Yes, if you commit torture you can be convicted of a crime – in Alabama. Not however, by the US Government, provided you were employed by the US Military and the CIA to torture “detainees” during the Bush Administrations “War on Terror.”
In Alabama, if you commit torture and kill people a judge will sentenced you to death. truth. But that is not the case not if you “defended our freedoms” by torturing and killing detainees, at least not by the US Department of Justice. Indeed it should come as no surprise to anyone that the DOJ admitted in Court it hasn’t reviewed the full Senate Report on Torture, despite claiming otherwise to the New York Times.
But first, let’s look at the Alabama case, shall we.
An Alabama judge sentenced a man to death Thursday who had been previously convicted for torturing and murdering his two young children. […]
Jurors in DeBlase’s trial were subjected to disturbing testimony that recounted various forms of torture the children suffered before they were killed.
In one incident Natalie DeBlase was said to have been bound with duct tape, gagged with a sock and stuffed into a suitcase for 12 hours.
In another incident DeBlase’s son was said to have been duct taped to a broom handle, gagged and forced to stand in a corner while Leavell-Keaton and DeBlase slept.
The mother will stand trial separately for the same crimes. The judge noted in sentencing that the he had “never encountered facts showing a more callous disregard for the sanctity of human life.” But hey, these were children. Beautiful white American children. Take a look at their smiling faces.
I don’t blame that judge one bit for sentencing the father to death – and I oppose the death penalty. Those parents committed seriously heinous acts of brutality on their kids. Then again, so did many US military and intelligence operatives with the full sanction of the Executive Branch of the US Government under former President Bush, as detailed in the Senate Torture Report. You can read about some of the more gruesome methods of torture employed by the CIA and US Military:
Majid Khan was … subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration, which included two bottles of Ensure. Later that same day, Majid Khan’s ‘lunch tray,’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was ‘pureed and rectally infused.’
and Here
In November 2002, a detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to the floor died, apparently from hypothermia. This case appears similar to the that of Gul Rahman, who died of similarly explained causes at an Afghan site known as the “Salt Pit,” also in November 2002. The site was also called “The Dark Prison” by former captives.
The aide said that the Cobalt site was was dark, like a dungeon, and that experts who visited the site said they’d never seen an American prison where people were kept in such conditions. The facility was so dark in some places that guard had to wear head lamps, while other rooms were flooded with bright lights and white noise to disorient detainees.
At the Cobalt facility, the CIA also forced some detainees who had broken feet or legs to stand in stress-inducing positions, despite having earlier pledged that they wouldn’t subject those wounded individuals to treatment that might exacerbate their injuries.
Or this one in Mother Jones:
[T]he interrogator allegedly forced Nashiri to stand with his hands over his head for two and a half days, blindfolded him, pushed a pistol up against his head, and revved up a cordless drill close to his body. When this produced no new information, the interrogator slapped the detainee repeatedly on the back of the head, told him he’d sexually assault his mother in front of him, blew cigar smoke in his face, and made him sit in such stressful positions that a medical officer was concerned the detainee’s shoulders would be dislocated.
I’m not even going to bother listing some of the more familiar “techniques” used by to “interrogate” detainees, such as waterboarding, threatening the lives of detainee’s parents and children, holding innocent children and women hostage to gain leverage over their families, sleep deprivation, extended ice water baths, random and gratuitous beatings, and so forth. If all that doesn’t seem heinous enough for you, however, let’s revisit the case of The Unfortunate Taxi Driver, Mr. Dilawar, whose murder by torture was the subject of the film, Taxi to the Dark Side, the Oscar winning documentary in 2007 (you may view the film in its entirety at this website).
Mr. Dilawar, age 22, had the misfortune to be driving his taxi back to his hometown with three passengers while on a road where a US military outpost had been the subject of a rocket attack. He spent five days at Afghan Air Force Base, shackled to a wall, his legs beaten to a pulp. This is a description of what he endured there at the hands of his interrogators, most of whom considered him innocent:
Black hood over his head caused difficulty breathing:
“He could not breathe,” said … one of Mr. Dilawar’s passengers. [Note, the three surviving passengers were detained at Guantanamo for one year, before being released in March 2004 with official documents stating they posed no risk to the United States]
Forced to kneel and hold his arms, which were hand cuffed, over his head during interrogation:
[Dilawar] was unable to hold his cuffed hands above his head as instructed, prompting Sergeant Salcedo to slap them back up whenever they began to drop.
Beatings for not being able to sit upright because of the condition of his legs:
When Mr. Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair position against the wall because of his battered legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt and repeatedly shoved him back against the wall.
Kicked in groin; Pulled to standing position using his beards, foot crushed by interrogator’s boot:
“They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on his bare foot with her boot and grabbed him by his beard and pulled him towards her,” he went on. “Once Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas, with her right foot. She was standing some distance from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.
Dilawar’s head slammed into table:
“[US Interrogator] had a rule that the detainee had to look at him, not me,” the interpreter told investigators. “He gave him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table, slamming his chest into the table front.”
Threatened with anal rape:
Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and “shook him harshly,” the interpreter said, telling him that if he failed to cooperate, he would be shipped to a prison in the United States, where he would be “treated like a woman, by the other men” …
And of course the constant smashing of Mr. Dilawar’s legs, shattering them into who knows how many tiny pieces:
The findings of Mr. Dilawar’s autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail was “blunt force injuries to the lower extremities.”
One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man’s legs “had basically been pulpified.”
“I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus,” added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.
Eventually, one person, Specialist Wells, served a two month sentence for his treatment of Dilawar. No one else ever served any time in connection with Diliwar’s death, or the death of another prisoner who died under similar circumstances at Bagram, a man named Habibullah, including individuals higher up in the chain of command. Not the torturers immediate superior, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, who was redeployed to Iraq in 2003 to take charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib, another infamous prison. Not the base commander. No one.
Of course, all this might be because authorization for these acts of savagery reached the highest levels of the US Military Command, if Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, interviewed in 2006 on the CBS News Show, 60 minutes is to be believed. He claimed to reporter Scott Pelley that he smelled a rat immediately upon learning of the deaths at Bagram:
“I was developing the picture as to how this all got started in the first place, and that alarmed me as much as the abuse itself because it looked like authorization for this abuse went to the very top of the United States government,” says Wilkerson.
In 2002, the “top of the government” was divided over whether the Geneva Convention applied to prisoners in Afghanistan. The resulting presidential directive tried to have it both ways ordering that the “…armed forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely” but Geneva would apply only “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity….”
It’s Wilkerson’s opinion that the Army chose to ignore Geneva when it issued new rules for interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ironic isn’t it, that the State of Alabama considers torturing people to death a capital crime, but that United States highest law enforcement official, Attorney General Holder considers prosecuting anyone in connection with the systematic employment of torture, which in many cases resulted in death, and which was often carried out against people the torturers themselves believed to be innocent, unfair.
“It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.
Unfair. Yes, the same defense offered by the defendants at the Nuremberg trials for the crimes against humanity with which they were charged, i.e., “We were only following orders,” is the official reason that the Obama administration’s top officials are claiming makes prosecution of CIA torturers, and the government officials who authorized the systematic use of torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions on War, something we as a civilized society simply cannot justify doing.
The White House has announced that CIA operatives, including contractors, who followed Bush guidelines for torturing prisoners will not be prosecuted for these actions, regardless of the Obama administration’s position on the legality of the techniques they used. “[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution,” President Obama said in a statement released [April 16, 2009].
Indeed, apparently, it is still the position of our government that it is better for everyone concerned if the American public knows as little as possible regarding the horrific actions of a vast organized and systematic effort, from lowly CIA operatives, soldiers and independent contractors to the most senior officials in the Executive Branch, to torture (and occasionally kill) people in the custody of our Military and Intelligence Services, despite the inconvenient revelations contained in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report, practices we routinely condemn as barbaric when committed by terrorist organizations such as ISIS.
Later today, the government will showcase its latest suppression effort, as the Justice Department will urge a federal judge in New York to keep secret hundreds of photos of torture from Abu Ghraib prison from almost a decade ago. President Obama once promised to release the photos, only to reverse himself months after coming into office – and he’s since been fighting for years to keep them secret.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, wrote recently about how US officials issued a “defiant message” after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the hacking of Sony Pictures that “terrorists shouldn’t get to decide the boundaries of our political debate.”
Yet time and again, the government claims the exact opposite under oath when arguing against more transparency: in court, the government has continually argued that terrorists would seize upon the photographs of Abu Ghraib, use them as a recruiting tool and provoke a violent reaction overseas. So, the goverment’s [sic] logic dictates, despite the fact that the actions of the US military depicted in the photos were illegal, the American public shouldn’t get to see what actually occurred.
Yes, those same Abu Ghraib photographs that everyone in the world has known about since 2004 still must be kept secret, because it would help the terrorists. As of all the drone strikes, many that killed innocent children, and our continued support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, much less our aid to despotic regimes in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, haven’t been sufficient recruiting tools for jihadists abroad and in the West.
Perhaps, we would all care a helluva lot more for the atrocities committed in our name if they had been perpetrated against people who look like little Natalie and Chase DeBlase pictured above. Yet, no matter how many images are shown of dead children killed by American forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and so on over the years, all too few of our fellow citizens give a damn.
I once posted a diary that was front-paged by Kos himself that documented the use of high explosive white phosphorus rounds by the US Military against civilian targets in Fallujah, a clear violation of the Geneva conventions. At the time, I believed I had rendered a great service, much as the people who exposed the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, no doubt, believed the same.
And yet here we are in 2015, and a Democratic Administration continues to use the same old, fallacious arguments to protect murderers and war criminals, because – well, because it would be inconvenient to seek justice for all concerned. Inconvenient for the people responsible during the Bush years, but also inconvenient for many Democratic politicians who voted for his wars of error. Inconvenient as well for many prominent Democrats who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and who no doubt do not want to risk exposure of their own dirty deeds in the defense of – well, not democracy, but the interests of their donors, mentors, benefactors, defense contractors, ad nauseam.
And that my friends, is how low-life scum in small countries are prosecuted for massacres and atrocities in the International Court of Justice, while low-life scum who “served” our country, particularly those who held positions granting them great authority over the lives of others, continue to reside in luxury and on occasion grace our airwaves with their monstrous presence.
The only question that remains regard the nature of our own complicity, collectively speaking, for our ignorance of these matters, and for the American public’s general apathy as to seeking justice for those responsible for the innumerable crimes against humanity committed in our names? I’ll leave it to you, the readers, to come to your own conclusions.