10 Reasons Why we Need a President Who Will Stop the Bush/Cheney Torture Program

[Time for change]

In designating thousands of prisoners captured during the course of his “War on Terror” as “unlawful enemy combatants”, George W. Bush has declared with that designation that those prisoners have no legal or human rights. Furthermore, hundreds or thousands of those prisoners have been subjected to repeated torture, either at the hands of our own government, or at the hands of other countries to which George Bush renders his prisoners. It is way past time that this inhumane program cease.

There are many differences between Barack Obama and John McCain on issues that are of great importance to the American people. One of the most important is their differing stands on the Bush administration’s torture policies. Before considering those differences, I’d like to discuss a few reasons why it is crucial that our country cease this abominable practice:


1. Torture – and George Bush’s whole program – is immoral

It’s hard to say it any more succinctly than that or to explain why it’s immoral to someone who doesn’t already understand that. Here is an excerpt from the Journal of Applied Misanthropology:

Ethically, torture is a moral abomination. One cannot engage in it and remain fully human; it requires turning off any sort of ethical sense or code of moral conduct. A nation which engages in it as a matter of policy loses any moral high ground which might give it cause to claim the right to do so in the first place.

2. It violates the U.S. Constitution

George Bush’s whole program for treatment of his prisoners violates the U.S. Constitution in many different ways:

Abrogation of the prisoners’ rights to challenge the propriety of their incarceration (i.e. habeas corpus rights) violates the first Article of our Constitution.

The Sixth Amendment to our Constitution is violated in several ways: The holding of prisoners for years without charges violates their right to a speedy trial; Bush’s policies also routinely violate the prisoners’ right to be confronted with witnesses against them; the right to counsel; and the right to be informed of the nature of the accusations against them.

The due process clause of our Fifth Amendment is violated by the routinely arbitrary nature of the arrests and imprisonment.

Our Eight Amendment is routinely violated by the widespread use of cruel and unusual punishments.

Some Bush and Cheney supporters say that our Constitution doesn’t apply to non-U.S. citizens. But there is no mention in our Constitution that such is the case. Our Constitution is based upon the principles stated in our Declaration of Independence, which asserts the unalienable rights of ALL people to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. How arrogant is it to assert that those sacred principles stated in the document upon which our nation was founded apply only to U.S. citizens!


3. It is against international law in several respects

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 (to which the U.S. is a signatory) specifies that anyone falling into enemy hands during wartime is to be accorded “prisoner of war” status, thus entitling them to specified humane treatment, unless determined otherwise by a competent tribunal. George Bush has made no attempt to comply with that basic requirement, instead designating all prisoners captured in his “War on Terror” as “unlawful enemy combatants”.

Furthermore, anyone falling into enemy hands and who is determined not to be a prisoner of war must be charged with a criminal offense in order to be held in captivity, and they must be accorded all the rights of accused criminals. This includes informing the person of the reason for his detention, the presumption of innocence, the right to contest his detention, access to a competent attorney, the right to confront witnesses, etc. The bottom line is that no person, whether prisoner of war, suspected criminal, or a person given any other designation, can ever fall outside the scope of these minimum international protections. George Bush has made no attempt to comply with this requirement, instead proclaiming that all of his prisoners have no legal or human rights whatsoever.

And the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 1984 further protects all categories of persons against torture. Again, the Bush administration has proclaimed that it has no need to comply with this international law, claiming among other things that, for his purposes, this law does not apply to non-U.S. citizens outside of the United States.

The purpose of international law is to establish and maintain international peace, harmony, and justice. When the most powerful nation in the world refuses to abide by international law, its purpose is substantially perverted.


4. Torture puts our own soldiers at very high risk of similar treatment

It doesn’t take a great deal of thinking to realize that if we abuse and torture our prisoners, our enemies will be much more likely to do the same to our soldiers when they are captured. We ask a great deal from our soldiers, and today’s American soldiers are stressed to the max because of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem fair to unnecessarily add to their burdens and risks by impairing their ability to rely on international law to ensure their humane treatment if captured.


5. Torture produces bad intelligence

Presumably the primary reason for abusing and torturing our prisoners is to obtain intelligence that will help us to win the “War on Terror”. It is extremely difficult to ascertain what if any useful intelligence has been obtained through all this, given the extreme secrecy of the Bush administration.

The most notorious example of bad intelligence obtained from Bush’s torture policies is that obtained from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, in which al-Libi “confessed” to ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. That information was used to help justify our disastrous invasion of Iraq. That should not have been the case, as it is well known that information obtained through torture has a marked tendency to be unreliable because of a tortured person’s desire to say whatever he thinks his tormentors want to hear, in order to stop the torture. In fact, Bush’s own intelligence agencies considered al-Libi’s information to be highly unreliable.

Has any useful information been obtained through torture by the Bush administration in its “War on Terror”? That seems doubtful. Certainly if it had, it would be eager to publicize the fact. In fact, that’s exactly what they tried to do on June 10, 2002, when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla, allegedly for plotting to explode a “dirty” bomb on U.S. soil. But after several years of torture, no credible evidence emerged to support that contention, so the Bush administration was forced to give up its plans to pursue the “dirty bomb” case against Padilla, on the basis that its case was “light on facts”.

As Four Star General, former Supreme NATO Commander, and former Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark says in this video, torture does not work. Noting that the United States has never treated its prisoners as the current Bush administration does, Clark explains that during World War II we treated our German prisoners as human beings, and that consequently they felt safe with us, and they “sang like canaries”.


6. Effect on the insurgency in Iraq

It is well known that in guerilla warfare the support of the local population is critical in determining the probability of success for either side. With that in mind, a series of Iraqi public opinion polls sponsored by the Coalition Provisional Authority graphically illustrate the sinking fortunes of the U.S. military in Iraq. In response to the question If Coalition forces left immediately, would you feel more safe or less safe?, the results for those answering more safe were as follows:

November 2003: 11%
January 2004: 28%
April 2004: 55%
May 2004: 55%

That same poll, in May 2004, indicated that 92% of Iraqis saw the Coalition forces as occupiers, versus 2% who saw them as liberators and 3% who saw them as peace keepers. And 86% wanted the Coalition forces to either leave immediately (41%) or as soon as a permanent government is elected (45%).

These statistics obviously raise the question of what caused such a dramatic and abrupt rise in the discomfort that Iraqis felt with the presence of U.S./Coalition forces. One likely answer, it seems reasonable to suppose, is the awareness of how we were treating Iraqi prisoners. The revelations of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib under the auspices of the U.S. government were first made in April 2004. Though we have no way of knowing precisely when Iraqis first became aware of this, it would seem likely that the revelations in April did not come as a complete surprise to many Iraqis.

How might this have impacted U.S. casualties? For the year beginning April 2003 there were 540 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, compared to 929 during the year beginning April 2004, approximately concurrent with the rather abrupt rise in the percentage of Iraqis who felt less safe with Coalition forces present than absent (though we don’t know precisely when the rise occurred or how abrupt it was).


7. Effect on the recruitment of anti-American terrorists

There is a strong belief among our intelligence agencies that, far from helping in our “War on Terror”, George Bush’s torture policies substantially facilitate the recruitment of more virulently anti-American terrorists:

Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, expressed the consensus view that bin Laden recognized how Bush's heavy-handed policies – such as the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the war in Iraq – were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.

8. Bush’s torture program affects primarily the innocent

There is little or no evidence that Bush’s program of prisoner abuse and torture makes much of an attempt to confine its abuses to people who are likely to have committed serious wrongdoing. If it did, then why does it pay bounty hunters to provide it with victims of completely unknown guilt? If it cared at all about obtaining information and pursuing justice, then why are 98% of its victims held for years without ever being charged with a crime of any sort?

Consequently, it should not be surprising that there is abundant evidence that the good majority of Bush’s prisoners in his “War on Terror” are mere innocent victims, rather than “the worst of the worst”, as claimed by his minions. For example: Major General Antonio Taguba, charged with investigating the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, said that “A lack of proper screening meant that many innocent Iraqis were being detained (in some cases indefinitely) and that 60% of civilian prisoners at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society. And the International Red Cross said that between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.


9. These policies facilitate tyranny

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which Bush pushed through Congress prior to the 2006 elections, not only condones his prisoner abuse and torture policies, but it gives George Bush himself the right to determine who is classified as an enemy of the United States. How much thought do you think he and his minions put into it before branding someone as an enemy of the United States? And do you think that he might stoop to using this for his own cynical political purposes if he thought he could get away with it?


10. It is against all major religious values

People whose moral values are guided by sources other than religion may disagree that religion is an important argument against torture. I don’t disagree with that view. This argument is directed at those people who use religion to guide them on moral issues.

Though the Bush administration’s treatment of its prisoners goes against the values of all major religions, I’ll focus here on Christianity, since Bush and many of his supporters make such a great show of being “good Christians”. Jesus spoke a lot about love, but He never advocated treating people like George Bush treats his prisoners. Here’s a statement from an article in Christianity Today to illustrate the point.

It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.

Differences between the Presidential candidates on torture policy

Though McCain has achieved a reputation for challenging George Bush’s torture program, and he has in fact said that torture “should never be condoned”, for which he deserves credit, when push comes to shove, he almost always votes with Bush on supporting his torture plans. Since he almost always votes with Bush on this issue, it seems likely that as President his policies would not differ much from those of the Bush/Cheney administration.

In marked contrast, Obama has been universally and strongly against torture. This is what Obama had to say about George Bush’s Military Commissions Act (which McCain voted for) and his torture programs:

In the five years that the President's system of military tribunals has existed, not one terrorist has been tried. Not one has been convicted. And in the end, the Supreme Court of the United found the whole thing unconstitutional, which is why we're here today. We could have fixed all of this in a way that allows us to detain and interrogate and try suspected terrorists while still protecting the accidentally accused from spending their lives locked away in Guantanamo Bay…

Instead of allowing this President – or any President – to decide what does and does not constitute torture, we could have left the definition up to our own laws and to the Geneva Conventions…

But politics won today. Politics won. The Administration got its vote, and now it will have its victory lap, and now they will be able to go out on the campaign trail and tell the American people that they were the ones who were tough on terrorism

Our country needs to set an example for decency, not torture

How many prisoners has George Bush’s “War on Terror” produced? Because of the secrecy surrounding the program, nobody knows. In addition to the more than seven hundred sent to Guantanamo Bay and the many hundreds in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other U.S. sponsored prisons, the Bush administration has rendered many hundreds more to repressive regimes to do our dirty work for us – in secret. Here is a passage from Stephen Grey’s “Ghost Plane – The True Story of the CIA’s Secret Torture Program”:

My own research would suggest the total number of renditions ran into many, many hundreds… only a small fraction of captured prisoners had been released to tell their stories or were able to pass their accounts out of jail through their families or lawyers. Since 9/11, Pakistan claimed to have captured more than six hundred Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, of which the majority, said its officials, were rendered into U.S. custody. Iran said it captured over one thousand; most of these were handed over to U.S. control… Egypt described the transfer of sixty to seventy into its jails alone…

The Bush/Cheney prisoner abuse and torture policies shame and embarrass our country in the eyes of the world, and are a stain on humanity itself. The fact that we are the most powerful country in the world means that these policies have far greater potential for jeopardizing the peace and safety of the world (along with our pre-emptive war in Iraq and who knows what other wars to come) than similar policies used by other countries.

[spanone]

1. k&r

[tbyg52]

2. K&R nt

[tdog8]

3. All these reasons

are right on...

I agree with them completely. I respect all these ideals.

But for those who needed convincing,

Do we really need more than one reason?

It's WRONG!

[Time for change]

8. Yes, I do believe we do

For those who need convincing, I don't believe that many will be convinced by simply saying "it's WRONG". Has that argument ever convinced you of anything?

In any event that isn't a reason, it's an assertion -- though I do acknowledge that it's very close to reason # 1 from my OP.

Also, another reason for posting this is to make the comparison between Obama and McCain on this issue.

[ColbertWatcher]

4. Bra-vo! Kicked, rec'd, bookmarked! n/t

[Time for change]

13. Thank you

[understandinglife]

5. Rec#4. Excellent.

[Time for change]

10. Thank you -- I thought of this when I read your recent post on

children being kidnapped by the Bush administration.

[DemoTex]

6. Best post in the history of DU, IMHO (and I've been here since 5/2001)

Fantastic compendium.

[Time for change]

9. Wow, that's saying an awful lot

I feel humbled, thank you.

[burythehatchet]

7. Adding buddy error

You cannot add this user to your buddy list because this user is already in your list.

[Time for change]

15. Thank you

On the subject of buddy list, I wonder if you could help me out?

I've put several people on my buddy list, but I've never seen any action from it. I thought that the idea was to be notified when your buddies post something, or something to that effect. Do you know what the buddy list is supposed to do? Thanks.

[Cerridwen]

11. Time to kick this back up so more people can see it.

I figure everyone's busy reading and they don't have time to kick it. :D

[Time for change]

16. Yes

Thanks for the kick.

I've already read this, so I have time to kick it. :D

[Usrename]

12. It's at the root of the Bush/Cheney coverup.

In the absence of torture, the truth would eventually become known.

[Time for change]

14. Do you mean that

it intimidates anyone who has information from coming forward and being a whistleblower, or something to that effect?

Do you think that even Congress is intimidated by the torture, from pushing investigations?

I've thought about that kind of stuff, but it seems like a stretch to think that Congresspersons might think that this could happen to them. But who knows? It's happened in other countries before. Why couldn't it happen here?

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

17. Why couldn't it happen here?

it does.

[Time for change]

18. Congresspersons taken into custody and tortured by our government?

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

19. oh, sorry

I guess I read it wrong, I thought it was about torture not just about congress-people.

So yes, it does happen here - even without being in custody, without a crime in fact.

With knowledge of some in congress, Ohio 9th district to be precise. Although you, Time for change may already know what I'm talking about since you got the emails from me.

In fact, some of the GITMO procedures have been used on me. Some other methods like laser remote as well. I suppose if "they" could use a method to sexully molest me, they do do it to any female and probably males as well. I wonder how many in congress would like to have their clit thumped?

How many would like to lose everything important to them, have their family threatened, have their elderly mother terrorized,
the list is long, and many in congress know about it. How about not being able to access an attorney? Sounding like GITMO yet? ACLU doesn't seem interested in assisting me, Turley doesn't seem interested, Center for Constitutional Rights doesn't care, and there are others who I've contacted that haven't contacted me back. All in the Most Livable City in North America, 3rd most in the world. With the knowledge of locals, including the mayor, fire dept. police, and local media.

[Time for change]

20. That's a tragic story

I'm sorry, but I don't recall if you told me why they're doing this to you?

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

21. since when do they need a reason?

I'm 54 years old, never been arrested, and not wanted for a crime.

Why are they doing this to me? The better question is why won't an attorney take my case? Why doesn't the ACLU, the CCR, the Congress/Senate, or the MSM - who are well aware of it, do nothing.

BUSH.

Enough said.

Everybody, EVERY DAMN BODY is afraid of the administration. So torture rules the day here.
There was a time when those who are complicite in this figured I suppose that their rights were not being violated so why bother, wait till Busholini is gone and the then I can go back to living a "normal" life. Now the same people complicite here and elsewhere are having their rights violated too, but the torture is reserved for me, an innocent, decent, kind, generous human being.
After years of violations, and methods reserved by this administration for the most violent and dangerous criminals in the world, torture - I'm Never going to be OK again. NEVER.

If I told you why I "think" I'm their target, they would hurt the people I love the most, maybe kill them. I actually contacted the FBI to protect those I love because of the fear of my loved ones being hurt. Seriously, I contacted the goddamned FBI for protection. I am not a kook who imagines things. This is very fucking real, and there isn't an attorney who will touch it. As for our representatives, I guess it's off the table.

They know, and I could give names of those who do. You might never vote again if I started laying it out for all to see.
They are either afraid, don't care, or one American life isn't that goddamn important to those who take the Oath.

[Time for change]

22. I'm sorry for your ordeal

I can't say that I understand the first thing about it. But I'm sorry you had to go through all that. :hug:

[Usrename]

23. I guess that was a rather cryptic way of saying things.

I'm trying to work up a complete and cogent response about this, because I think it's very important, and because I'm not sure that too many folks are actually seeing what is happening. I think some eyes might need to be opened very soon about all this.

IMHO, the whole purpose of torture is mostly hidden, and an alternative justification for torture has been deliberately contrived in order to keep the real reasons for it hidden. It’s slowly becoming more and more apparent that the real reasons for torture are totally contrary to this whole “ticking bomb/producing actionable intelligence/saving lives” thesis that is being offered up by John Yoo and his ilk. It’s simply not being used for any of those specific purposes.




One of the real purposes for torture probably IS to provide some form of intimidation of certain people. This is not very difficult to accept, especially if one is familiar with the recent history of the CIA and the School of the Americas where this kind of stuff was part of their syllabus. But that’s not all, and it’s not the most important aspect of it either. For the most part, I believe this torture is being done for a completely different purpose. I suspect that they are using torture in order to produce a false narrative, to create a completely different reality, similar to the way the Church operated during the Spanish Inquisition. Back in those medieval days, the inquisitors created a world where biblical truth could not be questioned (intimidation) and where the people were also coerced into believing that a real live Satan actually walked the earth (false belief). Then, as now, all of the proof for this alternate Truth was produced by torturing people. People were convinced that all this stuff must be real, just like they are now.

If you examine things closely enough, it looks an awful lot like torture is the primary method that is being used to create another (current) false reality, the one in which we are being forced to live right now. Specifically, I’m talking about the war on terror and the attacks of 9/11.





We know that The 9/11 Commission Report (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/pdf/fullreport.pdf">Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) comprises the official version of events leading up to the attacks. We know that the story is not true. We know that the commissioners admit in their own document that, unsatisfied with the information that they were getting from the CIA, they submitted their own lists of questions to the waterboarders with the specific intent of using the information that was to be obtained as evidence in their official report.

The report itself speaks to the issue. There is a disclaimer contained in a text box (page 146), entitled “Detainee Interrogation Reports,” and it reads (emphasis added):

“Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al-Qaeda members. A number of these ‘detainees’ have firsthand knowledge of the 9/11 plot. Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses—sworn enemies of the United States—is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process. We have nonetheless decided to include information from captured 9/11 conspirators and al-Qaeda members in our report. We have evaluated their statements carefully and have attempted to corroborate them with documents and statements of others. In this report, we indicate where such statements provide the foundation for our narrative. We have been authorized to identify by name only ten detainees whose custody has been confirmed officially by the US government.”

So, they admit in their own document that they submitted the questions to the waterboarders, with the intent of using this information as evidence in their official report. Under the http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-nurem.htm">Nuremberg Principles, any claims that those commissioners make now, that they didn’t know about how the info was obtained, is completely irrelevant. This act of including information obtained by torture in an official proceeding is strictly verboten by all modern jurisprudence, and is also specifically banned by Article 15 of the http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cat.htm">UN Conventions Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) is mentioned as a source 211 times... He was repeatedly waterboarded and tortured ... and it will later be reported that up to 90 percent of the information obtained from his interrogations may be unreliable ... Interestingly, the 9/11 Commission sometimes seems to prefer KSM’s testimony over other sources. For instance, in 2003 the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry reported that the CIA learned in 1996 that KSM and bin Laden traveled together to a foreign country in 1995, suggesting close ties between them ... But the 9/11 Commission will ignore this and instead claim, based on KSM’s interrogation, that KSM and bin Laden had no contact between 1989 and late 1996.

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&investigations:_a_detailed_look=911Commission

KSM underwent at least two sessions and other extreme measures before talking. "KSM required, shall we say, re-dipping," said another former senior intelligence official.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20752717/page/2

I’m afraid that once we finally remove all of the confessions and admissions obtained through torture from the 9/11 Report, we will be left without any narrative at all to explain those events. And I think that it has to be done. This is bad, very, very bad. Maybe the most horrific form of propaganda.

Calls have already been made to reject the findings of the 9/11 Commission, even by one of the actual commissioners.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3041310&mesg_id=3041310




A coverup like this one might be impossible to produce without the use of torture.

There might not be any official story of what happened leading up to 9/11 without the torture.

This is not right.

[Time for change]

24. I think that's the best explanation for why our govt. tortures than any I've read to date

Though I am now reading Philip Sands' book, "Torture Team", which may provide additional insight.

I think that the 9/11 Commission was compromised by far more than the use of torture. I think it is a despicable and transparent cover-up that twisted everything around to suit their purposes, whatever they were. One wonders if they had someone dictating the outcome to them. I read Shenon's book, and it was helpful, but still leads an awful lot of questions unanswered. I think that David Griffins' book sheds much more light on the subject than Shenon's.

So, who was the Commissioner who has now disavowed the report?

[Usrename]

25. Perhaps they haven't disavowed it, they just don't seem to believe it.

My language may be a little strong on that point, and I was referring mainly to Bob Kerrey, but I'm also thinking about Max Cleland, who has been the most outspoken in saying that more has to be done.

Nobody seems to be very proud of their own work, not even the co-chairs:

The co-chairs of the Commission now admit that the Commission largely operated based upon political considerations.

Chairman Thomas Kean says that the CIA intentionally impeded the 9/11 Commission's investigation and says: “I’m upset that didn’t tell us the truth.”

Co-chair Hamilton says of the CIA's cover up and destruction of tapes of interrogation of people allegedly connected with 9/11 "Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes," says Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, in the wake of reports the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two al-Qaida suspects. "Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge," adds Hamilton.

Hamilton also says "I don't believe for a minute we got everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, that the 9/11 debate should continue, and that the 9/11 Commission report was only "the first draft" of history.

http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2007/12/they-dont-believe-it-why-do-you.html