Some methods used by the CIA and military interrogators include using a scalpel to make numerous cuts on the penis of Benyam Mohammed, who was arrested at Karachi airport on April 10 2002, and flown by a US government plane to a prison in Morocco. Other techniques include forceful beatings and even stomping which resulted in the paralysis of Sami Al-Laithi, a result of his detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Al-Laithi is now confined to a wheelchair with two broken vertebrae. Images released from the Abu Ghraib scandal show the forceful rape, sodomy of Iraqi men, women, and children and include depictions of electrical wires attached to the genitalia of detainees. There were also images of dogs being used to attack detainees. Would it shock the American people to know that John C. Yoo, a Justice Department attorney who helped devise the Bush regime's doctrine of torture, condones even the torture of terrorists children to extract information from their terrorist parents.
When asked a hypothetical question in which the child of a terrorist suspect had their 'genitals crushed' in front of his father in order to extract information; Yoo answered there is "no law" and "no treaty" that would forbid such an atrocity, assuming that it was authorized by the president: "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that," Yoo said. How can an attorney for the Justice Department condone the torture of children, even terrorist children to safeguard the security of the American people?
We know through Seymour Hersh's work that the policy of torturing and sodomizing terrorist children had in fact been implemented because the Pentagon has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib to extract information from their parents. "[There's] a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher. 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.... They are in total terror it's going to come out."
Manuals used by the U.S. Army's School of the Americas between 1982 and 1991 condoned executions, beatings and many other human rights abuses. John Yoo admits that he regards the sexual torture of children to be a legal and justifiable tactic, if authorized by the president. Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on December 7, 2005 declared: "The absolute ban on torture, a cornerstone of the international human rights edifice, is under attack. The principle we once believed to be unassailable-the inherent right to physical integrity and dignity of the person-is becoming a casualty of the so-called war on terror."
The world now knows that the torture of detainees was not a result of a few bad apples, but is and was a direct consequence of orders coming all the way from the President and relayed through the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to troops on the ground. Why else would Bush fight so hard to legitimize his administrations stance on torture and extraordinary rendition? He and the Vice-President had lobbied congress to exempt the CIA from the McCain Bill outlawing torture by US Personnel and when they failed; Bush issued one of his infamous signing statements claiming authority to interpret the law anyway he sees fit even if it means ignoring it. We know that it is the administration that was and is responsible for implementing torture on a broad scale.
Interrogators as well as detainees have made public claims that torture does not solicit valuable information and fearing such treatment detainees will admit to anything just to have the torture stop even a former U.S. Army Interrogator describes why "Torture is the worst possible thing we can do to detainees." Bush keeps citing the criticalness of continuing this CIA prog
Rating: User: IndependentFreePress 2007-07-02T03:23:31.307Z
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