IWETHEY v. 0.3.0 | TODO
1,095 registered users | 1 active user | 0 LpH | Statistics
Login | Create New User
IWETHEY Banner

Welcome to IWETHEY!

New History Will Not Absolve Us
[link|http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0735,hentoff,77643,6.html|Nat Hentoff] :
If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.

We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.

Only one congressman, Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has insisted on probing the legality of the CIA's techniques\ufffdso much so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush's nominee, John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA's top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn't object to the Justice Department's 2002 "torture" memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as "organ failure . . . or even death." (Any infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.

As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in chief), is "a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of abuse that was signed off on\ufffdat the White House, really\ufffdand then implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down. . . . They would put people naked for up to 40 days in cells where they were deprived of any kind of light. They would cut them off from any sense of what time it was or . . . anything that would give them a sense of where they were."

She also told of the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was not only waterboarded (a technique in which he was made to feel that he was about to be drowned) but also "kept in . . . a small cage, about one meter [39.7 inches] by one meter, in which he couldn't stand up for a long period of time. [The CIA] called it the dog box."

Whether or not there is another Nuremberg trial\ufffdand Congress continues to stay asleep\ufffdfuture historians of the Bush administration will surely also refer to Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, the July report by Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

The report emphasizes that the president's July executive order on CIA interrogations\ufffdwhich, though it is classified, was widely hailed as banning "torture and cruel and inhuman treatment"\ufffd"fails explicitly to rule out the use of the 'enhanced' techniques that the CIA authorized in March, 2002, "with the president's approval (emphasis added).

In 2002, then\ufffdSecretary of State Colin Powell denounced the "torture" memos and other interrogation techniques in internal reports that reached the White House. It's a pity he didn't also tell us. But Powell's objections should keep him out of the defendants' dock in any future international trial.


I don't have anything to add other than I think the article is worth reading.
Seamus
New Thanks.
New Ditto
Smile,
Amy
New If anyone should be hauled before another Nuremberg style
tribunal is Cal law professor John Yoo. [link|http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0728,hentoff,77169,6.html|More Hentoff] :

Suddenly, rising from the audience, Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, confronted Yoo: "What I heard you say was that the president could order torture without restraint from Congress. . . . That the president can order torture of prisoners of war in any way, any time, contravenes absolutely everything this country is supposed to stand for. . . . "

Yoo: "A lot of the arguments you make about America's standing in the world . . . those are all fine arguments, but those are not constitutional arguments. Those are arguments on how, as a society, we should exercise this constitutional power. . . . "

Slaughter: "If I hear you correctly, you are telling me that you would tell your client, the president of the United States, 'You may order pulling out somebody's fingernails. You may order having somebody's family member killed in front of them to extract information.'. . . Are you really saying that our Constitution allows a president to do that?"

Yoo: "Is there any provision that prevents him from doing that?"
Seamus
Expand Edited by Seamus Sept. 1, 2007, 07:05:11 PM EDT
New A common academic viewpoint - just like the leaders . . .
. . of the Khmer Rouge. See my post [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=291139|Of course I don't mean to pick on . . .].

To many academics any amount of death and suffering is justified in the name of "correctness" and truth is whatever they say it is.

I repeat: keep them on campus doing absurd research projects. Whatever funding those projects cost, it's a comparative bargain.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
     History Will Not Absolve Us - (Seamus) - (4)
         Thanks. -NT - (Another Scott)
         Ditto -NT - (imqwerky)
         If anyone should be hauled before another Nuremberg style - (Seamus) - (1)
             A common academic viewpoint - just like the leaders . . . - (Andrew Grygus)

I like when things catch fire and explode, which means I do not have your best interests in mind.
103 ms