Ex-CIA executive director admits waterboarding is ‘torture’

Since, there's so much written about torture / "enhanced interrogation" techniques at Guantanamo Bay, there's nothing much left to comment on it. However, I would like to point out one thing this article mentions about these "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

As the article mentions that some of these torture techniques have been borrowed from the "torture book" of Nazi Germany.

So, it's all good & ok to vilify Nazis and describe Adolf Hitler as the most despicable human who ever lived, but it's all good and ok to copy the torture tactics from Nazis & apply them extensively on people who are still waiting for the lawful punishments for their alleged crimes.

Think of it like this; you hate that coworker at your workplace who bullies everyone & everyone is afraid of him/her. Would you, a nice person, copy & act like that bully & still think that you are not only a nice person, but people are respecting you because you are still being a considered a nice person by others?

Or what if your husband or boyfriend start copying tactics & methods of a rapist? Would you still think that he is a nice person with whom you are or willing to have a family?

Furthermore, perhaps, Nazis were using these "enhanced interrogation" techniques to extract info from Jews. They wanted to eliminate all Jews from lands they had occupied. Perhaps, they labelled "Jews" as "terrorists" & considered themselves & their nations / occupied lands to be threatened by Jews, & hence, wanted to extract info from captured Jews in any way they can, so they can exterminate all of them. Now, what if, we replace "Nazis" with "American military" & "Jews" with "Muslims". Lo and behold, we got Gitmo !!!

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https://www.rt.com/usa/311532-cia-torture-gitmo-interrogation/

The most senior CIA officer on record yet has said he’s “comfortable with saying” that waterboarding & related interrogation methods were “torture.” He was commenting on the post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” tactics used by the Bush Administration.

The remarks by former executive director of the CIA, Alvin ‘Buzzy’ Krongard (2001-2004), were made to BBC’s Panorama. The third most senior former official at the agency was asked if he thought waterboarding & related tools amounted to torture.

“Well, let's put it this way, it is meant to make him (the suspect) as uncomfortable as possible. So I assume, without getting into semantics, that's torture. I'm comfortable with saying that."

The torture debate has never let up. President Barack Obama famously put an end to torture in 2009, but failed to prosecute senior Bush-era officials for running such programs.

In the past, the position of all Bush-era officials was overwhelmingly that the euphemistically-called “enhanced interrogation” is not torture, as it was approved by the White House at the time. Those techniques included, aside from waterboarding, sleep deprivation, forcing detainees into uncomfortable physical positions, slamming them into flexible walls, as well as cramming them into small spaces, beating them physically & subjecting them to ice-cold baths.

Guantanamo Bay, which Obama has several times promised to shut down, is still operating. Panorama writes how one detainee, Abu Zubayadh, accused of being a key Al-Qaeda recruiter, has been in detention there since 2002. During these 14 years, he has regularly been stuffed into a box barely larger than a square meter, sometimes for 29 hours at a time. The person is forced to sit in a crouched position, with no room to breathe or do anything else.

Another, upright, coffin-shaped box was also used. Abu spent more than 11 days confined in that.

All the methods were taken from the CIA’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance & Escape) handbook on resisting interrogation. Some of the torture methods date back to Nazi Germany.

SERE military instructor Malcolm Nance talked to Panorama, explaining how “these close confinement boxes were used by the SS… They would stuff these British and American agents into them and drive them mad.”

The practice was banned by the Geneva Conventions, but this ban didn’t prevent its use on Guantanamo Bay inmates.

A host of other methods thought to have been banned were uncovered in last December’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, which dealt with the interrogation of terror suspects in secret CIA prison facilities.

According to Krongard, any intelligence extracted that the Brits found interesting & “particularly represented a threat” was shared with them by the Americans. "I can't think of two intelligence services working in a more harmonious or closer [way] and that I think, had a lot to do with the relationship at the top," he added.

When asked if he thought the British knew or approved of the interrogation methods, Krongard said: “It’s hard for me to think that they didn’t, they’re professional intelligence people, I mean obviously.”

However, when the BBC approached the Foreign Office to ask whether accepting information gathered through torture was fine, it received an adamant reply: “We do not condone it, nor do we ask others to do it on our behalf."

The results of the Senate Intelligence Committee probe were published last December. Though much of the report was redacted, it contained shocking findings about what was euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including the admission that they were ultimately ineffective.

Iraq war was a mistake, say today's White House hopefuls

So, after killing thousands upon thousands of Iraqis & leaving their country in a mess, American leadership is essentially saying, "oops, my bad."

When every sane person from Alaska to Australia & Russia to Chile was uttering the same mantra that attacking Iraq is a huge mistake, American leadership not only turned a deaf ear & blind eye to those sane voices, but they forced / incentivize their allies to join them in this non-sense of a war. Did those sane people had any more intelligence about Iraq than American CIA & British MI6 & all those other spying agencies US has around the world?

As I posted a picture & quote from the 2012 movie, Emperor, recently in my blog, in which a friend of Emperor Hirohito of Japan summarizes the past 100 or so years of international land occupation & warfare, to General Fellers (Matthew Fox). He said that Japan took the Singapore & Malaya from British, & Philippines from the Americans, who themselves took it from the Spanish. Britain & Portugal had long ago occupied Chinese territory (Hong Kong & Macao). But nobody ever tried to convict French, Dutch, British, & American leadership for their wartime transgressions, but Japan does the same thing (which was wrong, of course) once (in World War 2), & Americans are looking very intently in trying to punish the Japanese leaders.

Fast forward a few more decades & Iraq invades Kuwait & Russia annexes parts of Ukraine & US & its allies start talking about illegal land grabs & defending the freedoms of Kuwaitis & Ukrainians. But did Americans think about the Iraqi freedoms when they attacked Iraq & killed thousands of innocent civilians & turned that country in a mess, & all based on lies & deceptions?

Even if we forget about Iraqis for a minute, then what about all those American taxpayers who dutifully paid taxes, while living on meagre incomes themselves, & their own government leaders threw away their taxes, amounting to in the billions, in foreign lands, in international wars, from which US gained nothing, except, perhaps, creating more lone-wolf terrorists & terrorist organizations (ISIS)? What about those almost 5,000 American soldiers who died in Iraq fighting a war based on lies & with no positive results?

All those billions of dollars would've reduced education costs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've reduced / eliminated healthcare costs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've created millions of jobs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've helped American businesses in raising minimum wages (while American government would've reduce the burden of mandatory increased wages through subsidies etc.). All those billions of dollars would've made the lifestyle of Americans much better, all the while creating no terrorists in foreign lands.

In America, the common perception is that a victim doesn't get justice until the criminal is punished, in whatever way punishment befits the crime. In American corporate culture, when an employee makes such a huge mistake where billions of $$$ are sunk in a venture & receives no benefit whatsoever out of that venture, he/she is summarily fired from his/her job.

It seems to me that the rules of life for American leaders is quite different than American public. While one gets punished for a small mistake, the other goes scot-free for killing thousands of Iraqis & Americans, throwing away billions of its own citizens' hard-earned money, & helped in creating a much bigger menace in such terrorist organizations as ISIS & lone-wolf terrorists. This is American democracy & freedom hard at work.
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http://www.khaleejtimes.com/article/20150517/ARTICLE/305179939/1028

A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.

Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major contenders for president in both parties find it best to say that 4,491 Americans & countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged.

Many people have been saying that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more & more Republican politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.

It hasn’t been an easy evolution for those such as Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, now favoured to win her party’s nomination, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in the Senate. That vote, & her refusal to fully disavow it, cost her during her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war.

In her memoir last year, Clinton wrote that she had voted based on the information available at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain & simple.”

What might seem a hard truth for a nation to acknowledge has become the safest thing for an American politician to say — even Bush’s brother.

The fact that Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, was pressured ... into rejecting, in hindsight, his brother’s war “is an indication that the received wisdom, that which we work from right now, is that this was a mistake,” said Evan Cornog, a historian & dean of the Hofstra University school of communication.

Or as Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.”

Santorum didn’t always see the war that way. He voted for the invasion as a senator & continued to support if for years. ...

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, as a Republican candidate in 2008, said invading Iraq had been “the right decision.” But on his way to winning the 2012 Republican nomination, Romney said the war never would have happened if US & world leaders had realised Iraq didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction.

It’s an easier question for presidential hopefuls who aren’t bound by family ties or their own congressional vote for the war, who have the luxury of judging it in hindsight, knowing full well the terrible price Americans paid & the continuing bloodshed in Iraq today.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio & Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 & so didn’t have to make a real-time decision with imperfect knowledge. Neither was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who served an earlier stint in Congress.

All these Republicans said last week that, in hindsight, they would not have invaded Iraq with what’s now known about the faulty intelligence that wrongly indicated Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

They didn’t go as far, however, as war critics such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a declared Republican candidate, who says it would have been a mistake even if Saddam were hiding such weapons. ...

Former President George W. Bush & his vice-president, Dick Cheney, still maintain that ousting a brutal & unpredictable dictator made the world safer.

In his 2010 memoir, Decision Points, Bush said he got a “sickening feeling” every time he thought about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction & he knew that would “transform public perception of the war.”

But he stands by his decision.

The war remains a painful topic that politicians must approach with some care.

Jeb Bush, explaining his reluctance to clarify his position on the war’s start, said “going back in time and talking about hypotheticals,” the would-haves & the should-haves, does a disservice to the families of soldiers who gave their lives.

When he finished withdrawing US troops in December 2011, Obama predicted a stable, self-reliant Iraqi government would take hold. Instead, turmoil & terrorism overtook Iraq & American leaders & would-be presidents are struggling with what to do next. The US now has 3,040 troops in Iraq as trainers & advisers & to provide security for American personnel & equipment.

For the most part, the public & the military — like the politicians — are focused less on decisions of the past than on the events of today & how to stop the Daesh militants who have overrun a swathe of Iraq & inspired terrorist attacks in the West.

“The greater amount of angst in the military is from seeing the manifest positive results of the surge in 2007 & 2008 go to waste by misguided policies in the aftermath,” said retired US Army Col. Peter Monsoor, a top assistant to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad during that increase of US troops in Iraq.

“Those mistakes were huge & compounded the original error of going into Iraq in the first place,” said Monsoor, now a professor of military history at Ohio State University. “There’s plenty of blame to go around. What we need is not so much blame as to figure out what happened & use that knowledge to make better decisions going forward.”

Nightmare: Masked IDF troops interrogate & traumatise Palestinian kids

Didn't you know stones are a very dangerous weapon of mass destruction? (sarcasm)

When IDF (Israeli Defence Force) is going to treat Palestinian kids like this, then will these kids think of Israelis (civilian & military) as their saviour & respect their lives? Obviously, they won't. Then, they are going to attack Israel after growing up. And when they do that, the Western media will run with the story that Palestinians are radicalizing their children & training them to be suicide bombers & telling their kids to kill innocent Israelis.

Just like wrongful prison sentences grew hatred among African-Americans for the law enforcement & the judiciary, which spilled out, & still spilling out, in city-wide, state-wide, & country-wide anger, in US, then how can the people in the West think that treating children like this (interrogating them in the dead of night, arresting them, & harassing them ... for merely throwing stones at armed soldiers) is going to earn Israeli soldiers & civilians any sympathy from these children?

"The arrested children are tied & blindfolded" ... like Gitmo adult detainees. US is maligned all over the world for the abusive treatment of Guantanamo detainees. How many in the world are maligning Israel for its abusive treatment of Palestinian children?

But, hey, we Canadians can't criticize Israel at all. After all, under the auspices of Stephen Harper, Israelis can criticize Israel for its actions, but if Canadians do it, then we will be imprisoned for hate speech.

Isn't the West so fair & balanced? (rhetorical question) !!!
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http://rt.com/news/244477-palestine-children-night-interrogation/

Videos have emerged exposing masked IDF soldiers raiding Palestinian homes in the dead of night to interrogate children suspected of throwing stones at the Israeli military. Hundreds of underage are prosecuted each year in the occupied territories.
 
B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has posted two videos to the web showing what it claims are masked Israeli soldiers searching Palestinian homes at night in Hebron on February 23 this year.
 
The soldiers, in full combat gear & with Tavor assault rifles at the ready, order to all kids in the house be brought out, ignoring protests of the parents that the children are fast asleep.
 
The company officer explains that the soldiers came at such an hour because stones are thrown at Israeli service personnel “all day long.”

The officer tells an indignant Palestinian father that he doesn’t need to “explain his schedule” to him & orders the unit to “use your barrels right on the rooms you haven’t yet checked or opened.”
 
“Do you sometimes throw stones here?” a nine-year-old boy is asked.
 
Children on the videos are of varying ages, from 8 to 16. The officer orders all children to be photographed when the procedure is over.

“The children were shaking with fear,” Mirvat Qafishah, 37, a mother of six, told B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Ja’bari about the soldiers’ search of her home.

“My children were really scared,” Nayef Da’na, 53, a father of seven, also told B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Ja’bari about the armed soldiers’ entry into his home.
 
It is not out of the ordinary for children to suffer mistreatment from the Israeli military.
 
IDF soldiers are subduing young suspects on arrest; there is at least one piece of video evidence of Israeli soldiers setting a dog on a Palestinian youth.
 
Though the military promised a full inquiry into that incident, human rights activist Bill Van Esveld told RT he has no doubt that the incident is going to be dropped.

“The incidents we know of have had no kind of inquiry,” he said.
 
The military cannot treat civilians as though they are potential criminals, nor is the military permitted to use its soldiers as a deterrent against civilians, B'Tselem wrote in an article dedicated to the incident, calling the Israel security forces’ policy of entering the homes of Palestinian civilians by night “unjust & terrifying.”
 
“The Israeli military, unfortunately, has a very poor record for accountability. There is no indication that the night arrests of children, which is a policy that has been going on for years, & that is clearly approved by the higher echelons,” Van Esveld revealed, stressing that the problem is not the soldiers carrying out such orders, but the officials who order this policy to be implemented.
 
Bill Van Esveld believes that mistreatment of children won't stop soon. Only “serious international pressure” could force Israel to put an end to unlawful policies of using attack dogs on kids & breaking into homes.
 
The statistics of mistreatment of youngsters in the West Bank is disturbing.
 
According to Defense for Children International Palestine, up to 700 youngsters 12-17 years old are prosecuted in Israeli military courts every year, which is about two kids more in custody every day.
 
The underage of the West Bank are arrested, interrogated & detained by the Israeli army, police or security agents. The arrested children are tied & blindfolded.
 
Then they are taken to interrogation centers, some of which exist on the territory of settlements on the occupied territories. They are not given the right to be accompanied by a parent during interrogation. When questioned, the children are rarely informed of their rights.
 
The interrogation techniques include “intimidation, threats & physical violence with a clear purpose of obtaining a confession.” The documents presenting to children sometimes are in Hebrew, a language not many Palestinian children speak, the organization informed.
 
It is estimated that over 15 years, around 8,000 children have been detained & prosecuted.
 
The majority were charged with throwing stones.

"Drones vs Torture" by Rick McKee

"Drones vs Torture" - Rick McKee, Augusta Chronicle, Augusta, GA, US

Brutal Guantanamo interrogator accused of planting evidence

A Guantanamo Bay interrogator responsible for implementing brutal methods at the prison allegedly used similar tactics to extract murder confessions from non-white citizens during his 30-year spell as a Chicago detective.
 
Richard Zuley is accused of shackling suspects to police precinct walls for hours on end, threatening to harm their families & pressurizing them into implicating themselves & others.
 
Apparently targeting minority Americans, the detective's brutal regime resulted in at least 1 wrongful conviction - & other cases being thrown into doubt following accusations of abuse.
 
The shocking details, uncovered in an investigation by the Guardian, further damage the reputation of a country still reeling from recent revelations of wartime torture by the CIA.
 
Zuley was a detective on Chicago's north side from 1977 to 2007 & allegedly spent years engaging in brutal interrogation tactics, which are said to have included threatening subjects with the death penalty if they failed to cooperate.
 
He was also accused of planting evidence in one high-profile murder case where there was pressure to gain a speedy conviction.
 
As a Navy reserve lieutenant, he also carried out work for the military, telling a Chicago court in the mid 1990s that he did counter-terrorism work for Naval intelligence while continuing his role as a detective.
 
He was recruited to the Guantanamo Bay operation in 2002 - with U.S. military commanders believing he was just the man they had been searching for - having spent 3 decades cleaning up the streets of Chicago.
 
He says he was sent to Cuba as the 'liaison officer for the European Command' & was assigned to the prison's intelligence collection task force.
 
The detective took charge of the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, described in official government reports & a best-selling memoir as one of the most brutal ever conducted at the US prison.
 
Slahi was seen as a priority interrogation target upon arriving at the wartime jail in August 2002.
 
He was a veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, & US officials suspected he would have information on al-Qaida’s recruitment of the 9/11 hijackers in Europe.
 
Stuart Couch, a former Marine lieutenant colonel & military commissions prosecutor, described Slahi's treatment as 'unconscionable'. He said: 'I've never seen anyone stoop to those levels,' Stuart Couch, ... said according to the Guardian.
'It's unconscionable, from a perspective of a criminal prosecution – or an interrogation, for that matter.'
 
Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the now-shuttered Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantánamo, called Zuley’s interrogation of Slahi 'illegal, immoral & ineffective'.
 
While his methods at Guantanamo soon came to light, his shameful tactics, honed over years behind closed doors in Chicago police stations, have not received the same public scrutiny.
 
Several people in Illinois say they were wrongly convicted of crimes following coerced confessions extracted by Zuley & his teams.
 
An investigation into his methods & conviction records was launched following the 2013 state-attorney's decision to free an innocent man Zuley had helped send to prison for 23 years.
 
Lathieral Boyd, who was convicted of murder in 1990, has filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against him after spending half his life in prison.
 
On Tuesday, papers filed in federal court showed that the conviction-integrity unit of the Cook County state's attorney now wants to look at civilian complaints against Zuley relating to another wrongful-conviction case.
 
Another case highlighted by the Guardian includes that of Benita Johnson & Andre Griggs.
 
Griggs was a heroin addict & petty criminal who was accused of murder in 1994 after an informant claimed he boasted about it.
 
Griggs says he was handcuffed to a station wall for 'maybe 30 hours' - an ordeal he claims led him to sign a false confession.
Benita Johnson says she was also handcuffed to a precinct wall & implicated herself & former boyfriend Griggs after Zuley & his colleagues threatened to take away her children & seek the death penalty.
 
Describing her interrogation, Johnson said: 'Basically they just tortured me, mentally, & somewhat physically, with the cuffs, & screamed & hollered. I went through a lot.'
 
Zuley received praise from Chicago mayor Richard Daley for his successful interrogation of the 2 suspects.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2959879/Brutal-Guantanamo-interrogator-accused-planting-evidence-torturing-suspects-extract-murder-confessions-30-year-career-Chicago-detective.html

Killings in Europe in 2015