Tortured Logic

While we may feel safer knowing the authorities will do the unspeakable to protect us from "the terrorists", what shell of a society are we left with?

Defense Secretary Charge with Torture

News broke this week that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was charged with war crimes for ordering torture, during his visit to France. He apparently fled the country to to avoid being arrested as a war criminal.

President Has Legal Power to Torture Children
Bush advisor John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody.Click here to here him say it.

An Account of Child Torture in Iraq

"He was very afraid, very alone, And he had the skinniest arms I had ever seen on a kid. And he was literally shaking from head to toe. His wrists were so small we couldn’t even put handcuffs on him. And I took pity on him. From the moment I saw him and was escorting him, I felt, you know, sorry for him. They threw water on him and they threw him in the back of a Humvee. Then they drove him around in the middle of the night, and it was very, very cold. And then, afterwards, they covered him with mud and showed him his arrested father whom they had also questioned using other methods. But he wouldn’t talk. The questioning specialists told me that to see his son in this state, that that’s what broke him, you know, it broke his heart to see his son like that. The father started to cry and promised to tell them whatever they wanted to know after that". Sergeant Samuel Provance of the US Army

Woman & Child Rape at U.S. run Iraqi Prison

"Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. OK? Videos. There are women there....The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has, and they’re in total terror it’s going to come out. It’s impossible to say to yourself, how did we get there, who are we, who are these people that sent us there." Seymour Hersh's ACLU Keynote Speech

US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan
Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said. Forbes Story

Bush Says the U.S. Doesn't Torture



Torture's History Hypocrisy

Soldiers in Vietnam use the waterboarding technique on an uncooperative enemy suspect near Da Nang in 1968. After WWII a Japanese soldier, Yukio Asano, was charged with a war crime and sentence to 15 years hard labor for the same activity.

U.S. lawmakers apologize to Canadian torture victim

U.S. lawmakers on Thursday offered apologies to a Canadian citizen who was deported by U.S. counterterrorism officials to Syria, where he says he was imprisoned and tortured. Lawmakers from both parties also called on the Bush administration to apologize to Maher Arar, a Syrian-born software engineer still barred from entering the United States even though the Canadian government has cleared him of any links to terrorist groups. An administration official said she was not aware of any plans for the White House to issue an apology to Arar. "The America I see and hear about today is not the same America I admired when I lived there from 1999 to 2001," he said. (Reuters)