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82 thoughts on “Senate Report on Torture”

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  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Jives

    “..about the Zerzetsen/gangstalking/MK-Ultra”
    ________________

    If you must use those pretentious words, Jonathan, could you at least get the “s”s and “z”s the right way round?

    Thanks.

  • Porkfright

    My Uncle used to have an apposite term which he would use with the annoying and apparently stupid, Habbacrouton. It was “Who rattled your cage?” What shows above, and that which you attempt to denigrate and derail, is the simple fact that much-vaunted “Liberal Democracies” are overall neither Liberal or Democratic. Surely time that some politicians were brought before The House or sent for a holiday at The Hague. Or both.

  • Jives

    Habbabkuk,

    Your role in this thread is to distract by focusing on small details like spelling.

    I can assure you that real victims of zersetsen(dead or alive) care little for the spelling amidst tbeir years of silent torture.

    You really are a piece of shit,a dirty cowardly weak piece if slimy shit.

    Go stuff your Financial Times in your ears so you cant hear the screams of the tortured.

    Piss off shill fake.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Jives

    Apologies for having rattled your cage, Jonathan.

    And further apologies for having to point out that you’ve still not got the spelling right (clue: there’s one “s” and one “z”)

  • lysias

    Far from having one “s” and one “z”, “zersetzen” has one “s” and two “z”‘s. I only mention this because I like to see a nitpicker (and distraction artist) hoist with his own petard.

    Now, can we get back to the subject of the thread, and dispense with the nitpicking?

  • Herbie

    Hard to believe, innit.

    Habby’s one and only utility to this forum has been as pasty-faced, clerkish proofreader.

    And now we find that he’s incompetent on that score as well.

  • Silvio

    U.S. Tortured and Killed Innocent People for the Specific Purpose of Producing False Propaganda

    snip

    But the specific type of torture used by the U.S. last decade is even worse … it was a systematic program of torture specially designed in order to intentionally create false confessions.

    Indeed, the entire purpose behind the U.S. torture program was to obtain false confessions.

    And the torture techniques used were in fact COMMUNIST techniques specifically designed to produce false confessions.

    snip

    In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.

    The Washington Post reported the same year:

    Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.

    So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense — in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a “ticking time bomb” scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks — in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.

    snip

    According to NBC News:

    Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

    At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”

    The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves.

    http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/12/gov-tortured-killed-innocent-people-specific-purpose-producing-false-propaganda.html

  • lysias

    Just read the section of the 9/11 Commission Report on the operational details of 9/11, and look in particular at the footnotes. Practically everything in that section is sourced to detainees, mainly ones that we know were tortured, ones that we know the staffers of the commission were denied access to. The whole section on how 9/11 happened is certainly a house of cards, and I strongly suspect a pack of lies. The CIA knew very well what Stalin’s NKVD used torture for, and it was not for determining the truth.

  • lysias

    The 9/11 Commission Report is just as much a political document as the Warren Commission Report, and no more reliable. They both had their preordained conclusions, which they proceeded to twist the evidence to reach.

  • Herbie

    Wonderful demolition of The Guardian’s editorial on The Torture Report, by Peter at Medialens:

    “how blatant U.S. war crimes and brutality are still framed in such a way so as to mitigate them, or more precisely, to mitigate the state carrying them out.”

    http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1418163309.html

    The Guardian not having a great week on the old diversity of opinion thing, what with the curious contract termination of one of their writers, Dr Nafeez Ahmed:

    “My experience at The Guardian — the highly-regarded liberal newspaper that broke the Edward Snowden whistleblowing stories — though particularly flagrant, illustrates just how entrenched and structural the problems are.”

    https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/manifesto-for-a-media-revolution-abf42a16c870

    He’s trying to set up his own crowd-funded media:

    http://www.patreon.com/nafeez

  • BrianFujisan

    Mods

    Jives is not a Public Figure.

    Whatever his real Name,

    Could we hav Habfeatures Stick to Jives’s Chosen name for the Blog…since he/she it iz Genuinely convinced this is Said individual’s ( j’s) real name.

    Furthermore, its nothing more than Goading of a long term poster.

  • Jives

    Habbabkuk,

    Interesting you use the term ‘cage rattling’ in your flawed pedantry too.

    Waterboarding,broken bottles in rectums,rape and death threats to family members and children,180 hours sleep deprivativion,boiling to death,constant beatings,mock executions,temperature extremes,confinement in tiny coffins…the horrific list goes on and on.

    And yet you choose to pick on spelling.

    That tells me everything i need to know about you.

    How terribly small you are Habbabkuk,how terribly small.

  • Silvio

    In the “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” department:

    The Water Cure
    Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.
    By Paul Kramer

    Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

    SNIP

    That is what, on April 14th, made the testimony of Charles S. Riley, a clerk at a Massachusetts plumbing-and-steam-fitting company, so explosive. A letter from Riley had been published in the Northampton Daily Herald in March of the previous year, describing the water-cure torture of Tobeniano Ealdama, the presidente of the town of Igbaras, where Riley, then a sergeant in the 26th Volunteer Infantry, had been stationed. Herbert Welsh had learned of Riley, and enlisted him, among other soldiers, to testify before the committee. Amid the bullying questions of pro-war senators, Riley’s account of the events of November 27, 1900, unfolded, and it was startlingly at odds with most official accounts. Upon entering the town’s convent, which had been seized as a headquarters, Riley had witnessed Ealdama being bound and forced full of water, while supervised by a contract surgeon and Captain Edwin Glenn, a judge advocate. Ealdama’s throat had been “held so he could not prevent swallowing the water, so that he had to allow the water to run into his stomach”; the water was then “forced out of him by pressing a foot on his stomach or else with [the soldiers’] hands.” The ostensible goal of the water cure was to obtain intelligence: after a second round of torture, carried out in front of the convent by a “water detail” of five or six men, Ealdama confessed to serving as a captain in the insurgency. He then led U.S. forces into the bush in search of insurgents. After their return to Igbaras, that night, Glenn had ordered that the town, consisting of between four and five hundred houses, be burned to the ground, as Riley explained, “on account of the condition of affairs exposed by the treatment.”

    SNIP

    There was, of course, an easier way than argument to end the debate. On July 4, 1902 (as if on cue from John Philip Sousa), Roosevelt declared victory in the Philippines. Remaining insurgents would be politically downgraded to “brigands.” Although the United States ruled over the Philippines for the next four decades, the violence was now, in some sense, a problem in someone else’s country. Activists in the United States continued to pursue witnesses and urge renewed Senate investigation, but with little success; in February, 1903, Lodge’s Republican-controlled committee voted to end its inquiry into the allegations of torture. The public became inured to what had, only months earlier, been alarming revelations. As early as April 16, 1902, the New York World described the “American Public” sitting down to eat its breakfast with a newspaper full of Philippine atrocities:

    It sips its coffee and reads of its soldiers administering the “water cure” to rebels; of how water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of the patients until their bodies become distended to the point of bursting; of how our soldiers then jump on the distended bodies to force the water out quickly so that the “treatment” can begin all over again. The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/25/the-water-cure

  • Tony_0pmoc

    Go For It Craig. I Love You Really.

    LordSnootyandHisPals • an hour ago
    Good to see that the stinking Blair and his erstwhile sidekick Straw are being outed today as accessories to torture.
    1 • Reply•Share ›
    Avatar
    tony_opmoc LordSnootyandHisPals • 31 minutes ago
    Craig Murray Got Sacked as a Diplomat for outing them 10 years ago. Other than that ..well he keeps banning me from his website cos I think he’s a tw@t. Otherwise I quite like the guy.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9spgagSHI&index=13&list=UU64hSlG2O44qyv-UHY4QkuA

    Craig Murray – Torture 1 of 7
    tonyopmoc

    Uploaded on Apr 28, 2009
    Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Provides Evidence on UK Government Complicity in Torture.

    http://www.parliament.uk

    UN Convention Against Torture

    Joint Committee on Human Rights
    • Edit• Reply•Share ›
    Avatar
    LordSnootyandHisPals tony_opmoc • 28 minutes ago
    Yes, Tony, I should have qualified my statement:

    Good to see that the stinking Blair and his erstwhile sidekick Straw are being outed by a Senate report as accessories to torture.
    • Reply•Share ›
    Avatar
    tony_opmoc LordSnootyandHisPals • 25 minutes ago
    Craig Murray’s going to write an article about it tomorrow if he hasn’t already. I read his book Murder in Samarkand whilst it was raining in the Indian Ocean. I was gobsmacked.

    Tony

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Lysias

    “Far from having one “s” and one “z”, “zersetzen” has one “s” and two “z”‘s. I only mention this because I like to see a nitpicker (and distraction artist) hoist with his own petard.”
    ______________

    Fair point, Lysias, but I think you know what I meant.

    At which Oxford college did you read “Greats”?

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Jives

    “Waterboarding,broken bottles in rectums,rape and death threats to family members and children,180 hours sleep deprivativion,boiling to death,constant beatings,mock executions,temperature extremes,confinement in tiny coffins…the horrific list goes on and on.

    And yet you choose to pick on spelling.”
    _________________

    Yes, because we are operating in the world of blogging and not the real world. The Report has said what it did (and what it had to)and I see little practical point in adding my own voice (and little practical point in the commenters on here in adding their voices) to the justified chorus of condemnation. Whereas there does seem to be some point – not a great one, I’ll admit – in getting you to spell properly a word of which you make considerable use.

    Consider the incident closed.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Cameron hunts with hounds (and runs with hare)

    http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/torture-always-wrong-says-david-cameron-after-report-on-cia-acts-632355

    And your next move to regain the moral high ground, Dave? Maybe you might care to find out how far into the shit we were dragged by your predecessor? Start by getting access to the rest (90%) of the report, and getting Sam to read it to you at bedtime?

    Yeah, yeah. You had to say that because you were talking to the Turks (not that they’d have cared overmuch if we’d been torturing Kurds). It’s time for hardworking families to move on, isn’t it?

  • Ant Heaford

    Vindicated & validated Mr. Murray – thank-you again for standing up and speaking out.

    Now, how do we go about getting Bliar & co. in the dock – is an e-petition the way forward?

  • Brendan

    @ Habba

    “But, with the previous gripe (“oh, there’ll never be a report, it’ll all get hushed up”) out of the way, you’re immediately off on the next tack – ie, “problem with the report is that nothing will happen”.”

    But it was hushed up – for 10 years. And people have lost their careers – Murray himself – and some whistleblowers are in prison. A report 10 years late is almost worthless. It’s pontificating after the fact.

    I’m not complaining about the report – precisely because I know its worthless. I’d rather there was a report than there wasn’t, but it’s not enough. In corporate circles there is a mantra: always ask for more. Perhaps us lefties should say the same? This report is not enough. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield – should be in prison. Blair should probably be in psychiatric care, because his mental health problems clearly need treatment.

    But nothing will happen, of course.

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