responsible for performing the acts are above the law.
I used to believe that the common American wouldn't stand for these kinds of acts. I don't believe it now.
They have spent years training the American public to cast all morality to the winds. "9/11 Changed Everything." The public has been taught to march to the beat of the "ticking time bomb" to allow everything.
Those of us who grieved for our country during the reign of Dick Cheney, and knew that we never got it back with someone who would sign on for drone killings of American citizens, can take some solace in the fact that those things we knew were happening – by leaks and by the logic of the regime – are now more widely known.
Do I believe our democratic process will rid us of these practices? Well, who wags the dog? The money will still be there putting the sort of people into office who could have let this thing slide for so long. None of that has changed. And the complacent public will not protest or march about something like this. On a certain level, they too are scared it will happen to them. But perhaps that is why the report stands – perhaps it is a terrible warning not to step out of the masses and demand real change.
"…warning not to step out of the masses and demand real change."
Just as they've beat down the whistleblowers, anyone who pushes the Archons towards prosecution and hell, even just opening Pandora's box for a peek at what was done will be crushed under the inimitable full weight of the jackboots.
I'd like to believe that that's what they told Obama when he took office in 2009 – that "if you persist on prosecuting Bushco for doing what they did, we will destroy you and yours."
But I'm probably wrong…he wasn't coerced.
Thanks for the headline. I don't need to read this one…
After WWII the Allies went to Germany with the intent to bring to JUSTICE those that committed war crimes and they included members of the GESTAPO the German Secret police not actually soldiers and the closely aligned SS again not actually technically soldiers! Which is a precedent because the CIA are supposedly Civilian and their actions aren't actually Military well not in the strictest sense!
I have a quote from that era that is of great importance, and here it is, I have been quoting this from the very beginning of Bush's illegal activities relating to Prisoners, from when he first instigated the refusal to enable Geneva to which if one looks there is a reference of war crime in one of the lessor Supreme Court Justices rulings in Hamden V Rumsfeld!
in 1945 this quote was said and we should look at it carefully as it has extreme relevance today, we should also look at Geneva as well a fully ratified treaty, which after Hamden was shown that it has total legal status, which makes it clear in Article 131
No High Contracting Party shall be allowed to absolve itself or any other High Contracting Party of any liability incurred by itself or by another High Contracting Party in respect of breaches referred to in the preceding Article. Which includes wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, or wilfully depriving a prisoner of war of the rights of fair and regular trial!
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Justice Robert Jackson, US SUPREME Court who served as the chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials.
It is time that the US lives up to what is required and starts to prosecute those that have brought this mess, and note the laws to allow Those that tortured and more importantly those that ordered the torture, are in fact a breach of A fully ratified treaty under the full protection of the United States Constitution!
They can start with trials for YOO and BYBEE, the writers of the legal reasoning that the torture was lawful!
I wonder what kind of country we might have at the end of this? Sadder but wiser, able to build on new foundations, perhaps with a different kind of money as well. But we'll always be pushed by our technologies towards globalization, and this would be a national cleansing. We have so many partners in the torture business, so many countries we have implicated (like Poland and others), so many we have led into the darkness. That too would need facing up to.
Germany was partitioned for a long time after the war. This won't happen as a result of our defeat in the Mideast or our war crimes getting there.
Any prosecution will be a superficial blow to the USA, but necessary to correct course (which otherwise is into even worse practices, and the loss of any moral voice in the world).
There is what you think you can do to reform, and there is what the world forces on you. I'm not sure where we are in this at the moment. But the truth is, we have violated international treaties which we invoked against the Germans.
What a dump the US has become. Constantly lecturing the world with crap while never washing its own underwear's.
Dirty, fucked-up dump!
And whose idea was it to put 'that' smiling picture of Obama up with this? How subtle!! LOL