Red Cross report details CIA war crimes

[OneBlueSky]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/tort-a09.shtml

This week, the New York Review of Books released the full version of an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report detailing US Central Intelligence Agency torture of 14 “high value” terrorist suspects at prison “black sites” from 2001 until 2006. Earlier, it had produced excerpts of the report and an analysis by author Mark Danner.

The report makes explicit that the CIA violated the laws of war and basic human rights in its treatment of the prisoners, which included beatings, humiliations, sleep deprivation, and suffocation by water (“waterboarding”), among dozens of specifically named acts of brutality.

At several points, the 40-page report refers to CIA actions as illegal according to international law. The ICRC, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the body tasked with overseeing observance of the laws of war. That it has declared acts carried out by US intelligence personnel as torture carries enormous legal weight.

Yet the Obama administration has granted blanket immunity to CIA, military and Bush administration officials who ordered and carried out torture and other war crimes. An Obama administration spokesman, Mark Mansfield, told the New York Times that CIA head Leon Panetta “has stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.”

- much more . . .

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/tort-a09.shtml

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. Really Congress has been asleep when all this was going on.

Why didn't anyone kick up a fuss before?

[davekriss]

2. The Democratic leadership, albeit in minority status,

...was likely not "asleep" while this was going on. Which may be the single biggest reason there hasn't been and won't be any indictments for torture and war crimes (and illegal eavesdropping and lying to the American people to manufacture consent for war, and few-strings-attached TARP class thievery and on and on). FUBAR cubed, imho.

Surprise about torture by the American people comes as a surprise to me. We trained the fiercest of the South and Central American juntas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, for years. Those death and torture squads in places like El Salvador and Honduras in the eighties and earlier, terrorizing their own populations into oppressed passivity underneath right-wing regimes propped up by us -- they were our government's proxy force. The only thing different with the Bush administration is Bush dropped the pretense of proxy.

...And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation; a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands that erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.

-- Carolyn Forche, The Return, 1980 (I suggest reading it in its entirety, a great piece)

Until we prosecute, convict, and imprison our War Criminals, "We are all erased by them, and no longer resemble decent men."