A few excerpts from a 2006 book called Oath Betrayed by Dr. Steven Miles. A few excerpts are all one needs to read to see what we had done even before our invasion of Iraq.
From NPR: Excerpts from Oath Betrayed.
'Oath Betrayed' Questions Doctors' Roles in TortureThe reason for writing the book:
Miles, a doctor and medical ethics expert who has treated victims of torture throughout the world, had just one question: Where were the doctors? To answer that question he poured through records of army criminal investigations, FBI notes on debriefings of prisoners, autopsy reports, and prisoners' medical records.
From his book in which he talked about a man named Dilawar:
Dilawar was a twenty-two-year-old farmer and taxi driver, whom American soldiers tortured to death over five days at Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan in December 2002. When the soldiers pulled a sandbag over his head, Dilawar complained that he could not breathe. He was then shackled and suspended from his arms for hours, denied water, and beaten so severely that his legs would have been amputated had he survived. When he was beaten with a baton, he would cry "Allah, Allah!," which guards found so amusing that they beat him some more just to hear him cry. During his final interrogation, soldiers told the delirious, injured prisoner that he would get medical attention after the session. Instead, he was returned to a cell and chained to the ceiling. Several hours later, a physician found him dead. By then, the interrogators had concluded that Dilawar was innocent and had simply been picked up after driving his new taxi by the wrong place at the wrong time.
Dilawar's death was predictable and preventable. The counterintelligence team was inexperienced; only two of its thirteen soldiers had ever conducted interrogations before arriving in Afghanistan. The officers knew that President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld had ruled that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Afghanistan. The interrogation policies were unclear. The base commander had ignored Red Cross protests about the treatment of prisoners, including the practice of suspending them. Army and intelligence officers who knew of the ongoing pattern of abuses at the Bagram facility did not intervene to stop them. In fact, another prisoner, Habibullah, had died at the same facility under similar circumstances six days before Dilawar's death.
An autopsy on December 13 found that Dilawar's death was a homicide, caused by extensive and severe "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease" (inexplicably, "coronary artery disease" is typed on the death certificate in a different font). The Pentagon reported that the prisoner died of natural causes. Later, a coroner testified that Dilawar's legs were "pulpified" and that the body looked as if it had been "run over by a truck." Soldiers delivered the body and an English-language death certificate to his wife and two daughters in January 2003. The family could not read English.
Later in February, reporters went to Dilawar's village and located his family, who had the copy of the death certificate stating that Dilawar had died of homicidal injuries. The reporters confronted General McNeil with the death certificate that had been given to the family and asked him to explain why he had told reporters that Dilawar died a natural death of heart disease. General McNeil said that he always gave press the "best information available to him.
It is a very long excerpt, much more at the link. It is hard to read and remember that our country did this in our name whether we approved or not.
Move ahead to 2005 in Iraq. We continued these actions.
Haunted by the IcemanWhile some lesser military were being court-martialed and jailed....those who tortured for the CIA got off lighter. From Time Magazine 2005.
Monday, Nov. 14, 2005
Haunted by "The Iceman"
By Adam Zagorin / Washington
Military Police at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison dubbed him the Iceman; others used the nickname Mr. Frosty. Some even called him Bernie, after the character in the 1989 movie Weekend at Bernie's, about a dead man whose associates carry him around as if he were still alive. The prisoner is listed as Manadel al-Jamadi in three official investigations of his death while in U.S. custody, a death that was ruled a homicide in a Defense Department autopsy. Photographs of his battered corpse -- iced to keep it from decomposing in order to hide the true circumstances of his dying -- were among the many made public in the spring of 2004, raising stark questions about America's treatment of enemy detainees. For most of the horrors shown in those Abu Ghraib photographs, there has been some accounting. Although no officers were court-martialed, a soldier who held a prisoner on a leash got three years in prison; another who repeatedly hit detainees got 10 years. But those prisoners were held by members of the military, which has a relatively transparent system of punishing errant behavior. Al-Jamadi was a prisoner of the far more secretive CIA. That fact, for the moment, leaves unanswered the questions, If he was the victim of a homicide, who killed him? And will there be a trial?
There is so much hard reading on this one.
Al-Jamadi's story begins on the night of Nov. 4, 2003, when Navy Seals abducted him from his family's tiny apartment in a rundown Baghdad suburb. The CIA wanted to interrogate him because he was suspected of harboring two tons of high explosives and being involved in the bombing of a Red Cross center in Baghdad that killed 12 people. By the time the Seals overcame his violent resistance and dropped him off at Abu Ghraib as a "ghost detainee"--an unregistered prisoner--al-Jamadi had suffered damage to his left eye and facial cuts. He had also been roughed up in a way that may account for the fact that the autopsy revealed six broken ribs. His injuries, which the autopsy concluded could not have caused his death, did not prevent him from walking into the prison handcuffed and shackled, answering questions in English and Arabic.
The prisoner was then taken to a shower room, where his arms were pulled behind his back and shackled to window bars, forcing him to stand erect. Wearing an empty sandbag over his head, he was interrogated by a CIA officer identified in last week's issue of the New Yorker as Mark Swanner, who is not a covert operative. Roughly 90 minutes later, al-Jamadi was dead. One of the MPs who unshackled al-Jamadi's body from the window testified that blood gushed from his mouth and nose like "a faucet had turned on," flowing onto the floor where his hood now lay. The autopsy ruled that al-Jamadi's death was brought on by "blunt-force injuries" and "asphyxiation." Cyril Wecht, coroner of Allegheny County, Pa., and past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, examined the autopsy report and other records of the investigations and says, "The most likely cause of death was suffocation, which would have occurred when the sandbag was placed over Jamadi's head, as his arms were secured up and behind his back, constricting breathing." Swanner told investigators he did not harm the prisoner.
I don't know if they ever found where they took his body.
Al-Jamadi's demise deeply unsettled his captors, according to the investigations. The guard who first determined that the prisoner was no longer alive told CIA agents, "This guy's dead--it's on you." Another guard later said the agents "didn't know what the hell to do." A CIA employee reported being told by a colleague to "keep his mouth shut about the incident and not say anything about it in e-mail." When Abu Ghraib's military-intelligence commander showed up, a witness heard him say, "I'm not going down for this alone." To avoid roiling the other prisoners and prevent decomposition of the body, al-Jamadi's corpse was iced down and held in the interrogation room overnight. The next day, wrapped in a body bag, covered with a blanket and with an intravenous tube taped to his arm, al-Jamadi was spirited out of Abu Ghraib as if he were merely an invalid. The location of his remains has not been made public.
Do you remember the Military Commissions Act of 2006? I have not kept up with what parts were repealed, what parts are still intact. It was a tragic bill to pass. It was still a Republican controlled congress, but far too many Democrats voted for it.
It in effect said that what we had been doing was not illegal. At least that is my understanding. I don't know how that will play today into investigating and charging those who ordered the torture.
Congress's Shameful Retreat From American ValuesHere is a summary from Garrison Keillor.
The Senate also decided it's up to the president to decide whether it's OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators. This is now purely a bureaucratic matter: The plenipotentiary stamps the file "enemy combatants" and throws the poor schnooks into prison and at his leisure he tries them by any sort of kangaroo court he wishes to assemble and they have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal. This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by President Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.
It's good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 - Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright - and you won't find more than 10 votes for it.
The words from the link of Bob Geiger, a blogger whose work I appreciate so much.
The Senate Democrats who voted for this MCA in 2006. The words blogger Bob Geiger, whose work I appreciate.Yet the 12 Democrats who checked their consciences at the Senate cloakroom and voted in favor of the Bush Administration's torture bill this week, have almost nothing to say about their votes. In case you haven't seen the roster of who voted with Republicans on this, here they are:
* Thomas Carper (D-DE)
* Tim Johnson (D-SD)
* Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
* Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
* Joe Lieberman (D-CT)
* Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
* Bill Nelson (D-FL)
* Ben Nelson (D-NE)
* Mark Pryor (D-AR)
* Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)
* Ken Salazar (D-CO)
* Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
As Garrison Keillor said: Mark their names and mark them well.
Here are the Democratic votes in the House:
Andrews, Bean, Barrow, Bishop(GA), Boren, Boswell, Boyd(FL), Brown(OH), Chandler, Cramer, Cuellar, Davis(AL), Davis(TN), Edwards, Etheridge, Ford, Fox? (not sure), Gordon, Herseth, Higgins, Holden, Marshall, Melancon, McIntyre, Michaud, Moore(KS), Peterson(MN), Pomeroy, Ross, Salazar, Scott, Spratt, Tanner, Taylor(MS)
Mark their names also. They also said it was okay for "the president to decide whether it's OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators."
It was no okay then, it is not okay now. It was a way to appear tough and hard and unbeatable to the world. It did not work.
I don't think we look so macho now.
President Obama is handling this very difficult very delicate job in a calm and sure manner. I think he will do what he can to restore our image in the world.
But the Democrats who went along with this have to examine their consciences.
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