So, while Obama still would like to keep looking forward and not backward (at all the bad stuff we did during the War Against Terror) I, just a regular American citizen, will look back for my President and quote what Glenn Greenwald said in a post on Salon.com back in August. In turn, Greenwald quotes, in his post, a 2004 CIA's Inspector General Report released due to a FOIA request made, not by the New York Times, or Time Magazine, or Newsweek, or any other mainstream news source. Greenwald reminds us that it was the ACLU who is uncovering the evidence required to go after torturers in our own country and not the news media. But that's a side note.
So, here's what Greenwald found was done in our name, to keep us "safe," and to preserve our wonderful freedom:
Threats of execution (img)
Threats to kill detainee and his children (img)
Threats to rape detainee's female relatives in front of him (img)
"Buttstroking" with rifles and knee kicks (img)
Blowing smoke in detainee's face for five minutes (img)
More "convincing and poignant" waterboarding of the type we prosecuted Japanese war criminals for using (img)
You can click each of those to see scans of the pages of the report that match up with the type of torture to read some of the details. Unfortunately, too many of the details have been redacted by the USG, but hey, at least we know for sure that this definitely happened. The government admitted it did these things and they all sound illegal to me.
Don't think they're that bad? Well, Greenwald adds:
The IG Report also documents numerous other abuses that have been documented by prior OLC memos, including having waterboarded detainees 82 and 183 times; hanging them by their arms until interrogators thought their shoulders might be dislocated; stepping on their ankle shackles to cause severe bruising and pain; putting them in a diapers and leaving them doused with water on cold concrete floors in cold temperatures to induce hypothermia, etc. Some of the numerous deaths of detainees during interrogations were also discussed (for details on detainee deaths, see here and here). After documenting all of that, the IG Report notes:
(img)
Yeah, so this stuff is all wrong. There has been no declaration of war against the country of Al Qeada, so we can't treat them as POWs and even if we could, we'd be forced to treat them better than this. These people are just that--people. They deserve a fair trial and every other right promised every human on the planet in the US Constitution. Just because we don't like them doesn't mean they stop being human. But if we do this stuff, it's we who stop being human.
Orignal From: Just a Friendly Reminder that We Tortured
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