Posts Tagged ‘torture’
2009
“There’s a McDonald’s on the high street, suburban houses, rats the size of dogs and 229 of the world’s most high-profile prisoners. Six months after President Obama declared that he would close it down, Naomi Wolf heads to Guantánamo Bay to see whether anything has changed.
Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word…”
source: truthout.org
“The Obama administration says it will release Mohammed Jawad, who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp since 2002. Earlier this month officials admitted that there was no military case for Mr Jawad’s continued detention. But government lawyers had said they wished to keep him in detention pending a possible criminal prosecution…
Mr Jawad was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2002, after being accused of throwing a grenade at a jeep and injuring two US soldiers and their interpreter. His lawyers say he was 12 years old at the time of his arrest, although Pentagon officials say a bone scan indicates that he was actually 17. Shortly after his arrest, he was transported to the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, where he is still being held.
His lawyers campaigned for his release, arguing that his confession had been obtained by Afghan officials using torture. In October 2008, a military judge ruled the confession inadmissible and on 16 July, Judge Huvelle described the US government’s case against Mr Jawad as ‘an outrage’ that was “riddled with holes”. On Friday US authorities said they no longer considered him to be a military prisoner. But they also said that they intended to construct a criminal case against Mr Jawad, and that he should remain in detention while they did so…”
“A signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, the United States ‘does not torture.’ Yet abundant evidence indicates that it does, directly or by proxy—and in fact always has. An old American tradition of state-sponsored torture even has its own lexicon: SOA, Kubark, Phoenix, MK-Ultra, rendition, CIA’s ‘no-touch’ paradigm, etc. It is quite popular, too. Torture enjoys more than twice the public support in the US that it does in France, Spain, and the UK. One of the most watched TV dramas, 24, is but an extended ode to the glories of torture. The former director of a prominent human rights center at Harvard writes of the judicious use of sleep deprivation, hooding, and targeted assassinations; he concedes the government’s need to ‘traffic in evils.’ The nation’s most celebrated defense attorney recommends ‘torture warrants’ and ‘the sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails’ (’sterilized’ because he is a liberal). The most cited legal scholar in the land writes: ‘If the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible. No one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility.’
Anti-torture voices have been left sounding defensive, insecure, incoherent. Yet, while boasting the world’s highest incarceration numbers and supermax prisons characterized by a warden as a “clean version of hell,” the US has also begun to question its tolerance of torture. The debate is on, and torture is winning. I intend here to lay the foundation for a strong, cogent anti-torture position. It rests upon three principles:
Torture is always wrong;
Torture must be banned by law unconditionally;
Not all torture decisions should be morally codified.
The first two principles reject torture on moral grounds (it’s wrong) and legal ones (it’s bad)…”
via counterpunch.org