Exercise R Us

Question:

And why wouldn’t it be legal? Just more of the same old crying when it is done to them what they have done to others. — Criticizing a religion is something that makes people squeamish, especially in the paranoid culture of political correctness. http://www.prophetofdoom.net/prologue.html

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> *** PENTAGON REPORT ARGUES TORTURE IS LEGAL IN WAR ON TERROR *** > A classified Pentagon report, providing a series of legal arguments > apparently intended to justify abuses and torture against detainees, appears > to undermine public assurances by senior U.S. officials, including President > George W. Bush that the military would never resort to such practices in the > "war on terrorism." > Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at > http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406torturelegal.html).

Response:

Izlam is very intolerant indeed, but swine can live without fear of slaughter.

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> *** PENTAGON REPORT ARGUES TORTURE IS LEGAL IN WAR ON TERROR *** > A classified Pentagon report, providing a series of legal arguments > apparently intended to justify abuses and torture against detainees, appears > to undermine public assurances by senior U.S. officials, including President > George W. Bush that the military would never resort to such practices in the > "war on terrorism." > Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at > http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406torturelegal.html).

Response:

Journalists from outside were able to visit places in Iraq where prisoners of Saddam Hussein’s regime had been held. When the Kurds captured Kirkuk, Gwynne Roberts described a visit: ‘ ‘The Kurds guided me into the pitch-black vaults of the security building used as a torture centre. In one cell pieces of human flesh -ear lobes -were nailed to the wall, and blood spattered the ceiling. A large metal fan hung from the ceiling and my guide told me prisoners were attached to the fan and beaten with clubs as they twirled. There were hooks in the ceiling used to suspend victims. A torture victim told me that prisoners were also crucified, nails driven through their hands into the wall. A favourite technique was to hang men from the hooks and attach a heavy weight to their testicles. ‘ ‘These reports were rightly front-page news, but that was partly because Saddam Hussein was the enemy in the Gulf War. The appalling nature of his regime was highly visible and the world was ready to listen to such accounts. For years Amnesty International and others had been reporting similar tortures in Iraq, with little resulting publicity. ‘ ‘And from Kuwait, soon after the Iraqis were driven out, came reports that it was the turn of Palestinians to be tortured. Victims of the new wave of torture were interviewed in Farwaniya Hospital. One Palestinian had half his body ‘1 was tortured with electrical shocks. I became paralysed. ..I was held by an intelligence unit. ..I do not know what is my destiny. I was captured only because I am a Palestinian. They threw me in this hospital. I want to get out of here…out of Kuwait…Please help me. ‘ One thing is clear from this. Cruelty infects the victims like a virus. It spreads itself, transmits itself through violence and anger aimed at the original perpetrator, you can become the perpetrator as well. Cruelty enhances domination. In domination there is safety. Saddam Hussein and others like him are perpetually concerned with personal safety, at the same time as they undermine it by greater and greater acts of cruelty. Glover goes on: ‘Three factors seem central. There is a love of cruelty. Also, emotionally inadequate people assert themselves by dominance and cruelty. And the resources which restrain cruelty can be neutralized. ‘ ‘ ….. Sometimes cruel treatment is a means to an end, such as intimidation. Fear abduction and torture was used to deter criticism by the military dictatorship in Argentina. Some Argentinians who brought habeas corpus cases on behalf of people who had ‘disappeared’ started to ‘disappear’ themselves. ‘ ‘ ….. Some of the appeal is that of exercising power over victims. Jacobo Timerman was tortured in Argentina under the military regime. He noticed sometimes a bond developed between torturer and victim, who could come to need each other. The victim could need a human voice. "For the torturer, it is a sense of omnipotence… the torturer needs to be needed by the tortured." He described one of the men offering him coffee, food and a blanket. Timerman refused the man’s offer to go to bed with a woman prisoner. His refusal made the man angry: "In some way he needs to demonstrate to me and to himself his capacity to grant things, to alter my world, my situation. To demonstrate to me that I need things that are inaccessible to me and which only he can provide." Those higher up also enjoyed the exercise of power. General Galtieri visited a centre where prisoners were held. To one woman, who had been blindfolded and tortured for months, he said,"If I say you live, you live, and if I say you die, you die. As it happens, you have the same Christian name as my daughter, and so you live." ‘

 *** PENTAGON REPORT ARGUES TORTURE IS LEGAL IN WAR ON TERROR ***

Response:

*** PENTAGON REPORT ARGUES TORTURE IS LEGAL IN WAR ON TERROR *** A classified Pentagon report, providing a series of legal arguments apparently intended to justify abuses and torture against detainees, appears to undermine public assurances by senior U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush that the military would never resort to such practices in the "war on terrorism." Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406torturelegal.html).

Response: