Torture: Bush Reaps What Kennedy Sowed

[WilliamPitt]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/062404A.shtml

Torture: Bush Reaps What Kennedy Sowed
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 24 June 2004

New photos of American soldiers raping and killing Iraqis will likely emerge in the coming days, as Secretary Rumsfeld obliquely warned us weeks ago. Far more graphic then any images we have yet seen, they will again drag Team Bush through the mud, further mocking their claims to uphold human rights and mucking up their celebration of "Iraqi sovereignty."

Taking the scandal beyond coercive interrogation, the new horror show will make real the brutality that war brings out, especially against men and women who look, dress, talk, eat, and worship in ways that seem so foreign. In young soldiers from Kansas and West Virginia, we will see the same contempt that European conquerors showed in their colonial flings, even as they preached the Word of God or the Values of Western Civilization. In jargon of an electronic age, we will hear the blood-curdling echoes of earlier American heroes wresting control of an entire continent from those who lived there before, not to mention those pumped-up imperial forays across the Pacific and into Latin America.

Remember Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden, the high-minded phrases that hid the old down-and-dirty? War on Terror, Democracy (of an export kind), and the New American Century follow in the same tradition, celebrated or despised depending on which side of the boot one sees and who ends up with the oil. Only now, most of the world - and growing numbers of Americans - want to shed the whole bloody business.

Which brings us back to those coercive interrogation techniques. Call them stress and duress, torture-lite, or just plain torture, they remain central to America's colonial adventures from Vietnam to Iraq.

...more...

[Jacobin]

1. When the rape pics come out, the media will show them

NON Fucking STOP (blurring the appropriate parts of course).

Will Smirk continue to whine about Saddam's "rape rooms" after this?

BTW, a small editing nit to pick if it hasn't yet been posted:
Second sentence: "Far more graphic THAN (not "then")"

[Lindacooks]

2. That headline should be 'Bush Reaps What Reagan Sowed'

After all, Reagan et al DIRECTLY made Hussein the man he was in 1991 during the first Gulf War and today. I don't deny that President Kennedy shouldn't have escalated the Vietnam War, but that's going back a bit far with blame, isn't it?

[WilliamPitt]

3. How far back does it go?

If the Kennedy admin set the ball rolling on the institutionalization of torture as a means of interrogation by Americans, well...shoe, meet foot.

[aquart]

4. I worked with a man once

Who told me he had done a year or so in military prison for refusing to translate for American torturers, excuse me, interrogators, during the Viet Nam War. I recall being slightly startled and not at all surprised.

[WilliamPitt]

5. And the added dimension

Often in Vietnam, the Americans had no need to torture prisoners. The ROK soldiers were there to do it for us. Often, all we had to do was threaten to turn a prisoner over to the ROK, and that prisoner would start talking.

I guess that's what is meant by the threat of torture being more effective.

[WilliamPitt]

6. .

[symbolman]

7. My Brother did the Nam scene

one of the reasons I didn't have to go there even tho I was in the Military at the same time..

and they had a cute little trick in the Air Force.

You take two prisoners up in a chopper with an open door, turn to the first one and say, "Talk." -- if they didn't you threw the first guy out of the open chopper door, turned to the next guy and said,

"Talk."

said it worked like a charm.

Will, I wrote your dad about my case -- also want to invite you to something BIG we are getting together.

[Eric J in MN]

8. If the goal isn't to cause severe pain, as that article says, then

If the goal isn't to cause severe pain, as that article says, then explain that to a man named Neisef:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040628-655389,00.html

Time Magazine ("New Abuse Charges" by Viveca Novak and Douglas Waller, posted June 20, 2004) reports:

Meanwhile, a class action filed in California on behalf of former detainees raises the specter of brutal physical abuse. One plaintiff, identified only as Neisef, claims that after he was taken from his home on the outskirts of Baghdad last November and sent to Abu Ghraib, Americans made him disrobe and attached electrical wires to his genitals. He claims he was shocked three times. Although a vein in his penis ruptured and he had blood in his urine, he says, he was refused medical attention
...
On June 6, Neisef was released, after a U.S. civilian told him, he says, that he had been wrongly accused by informants. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad confirms that a prisoner with Neisef's ID number was released on that date, and TIME has obtained a copy of his release order. But the Pentagon would not comment on the specifics of Neisef's account.

[WilliamPitt]

9. .