10 January 2005

Prisoners: if you can't torture them, what are they good for?

I pointed my Google into the web with instructions to find articles about "Saddam torture". Following is a short sample of what came back:

"I was beaten, refrigerated naked and put underground for one year because I was a Shiite and Saddam is a Sunni," said Ali Kaddam Kardom, 37. "Under Saddam, there were no rights of appeal," Kardom said. "I begged them to stop as they beat me. It only inspired them to beat me harder." An Iraqi soldier, who according to the facility's records witnessed the beatings, said interrogators regularly used pliers to remove men's teeth, electric prods to shock men's genitals and drills to cut holes in their ankles. In one instance, the soldier recalled, he witnessed a Kuwaiti soldier, who had been captured during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, being forced to sit on a broken Pepsi bottle. The man was removed from the bottle only after it filled up with his blood, the soldier said. He and his two brothers, Majeed and Shakeer, have cigarette burns on their wrists, the bottoms of their feet and their inner thighs. The tape is hard to watch, and the senators who released it say that is the point. The tape is proof positive of the reality of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. At first what you see are Saddam's henchmen preparing to chop off a body part, presumably because of some crime against Saddam and his government. The video continues. An Iraqi man is about to have his tongue cut off, and the pain is unbearable. There is a line about how this is being done in the name of Allah, and in another part, one of Saddam's soldiers explains what is about to happen to the next victim, who is about to have his arm cut off. The punishments include fingers being chopped or shot off, tips of tongues being cut off, wrists being broken by sharp blows from a wooden rod, lashes by whip or cane, a bound man being tossed off a building … and a man being humiliated by riding a donkey backwards. "When you have people filming in front of crowds cheering and clapping -- you have people cutting off people's tongues and heads and chopping off their fingers and hands throwing them off three-story buildings -- you learn something about a group of people and how they lived their lives and treated their people and we are so fortunate that they are gone and those 23 million people are liberated," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters during a Pentagon briefing Thursday. "People died, people were imprisoned without trial," one man told me. On the ground I found a book called the Psychology of Interrogation, as if the men who worked here needed a handbook. Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, headed by Saddam, approved amputation of the tongue as a new penalty "for slander or abusive remarks about the president".

Now it's time for you to play the www.Stopdubya.com FUN QUIZ. Under the definition of torture so willingly provided and eloquently stated by soon-to-be-approved Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, which one of the acts listed in the section above is actually considered to be torture? There is a rich collection of sadistic acts there, including amputation, electric shock to the genitals, breaking wrists with a bat, burning with cigarettes, and various forms of degradation, humiliation, and fear. The clock is ticking, ticking, ticking… OK, time's up!

If you guessed NONE OF THE ABOVE ARE CONSIDERED TORTURE BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, go to the head of your class. Also not considered torture are mock executions, Russian Roulette, repeated drowning and revival, hanging by the wrists and beating with sticks, bats, whips, chains, or whatever, putting the prisoner in a cell next to another prisoner being tortured for hours and telling them they're next, siccing the police dogs, punching teeth out of mouths, sodomy with any handy foreign object, withholding food, water, sleep, or anything else. According to Gonzoles, you can even strip the prisoners and have them led about the cell block like dogs.

OK… I might have stretched it a bit, Gonzales could possibly frown on throwing someone off of a 3 story building because they might actually DIE from that… one of the limits he puts on torture. But if you don't kill them or harm them in any way equivalent to killing an organ, then pretty much ANYTHING GOES.

By now, you may be asking yourself "What's the difference between what Saddam did to the Iraqis and what the Bush Administration is doing to the Iraqis?" Well, you're not the only ones who are asking that question. And if you think it's only Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, you are sadly mistaken. The Bush Administration has actively pursued a policy of torturing prisoners, sometimes TO DEATH, at 30 camps around the world. In fact they have shipped prisoners to other countries like Egypt and Israel to be tortured when they ran out of torture capacity.

The 2004 election proved to the world that Americans support the illegal, immoral, and unnecessary war on Iraq… a war of choice that didn't need to be fought. The act of approving Gonzales as Attorney General will tell the world that the US is a nation that endorses a policy of torture.

That's the wrong message to send, isn't it? Is that how YOU want to be viewed by the rest of the world?