[Mb-civic] regarding torture

[richard haase]

regarding torture i can assure you the current regime
the far right the neo cons and the old cons
are for it
no mystery to that
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mha Atma Khalsa" <drmhaatma at yahoo.com>
To: "Michale Butler" <michael at michaelbutler.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 06, 2005 5:57 PM
Subject: [Mb-civic] regarding torture


>
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-rutten5nov05,0,7549651.column?coll=la-story-footer&track=morenews
>
> Los Angeles Times, Saturday, November 5, 2005
> Tim Rutten:
>
> Regarding Media
>
> Pervasive silence about torture issue
>
> OF all the ways in which the American news media have
> failed since
> Sept. 11, none may be more consequential than the mild
> and deferential eye
> it has cast on the Bush administration's adoption of
> torture as state
> policy.
>
> Who can forget the giddy months through the fall of
> 2001 when U.S. cable
> networks and newspaper op-ed pages actually staged
> debates - in some cases
> in front of live audiences -over how far we should go
> to "extract
> information" from any Al Qaeda members who fell into
> our hands?
>
> Ostensibly responsible Americans - officials and
> commentators alike -
> unashamedly sat and publicly discussed not only
> whether torture was licit,
> but also how and when it should be applied.
>
> The whole sorry spectacle reached its nadir when a
> purported civil
> libertarian, Harvard Law professor Allen Dershowitz,
> proposed procedures
> for obtaining "torture warrants." (The relevance of
> due process to a moral
> universe that sanctions the torment of other human
> beings is apparently an
> irony against which a Harvard professorship armors the
> mind.)
>
> All of this was abetted by a news media that somehow
> found it natural to
> adopt the verbal evasions of our budding Torquemadas.
> Phrases such as
> "coercive interrogation" and "harsh measures" began to
> turn up with
> regularity. Nobody even bothered to wink.
>
> One of the best is "rendition," which occurs when U.S.
> forces or
> intelligence agencies capture suspected terrorists and
> secretly turn them
> over to another country - Egypt, Jordan and Morocco
> apparently are
> favorites - where people aren't squeamish about a
> little coercion.
>
> We remain an ingenious people. Who but Americans would
> think of
> outsourcing torture?
>
> None of this is surprising. If recent history has
> taught us anything, it's
> that the road that brings hell to Earth is paved with
> euphemism.
>
> This week we passed another milestone on that path,
> when the
> Washington  Post's Dana Priest reported that "the CIA
> has been
> hiding and interrogating some of its most important al
> Qaeda captives at a
> Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to
> U.S. and foreign
> officials familiar with the arrangement."
>
> In her front page account, Priest wrote, "The secret
> facility is part of a
> covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four
> years ago that at
> various times has included sites in eight
> countries....The existence and
> locations of the facilities - referred to as 'black
> sites' in classified
> White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional
> documents are known
> to only a handful of officials in the United States
> and, usually, only to
> the president and a few top intelligence officials in
> each host country."
>
> According to the Post's story, "The CIA and the White
> House ... have
> dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency
> answer questions in open
> testimony about the conditions under which captives
> are held. Virtually
> nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities,
> what interrogation
> methods are employed with them, or how decisions are
> made about whether
> they should be detained or for how long."
>
> Now, why do we suppose our government wants to hold
> people secretly in
> foreign countries? Maybe it's because they want to do
> things to them that
> would be illegal inside the United States ... like,
> say, torture them?
> That would explain why Vice President Dick Cheney and
> CIA Director
>
> Porter J. Goss have so stubbornly resisted language
> written into the
> defense spending bill by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a
> one-time Vietnam
> POW, that would prohibit the cruel or inhumane
> treatment of any prisoner
> in U.S. custody, including those held by the CIA.
> Cheney and Goss aren't
> concerned, as their surrogates have argued, about
> tying the intelligence
> agencies' hands in some future, theoretical moment of
> national emergency.
> They're worried that they'll have to close down the
> clandestine torture
> chambers that are in operation now.
>
> And the American press continues to abet their
> sinister evasions with an
> indifference to consequence and diffidence to power
> that only can be
> called what it is: moral cowardice.
>
> Even the Post, which deserves full credit for exposing
> the existence of
> the White House's petite gulag, stepped back from the
> full disclosure it
> owed the American people. "The Washington Post is not
> publishing the names
> of the Eastern European countries involved in the
> covert program, at the
> request of senior U.S. officials," Priest wrote. "They
> argued disclosure
> might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those
> countries and elsewhere
> and could make them targets of possible terrorist
> retaliation."
>
> You can bet those officials argue that - and you can
> bet just as strongly
> that acceding to their demands shields the Post from
> being called
> unpatriotic, one of the favorite epithets this
> administration uses to
> bludgeon the press.
>
> But at least the Post was willing to take the risk of
> exposing most of
> this story. What should have been a torrent of
> follow-up reporting and
> commentary by other news organizations was barely a
> trickle by week's end.
>
> In fact, when a Washington-based human rights
> organization came forward to
> say it believes the CIA's secret prisons are in Poland
> and Romania, the
> only newspaper willing to print the allegations was
> Britain's Financial
> Times.
>
> The grotesqueries presented by this sordid story are
> almost too
> numerous to list. But one likely to be overlooked
> deserves to be noted.
> There is something particularly perverse about the
> United States inducing
> the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe to become
> its accomplices in
> all this.
>
> For decades, the iron curtain, captive nations and
> Soviet tyranny were
> staples of American political rhetoric - and of the
> U.S. news media's
> editorial pages. Seas of reportorial ink were spilled
> charting the murky
> reaches of the Gulag and the interlocking network of
> secret police
> agencies that maintained the cold grip of an ossified
> communism throughout
> the Eastern Bloc year after gray, numbing year.
>
> To make these points in this connection is not to
> mock. We were right, and
> the Soviet Union and its client governments were
> wrong.
>
> Now, we have to wonder whether the Bush administration
> fixed on Poland and
> Romania - or some other Eastern European democracy -
> precisely because it
> suspected that the long night of Soviet oppression had
> conditioned them to
> accept our "black sites" on their soil?
>
> Or did we think that societies desperate for a slice
> of the West's
> prosperity wouldn't mind selling just one more little
> piece of their
> collective souls to obtain Washington recommendation
> to the European
> Union?
>
> There was a time when American officials could stand
> up in public and -
> without blushing - describe the United States as "the
> leader of the free
> world."
>
> Could any of them do that now that this administration
> has adopted
> torture as an instrument of state policy?
>
> Sadly, the answer probably is yes. They lost the
> ability to blush when
> shame became a casualty of the war on terror.
>
>
>
>
>
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