More ’sickening’ truths about torture soon to be revealed

David Edwards and Muriel Kane
The Raw Story
June 11, 2009

A crucial CIA Inspector General’s report from May 2004 is expected to reveal some long-hidden truths about the Bush administration’s use of torture.

According to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “This report is sort of the big kahuna in terms of what we have been waiting to see from the government’s own files on torture. That report, which is long and has been described by people who have seen it as ’sickening,’ apparently stopped the torture program in its tracks.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recently warned in a speech on the floor of the Senate that almost everything we think we know about the Bush administration’s torture program is wrong.

“There has been a campaign of falsehood about this whole sorry episode,” Whitehouse stated. “We’ve been misled about nearly every aspect of this program. … Measured against the information I’ve been able to get access to, the storyline that we have been led to believe … is false in every one of its dimensions.”

…….full article here

Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation

Andy Worthington.co.uk
June 10, 2009

“Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation” is a report I’ve compiled for Cageprisoners analyzing the weight records for prisoners at Guantánamo (released by the Pentagon in March 2007), which demonstrate that, from January 2002, when the prison opened, until February 2007, when these particular records came to an end, one in ten of the total population — 80 prisoners in total — weighed, at some point, less than 112 pounds (eight stone, or 50 kg), and 20 of these prisoners weighed less than 98 pounds (seven stone, or 44 kg).

The report is available here (as a PDF):
Guantanamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics Of Starvation

The following is the introduction to the report:

Today is the third anniversary of the deaths in Guantánamo of three prisoners, Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani. The anniversary comes just two weeks after the second anniversary of the death of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, the fourth prisoner to die in mysterious circumstances, and just eight days after the death of a fifth prisoner, Muhammad Salih. The authorities maintain that the men died by committing suicide, although doubts about this explanation have repeatedly been voiced by former prisoners. However, it is also significant that all five men were long-term hunger strikers.

…….full article here

Police ‘arrest innocent youths for their DNA’, officer claims

Hundreds of teenagers are having their DNA taken by police in case they commit crimes later in life, an officer has disclosed.

Murray Wardrop
Telegraph
June 4, 2009

Officers are targeting children as young as 10 with the aim of placing their DNA profiles on the national database to improve their chances of solving crimes, it is claimed.

The alleged practice is also described as part of a “long-term crime prevention strategy” to dissuade youths from committing offences in the future.

The claim comes amid widespread criticism of government proposals to store DNA profiles of innocent people, including some children, on the database for up to 12 years.

Civil liberty campaigners have condemned the tactic of as “diabolical” and said it showed contempt for children’s freedom.

A Metropolitan Police officer made the claims after figures were released showing that 386 under-18s had their DNA taken and stored by police last year in Camden, north London.

The officer said: “Have we got targets for young people who have not been arrested yet? The answer is yes. But we are not just waiting outside schools to pick them up, we are acting on intelligence.

…….full article here

9/11 Metastasizing: the Left’s Co-Dependency

Daily Kos
June 3, 2009

Heckler’s diary

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein relates how nations brutalized by the Chicago School’s savage capitalism and the Dirty War juntas enforcing it have recovered and developed a healthy immunity against more eviscerating shock therapy:

Any strategy based on exploiting the window of opportunity opened by a traumatic shock relies heavily on the element of surprise… in North America, the September 11 attacks were, at first pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative or anything that could bridge the gap between reality and understanding. Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable to those people who take advantage of chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a new narrative that offers perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make sense again.

That psychology pertains on both the individual and societal levels: a trauma that is never dealt with openly, but suppressed in the subconscious, festers, reinforcing crippling habits and sabotaging recovery. Maybe it is our reigning paradigm of dogmatic materialism that keeps us from acknowledging afflictions of the mind and spirit; imbibe a new pill to correct the faulty chemistry, or ingest an economic stimulus package to cure our destructive addiction to greed and gluttony. Consciousness, our scientists tell us, is a mere epiphenomenon of electrical brain circuits, so there can be no such thing as a collective “national psyche” capable of being wounded (socialist psychology!).

…….full article here

How MI5 blackmails British Muslims

Robert Verkaik
The Independent
May 21, 2009

Five Muslim community workers have accused MI5 of waging a campaign of blackmail and harassment in an attempt to recruit them as informants.

The men claim they were given a choice of working for the Security Service or face detention and harassment in the UK and overseas.

They have made official complaints to the police, to the body which oversees the work of the Security Service and to their local MP Frank Dobson. Now they have decided to speak publicly about their experiences in the hope that publicity will stop similar tactics being used in the future.

…….full article here

Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney

Paul Craig Roberts
Antiwar.com
May 21, 2009

America has lost her soul, and so has her president.

A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.

The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.

The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.

Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.

…….full article here

Obama on torture photos: cover-up and complicity

Bill Van Auken
WSWS.org
May 15, 2009

President Obama’s repudiation of his promise to comply with a court order and release Pentagon torture photos marks a qualitative deepening of the cover-up of the crimes carried out under Bush as well as their continuation under the new administration in only slightly altered form.

The president’s decision amounts to the deliberate suppression of evidence that the US military-intelligence apparatus, at the direction of the White House, carried out systemic torture.

The about-face on the torture photos is of a piece with a series of actions taken by the administration in recent months. These include the Obama Justice Department’s attempt to suppress lawsuits challenging extraordinary rendition, torture and illegal domestic spying, all hallmarks of the police-state apparatus erected under Bush in the name of a war on terrorism.

…….full article here

Executive Summary: What do the Experts Say About Torture?

Washington’s Blog
May 15, 2009

Here is a very brief summary of what the experts say about torture:

* Torture doesn’t work in providing information which will keep us safe

* Torture actually reduces our national security

* Most of those tortured were innocent

* They were not tortured in order to prevent terrorist attacks, but to create a false justification for the war in Iraq (by creating a false linkage between Iraq and Al Qaeda) (and see this).

Torture has also been used throughout history as a form of intimidation, to terrorize people into obedience. However, it is not yet clear whether or not this was one of the reasons that the Bush administration implemented a policy of torture.

* The 9/11 Commission report was primarily based upon confessions from those who were tortured. However, none of the information from those who confessed is credible. For example, one of the main sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was not even allowed to read. See also this, this, this and this.

* Prosecuting those in the U.S. who created the torture program will REDUCE attacks against the U.S. and against American troops

…….full article here

“Sadistic . . . violent . . . inhuman.”

Mike Malloy.com
May 13, 2009

They must be horrific. So violent, in fact, so obscene, so counter to even the basic tenets of human decency that President Barack Obama sought today to block the release of hundreds of photos showing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan being abused, violated, tortured. He ordered this reversal of his position – he had been in favor of the decision to release this further evidence of war crimes committed under orders from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – after military commanders warned that the images could inflame anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.

But, it is far worse than that. The reality is this: Anti-American sentiment could not be more “inflamed” than it already is in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Our policy of indiscriminate bombing after the location of a “target” has been determined has caused the deaths of hundreds of men, women and children in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Our policies of providing weapons of terror – such as white phosphorous, concussion bombs, advanced jet fighters, massive tanks bristling with the power to annihilate anything in its path, explosives packed in cases made of depleted uranium – to be used by Israel against an utterly defenseless Palestinian population is known throughout the Middle East, throughout the world, except, of course, here in the U.S.

…….full article here

Youtube censors US journalist

The London Daily News
May 12, 2009

Radio and internet journalist Alex Jones has been censored by the internet giant Youtube with the removal of the “Alex Jones Channel” from the site, causing revulsion across the United States and Europe, in what is increasingly being seen as another example of a “Big Brother” intervention in the democratic process.

Alex Jones best known for his investigative journalism around the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and his conspiratorial theories describes himself on his website infowars.com as:

“Syndicated radio journalist and documentary filmmaker Alex Jones has been on the front lines of the growing global information war from ground zero to the occult playgrounds of the power-mad elite.”

The “Alex Jones show” on YouTube was attracting around 1 million views a week, and was responsible for the “The Obama Deception” which has clocked 1,897,810 views.

…….full article here