Espionage, Torture and those seven paragraphs

For a telling commentary on yesterdays Appeal Court decision in the Binyam Mohamed torture evidence case, have a look at Obsolete's Blog. The whole thing is worth reading but a couple of quotes:

Reading the seven paragraphs that have finally been released detailing the CIA's treatment of Binyam Mohamed after today's ruling by the Court of Appeal, it's initially difficult to know quite why the government was so determined that they should remain secret. They tell us absolutely nothing that we didn't already know: that the US was systematically mistreating almost anyone that came into their custody in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; that this was just the start of the torture regime which Binyam Mohamed found himself under; that the CIA, despite the claims of our security services, had been letting them know just what they were doing to individuals connected to this country; and that despite knowing full well that what the CIA was doing to Mohamed at this early stage would breach our obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights, as found during the 1970s when the "five techniques" were outlawed in Northern Ireland, they did absolutely nothing to intervene to stop his mistreatment

 And....

Indeed, the only reason why the Court of Appeal decided that seven paragraphs could today be published was that far more gruesome evidence of the torture which Mohamed underwent was released by a US court in a judgement in November of last year. Lord Neuberger quotes from it in his section of today's ruling (paragraph 126):

[Mr Mohamed's] trauma lasted for two long years. During that time, he was physically and psychologically tortured. His genitals were mutilated. He was deprived of sleep and food. He was summarily transported from one prison to another. Captors held him in stress positions for days at a time. He was forced to listen to piercingly loud music and the screams of other prisoners while locked in a pitch-black cell. All the while, he was forced to inculpate himself and others in various plots to imperil Americans.
...
At page 58, she said that "[t]he [US] Government does not challenge or deny the accuracy of [Mr Mohamed's] story of brutal treatment" and repeated that point at pages 62 and 64. On pages 61-2, she said that his "persistence in telling his story" and "very vigorous… and very public ... pursu[ance of] his claims in the British courts" indicated that his evidence was true and "demonstrates his willingness to test the truth of his version of events in both the courts of law and the court of public opinion". In the passage just quoted from page 70 of her Opinion, she referred to Mr Mohamed's "lengthy prior torture" as an established fact.

Compared to the seven paragraphs we have today, it doesn't really get much more damning.

It moved me to make the following comment:

This sort of stuff really is your forte Obsolete. That is one cracking analysis which I wouldn't presume to add to, other than with a rather apposite quotation from Joseph Persico's 'Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage' (hat tip to Cryptome)

Espionage involves peeking at the other fellow's hand, marking the cards, cooking the books, poisoning the well, breaking the rules, hitting below the belt, cheating, lying, deceiving, defaming, snooping, eavesdropping, prying, stealing, bribing, suborning, burglarizing, forging, misleading, conducting dirty tricks, dirty pool, skulduggery, blackmail, seduction, everything not sporting, not kosher, not cricket. In short, espionage stands virtue on its head and elevates vice instead.

- all to further our mission to do good in the world naturally - so that's OK then.

Some things never change eh? and despite all the pompous, ridiculous - not to say comical if it weren't so damned depressing - protestations of their apologists (well he would say that wouldn't he? - aka Mandy Rice Davies) the routine behaviour of our own SIS's are most certainly no exception.

Does ANYONE seriously believe that this will have ANY effect other than to make them and their political puppets - to whom offers may be made that simply cannot be refused - that much more careful, deceptive - and all the other attributes mentioned above - when going about their business of protecting us from their manufactured and calibrated milieu of TERROR?

After all, Robert Cecil is their archetype - and we STILL celebrate his brilliant 'just-in-time' capture and execution of those dastardly gunpowder plotters some 400 years later eh?

Indeed some thing never NEVER CHANGE and the Sheeple remain as credulous as ever.

Hat tip to 'Deep Politics Forum' for the picture 

Update: This post was prompted by 'Obsolete's' take on the '7 paragraphs'. His subsequent posts on the matter are well worth reading too:

Scum-watch: Whose side are you on? - This is one of his routine demolitions of our appalling tabloid press. The Sun in this case, though there is precious little to choose between them in the utter garbage stakes apart from contrived left-right biases. Of course, like the sheep-dog in the picture above, their real purpose is to herd the sheeple while dividing them over trivia.

The seven paragraphs fallout continues

Torture: The Justification

"Our aim is to put you in hell so you will tell the truth. These are the orders we have from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell." --- US soldier to Abu Ghraib detainee [1]

Coming out of the woodwork ... as if from the woodcut of waterboarding in the Spanish Inquisition, stepping out, into our lives, assuming three dimensional features, taking on flesh tones, inhaling and exhaling... figures who declare with serious faces that ... torture .... Works.

They tell us:

• We will extract confessions from you.
• We know that you know what we want.
• We will tell you what we know about you and your co-conspirators and what we know that you know.
• We will tell you again and again and again and again until you tell us what we have told you so that we may know the truth. [2]
• We will pour jugs of water onto your face till you choke and struggle against your binds, to purify you.
• We will tell you that if you don't talk that you will surely die.
• We will put you in coffin-sized boxes for hours.
• We will throw you against the walls. Repeatedly.
• We will strip you naked and set dogs upon you.
• We will deny you sleep for days upon days.
• We will tell you that we will not ever stop until you have made your peace with us and confess freely and fully.
• We will slap you and beat you until you tell us what we want.
• We are, you must know, a merciful people, a kind people, a just, and a moral people.
• There are no more merciful, more kind, more just, more moral people than us.
• We are so just and moral that we can do these things to you and not be sullied by it.
• We remain moral and righteous as we beat you because our intentions are so pure. [3]
• We are protecting Americans' lives and if we have to suffocate you or beat you to death, we do so in the name of the American people, whose lives are more precious than your pitiful lying life.
• Our morality and justice is so great – Lord Be Praised - that you envy us this righteous life that we live, which is why you hate us so.
• But we are stronger and mightier than you.
• For we have God on our side.
• And you, you have nothing but superstition.
• We spit on your Quran.
• We are God's soldiers. [4]
• We will put your heads on sticks and rock your world. [5]
• We will demonstrate the superiority of our All Mighty compared to your pitiful heathen beliefs.
• We shall turn your life into a living hell.
• We shall teach you a lesson that you will not forget, nor your family, nor your neighbors, nor your mosque, nor your countrymen.
• In the Middle East, in Asia, in the world as a whole, we are the One.
• For you have no power. We have it all.

Notes

1. From Andy Worthington, 'Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed tells his story'.
2. "Understandably unable to resist the effects of the torture, Binyam proceeded to confess to whatever wild theories were put to him by his torturers. 'They had fed me enough through their questions for me to make up what they wanted to hear,' he said. 'I confessed to it all. There was the plot to build a dirty nuclear bomb, and another to blow up apartments in New York with their gas pipes.' As Rose noted, 'This - supposedly the brainchild of the 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - always sounded improbable: it was never quite clear how gas pipes might become weapons.'"Binyam added, 'I said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had given me a false passport after I was stopped the first time in Karachi and that I had met Osama bin Laden 30 times. None of it was true. The British could have stopped the torture because they knew I had tried to use the same passport at Karachi both times. That should have told them that what I was saying under torture wasn't true. But so far as I know, they did nothing.'" From Worthington, 'Seven Years of Torture'.
3. "Obama credited not Mr. Bush but the former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael V. Hayden and the former director of national intelligence Mike McConnell, who 'really had America's security interests in mind when they acted, and I think were mindful of American values and ideals.'" (From Helene Cooper and Stolberg Gay Stolberg, 'Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of Taliban', New York Times, March 7, 2009.
4. "'You are the sovereign. Your name is holy. You are the pure spotless lamb,' a female voice cried out on the loudspeakers as the marines clapped their hands and closed their eyes, reflecting on what lay ahead for them." The scene was reported by Agence France-Presse on Nov. 6, 2004" (From Mark Crispin Miller, 'Bush and Cheney's War on the Enlightenment', in Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips (eds.), Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006) 193. - And, "At Fallujah, the Marines used napalm and white phosphorous - weapons banned by international law - to immolate the people living there, and saw that it was good; for in King David they thought they could see themselves, Agence France-Presse observed: "'The marines drew parallels from the verse with their present situation, where they perceive themselves as warriors fighting barbaric men opposed to all that is good in the world.'" Miller, 'Bush and Cheney's War', 194.
5. "With regret," the Russian official said, "I have to say that you are going to get the hell kicked out of you [in Afghanistan]." One of the Americans responded... "We're going to kill them," the U.S. official asserted. "We're going to put their heads on sticks. We're going to rock their world." From Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 103.

Source: Dennis Loo

Sadistic . . . violent . . . inhuman.

The US really has lost it.

There are those who clearly see the whole abuse of prisoners thing for what it is: Sadistic, violent, inhuman behaviour that is utterly beyond the pale - FULL STOP! - The problem is that the facts are so unacceptable to the self-image of Jane and and Jo sixpack and their 'Mom-an-apple-pie' Real America, that it can no more be squarely faced than can the implications of 911 truth or the murders of JFK, and MLK.

The result?

Outrage - absolute OUTRAGE. But not at the relentless systematic torture and abuse of prisoners, rather, at the prospect of further evidence of it being released in the form of official photos and videos. A sort of 'kill-the-messenger' syndrome with a twist.

So what does shiny new President 'Change you can believe in' Obama do? why cave in to the outrage and keep them under lock and key - naturally. Which is simply further confirmation of the horrific, obscene depravity of it all.

This in reply to a question about them at an ACLU convention from Seymour Hersh:

“Some of the worse that happened that you don’t know about, ok? Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men … . The women were passing messages saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has"

Meanwhile that reptile Cheyney is touring the studios explaining how torture 'saved American Lives' , which bad as it is, is not the half of it. It seems that it's first persistent use was aimed entirely at establishing a link between Saddam Hussain and Al Qaida to justify the invasion of Iraq. And that is EXACTLY what it did - falsely - with the 'confession' of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who finally died in his Libyan prison last week. A confession used by Colin Powell in his infamous pre-invasion address to the UN

as Paul Krugman says in today's New York Times:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the non-existent link. There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

We don't do Torture

“The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.” President Bush on UN Torture Victims Recognition Day 26 June 2003

We don't torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country. - George W. Bush Interview with Australian TV - October 18, 2003

“Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right and we are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law … Many have been detained, arrested, thrown in prison and subjected to torture by regimes that fail to understand that their habits of control will not serve them well in the long term.” Statement by President Bush released by the White House on June 26, 2005

"We do not torture." President Bush to reporters during a visit to Panama in November 2005

The American Torture Memos

These memos really are sick, sick SICK!

I've been acutely aware of the whole, undeniable, gross mistreatment of prisoners thing for years now but reading those documents is still shocking - not surprising but truly shocking. I was forcefully reminded of the NAZI's penchant for legalistic documentation of their atrocities. The US really has lost the plot when it comes to any shred of a claim to 'the moral high ground' - but, like its protege Zionist Israel, appears oblivious to its wretchedness.

There was an interview with a young black 'CIA Spokesman' on Channel 4 TV News last night. The guy was maybe 30-35 years old, handsome, clean cut, a bit like a young Sidney Poitier in appearance. His brief was clearly one of damage limitation and his performance was surreal. As usual with our MSM, he was given an easy ride by Krishnan Guru-Murthy the interviewer but in the event it made no difference. He was like a smiling automaton. I lost count of the stock phrases: 'Terrorism is worlds biggest threat'; 'to keep Americans safe from terrorism'; 'to keep Americans free from the fear of terrorism', 'Terrorism', 'Terrorism', 'Terrorists', 'Terrorists', 'Americans this', 'Americans that' - like clockwork. Substitute 'Terrorist(ism)' with 'Witch(craft)' and the meaning would have been unchanged. Inevitably - and quite unprompted - he invoked 9/11 with the words 'we lost over 3,000 lives to terrorists on 9/11 and we want to make sure that does not happen again'. Had I been that interviewer I would have shot back something like "..... but you have lost over 300,000 lives on your roads since then - that's the equivalent of over 100 9/11's !! - with maybe a further million dead and over 3 million displaced lives ruined by your military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you not think it high time we found some sense of proportion here?"

But of course such a question is absolutely verboten and more than any interviewers job is worth - and the interviewer knows it too (not to mention that the interviewee was clearly incapable of understanding such a question). So we are fed pap: "Americans have the right" etc etc ad-infinitum and of course, as loyal poodles we in the UK must support and assist in the enforcement of those 'rights'.

Frankly I am sick, weary and tired of hearing about 'Americans' - 'My fellow Americans' hand-on-heart, misty-eyed stares into the middle-distance to the strains of the 'By the Dawn's early light' - It's enough to make any sane human being want to puke. Patriotic nationalism - particularly of the sickly sentimental goodies -v- baddies American variety has one hell of a lot to answer for.