In this next Article of the The Washington Post there you made read this article of abuse called:
Call Cruelty What It Is
By Tom Malinowski
Monday, September 18, 2006; Page A17
President Bush is urging Congress to let the CIA keep using "alternative" interrogation procedures -- which include, according to published accounts, forcing prisoners to stand for 40 hours, depriving them of sleep and use of the "cold cell," in which the prisoner is left naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and doused with cold water.
Bush insists that these techniques are not torture -- after all, they don't involve pulling out fingernails or applying electric shocks. He even says that he "would hope" the standards he's proposing are adopted by other countries. But before he again invites America's enemies to use such "alternative" methods on captured Americans, he might benefit from knowing a bit of their historical origins and from hearing accounts of those who have experienced them. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for the president's reading list.
He might begin with Robert Conquest's classic work on Stalin, "The Great Terror." Conquest wrote: "When there was time, the basic [Soviet Secret police] method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the 'conveyor' -- continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? . . . At any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was as painful as any torture."
Conquest stated: "Interrogation usually took place at night and with the accused just roused -- often only fifteen minutes after going to sleep. The glaring lights at the interrogation had a disorientating effect." He quoted a Czech prisoner, Evzen Loebl, who described "having to be on his feet eighteen hours a day, sixteen of which were devoted to interrogation. During the six-hour sleep period, the warder pounded on the door every ten minutes. . . . If the banging did not wake him, a kick from the warder would. After two or three weeks, his feet were swollen and every inch of his body ached at the slightest touch; even washing became a torture."
Conquest quoted a Polish prisoner, Z. Stypulkowski, from 1945: "Cold, hunger, the bright light and especially sleeplessness. The cold is not terrific. But when the victim is weakened by hunger and sleeplessness, then the six or seven degrees above the freezing point make him tremble all the time. . . . After fifty or sixty interrogations with cold and hunger and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an automaton -- his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state, he is often convinced he is guilty."
Next on the list: Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago." Solzhenitsyn describes the experience of prisoner Anna Skripnikova in 1952: "Sivakov, Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze State Security Administration, said to her: 'The prison doctor reports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That's too low, you bitch! We're going to drive it up to 340 so you'll kick the bucket, you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no broken bones. We'll just not let you sleep.' And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in interrogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in and shouted: 'Open your eyes or I'll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up."
Elsewhere, Solzhenitsyn writes: "Sleeplessness . . . befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own 'I.' "
Finally, the president might review the memoirs of former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, who describes experiencing sleep deprivation in a Soviet prison in the 1940s: "In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget. . . . Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it. . . . I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty. He promised them -- if they signed -- uninterrupted sleep!"
The Soviets understood that these methods were cruel. They were also honest with themselves about the purpose of such cruelty -- to brutalize their enemies and to extract false confessions, rather than truthful intelligence. By denying this, President Bush is not just misleading us. He appears to be deceiving himself.
The writer is Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
After reading this article it makes you feel sick in your stomach after all this time with Mr. Bush at your side!
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Its Time To Get Rid Of PRESIDENT BUSH !
If you want read this article about torture then think again, you should read about it:
A License to Abuse;
Mr. Bush says he has "one question" for Congress. The right answer to it is "no."
Sunday, September 17, 2006; Page B06
PRESIDENT BUSH made crystal clear Friday that he has one overriding concern about the legislation on foreign detainees before Congress. His "one test," he said, was whether Congress would authorize what he repeatedly called "the program" -- that is, the CIA's network of secret prisons and its brutal treatment of the people in them. "Congress has got a decision to make," Mr. Bush declared during a news conference. "Do you want the program to go forward or not?"
That is indeed the most important question before Congress and the nation. So allow us to elaborate, again, exactly what Mr. Bush means by "the program." He's talking about the practice of sequestering terrorist suspects indefinitely and without charge in secret foreign locations and holding them incommunicado even from the International Red Cross. Until recently, such "disappearances" were the signature of Third World dictatorships. U.S. adoption of them has roiled relations with our closest European allies and impeded collaboration with foreign police and intelligence services.
Mr. Bush also wants the CIA to be able to treat its detainees to such practices as "cold cell," or induced hypothermia, in which detainees are held naked in near-freezing temperatures and repeatedly doused with water; "long standing," in which prisoners are handcuffed in an uncomfortable standing position and forced to remain there for up to 40 hours; and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Throughout the world and for decades, such practices have been called torture. That's what the United States called them when they were used by the Soviet KGB. As the president himself tacitly acknowledges, they violate Geneva and other international conventions as well as current U.S. law. News that the United States has used these techniques -- as well as waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that simulates drowning -- has gravely damaged U.S. standing in the world and the fight against terrorism. It increases the danger that captured U.S. servicemen will be exposed to similar treatment by nations that might otherwise feel obliged to respect the Geneva standards.
When Mr. Bush was asked Friday whether he wasn't in effect seeking sanction for torture, he responded with an evasion. He claimed that the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3 is "very vague" and that his proposal would provide "clarity" for CIA professionals. In fact, the opposite is true.
Common Article 3, which prohibits cruel treatment and humiliation, is an inflexible standard. The U.S. military, which lived with it comfortably for decades before the Bush administration, just reembraced it after a prolonged battle with the White House. The Army issued a thick manual this month that tells interrogators exactly what they can and cannot do in complying with the standard. The nation's most respected military leaders have said that they need and want nothing more to accomplish the mission of detaining and interrogating enemy prisoners -- and that harsher methods would be counterproductive.
Mr. Bush wants to replace these clear rules with a flexible and subjective standard -- one that would legalize any method that does not "shock the conscience." What shocks the conscience? According to Mr. Bush's Justice Department, the torture techniques described above -- and at least in the past, waterboarding -- do not, "in certain circumstances." So Mr. Bush's real objection to Common Article 3 is not that it is vague. It is that it will not permit abusive practices that he isn't willing publicly to discuss or defend.
Rather than admit that he wants to legalize disappearances and torture, Mr. Bush ominously warns that "the program" won't continue unless Congress passes his bill. He says "time's running out," even though it's not. There are no detainees in the CIA prisons at the moment, according to the president, and the only clock running out is that measuring the midterm election campaign. There is no need for Congress to act in the next two weeks. But if it does, the clear answer to Mr. Bush's question, endorsed by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and a host of other responsible Republican and military leaders, is "no." For both moral and practical reasons, the country should reject this fundamental violation of its principles.
This article came out from the http://www.washingtonpost.com/ website. It makes you wonder that Bush can do these things is so unspeakable and immoral as well.
When I said about getting rid of Mr. Bush; I mean "it's time to get rid of Bush for good!" Think about it.
A License to Abuse;
Mr. Bush says he has "one question" for Congress. The right answer to it is "no."
Sunday, September 17, 2006; Page B06
PRESIDENT BUSH made crystal clear Friday that he has one overriding concern about the legislation on foreign detainees before Congress. His "one test," he said, was whether Congress would authorize what he repeatedly called "the program" -- that is, the CIA's network of secret prisons and its brutal treatment of the people in them. "Congress has got a decision to make," Mr. Bush declared during a news conference. "Do you want the program to go forward or not?"
That is indeed the most important question before Congress and the nation. So allow us to elaborate, again, exactly what Mr. Bush means by "the program." He's talking about the practice of sequestering terrorist suspects indefinitely and without charge in secret foreign locations and holding them incommunicado even from the International Red Cross. Until recently, such "disappearances" were the signature of Third World dictatorships. U.S. adoption of them has roiled relations with our closest European allies and impeded collaboration with foreign police and intelligence services.
Mr. Bush also wants the CIA to be able to treat its detainees to such practices as "cold cell," or induced hypothermia, in which detainees are held naked in near-freezing temperatures and repeatedly doused with water; "long standing," in which prisoners are handcuffed in an uncomfortable standing position and forced to remain there for up to 40 hours; and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Throughout the world and for decades, such practices have been called torture. That's what the United States called them when they were used by the Soviet KGB. As the president himself tacitly acknowledges, they violate Geneva and other international conventions as well as current U.S. law. News that the United States has used these techniques -- as well as waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that simulates drowning -- has gravely damaged U.S. standing in the world and the fight against terrorism. It increases the danger that captured U.S. servicemen will be exposed to similar treatment by nations that might otherwise feel obliged to respect the Geneva standards.
When Mr. Bush was asked Friday whether he wasn't in effect seeking sanction for torture, he responded with an evasion. He claimed that the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3 is "very vague" and that his proposal would provide "clarity" for CIA professionals. In fact, the opposite is true.
Common Article 3, which prohibits cruel treatment and humiliation, is an inflexible standard. The U.S. military, which lived with it comfortably for decades before the Bush administration, just reembraced it after a prolonged battle with the White House. The Army issued a thick manual this month that tells interrogators exactly what they can and cannot do in complying with the standard. The nation's most respected military leaders have said that they need and want nothing more to accomplish the mission of detaining and interrogating enemy prisoners -- and that harsher methods would be counterproductive.
Mr. Bush wants to replace these clear rules with a flexible and subjective standard -- one that would legalize any method that does not "shock the conscience." What shocks the conscience? According to Mr. Bush's Justice Department, the torture techniques described above -- and at least in the past, waterboarding -- do not, "in certain circumstances." So Mr. Bush's real objection to Common Article 3 is not that it is vague. It is that it will not permit abusive practices that he isn't willing publicly to discuss or defend.
Rather than admit that he wants to legalize disappearances and torture, Mr. Bush ominously warns that "the program" won't continue unless Congress passes his bill. He says "time's running out," even though it's not. There are no detainees in the CIA prisons at the moment, according to the president, and the only clock running out is that measuring the midterm election campaign. There is no need for Congress to act in the next two weeks. But if it does, the clear answer to Mr. Bush's question, endorsed by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and a host of other responsible Republican and military leaders, is "no." For both moral and practical reasons, the country should reject this fundamental violation of its principles.
This article came out from the http://www.washingtonpost.com/ website. It makes you wonder that Bush can do these things is so unspeakable and immoral as well.
When I said about getting rid of Mr. Bush; I mean "it's time to get rid of Bush for good!" Think about it.
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