Posted on Monday, 30 July, 2007 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
There was this guy named Calvin — who I once met by hanging out with people who worked for the International Trauma Treatment Program in Olympia — who always balked at the idea that torture, as many of its detractors alleged, didn’t work. Calvin ran one of Uganda’s many refugee camps through Pilgrim and was himself a survivor of all sorts of horrors and the first to admit that anyone can be driven to give up anything under the right conditions.
Torture can make anyone tell their tormentor exactly what he wants to hear. If he wants to hear that an insurgency or operation or whatever is doing either this or that, the victim will divine exactly what he needs to say and eventually say it so convinsingly that she or he will even believe it himself.
So it’s not in and of itself stunning news that much of the United States government’s bad intelligence about Iraq is the result of the use of torture. What is interesting is the how of torture, though, and possibly the why, which are both explored in Katherine Eban’s Vanity Fair online article on the use of psychological torture by the U.S. military’s reverse-SERE program. People are getting job skills in today’s Army, it’s just not the sort of jobs in computer repair that those recruting ads tout. — Link
Posted on Sunday, 4 February, 2007 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
“Meet Abel Hamad. A family man and a father of four. A lover of table tennis and a good joke.” Pretty innocuous so far. But the plot thickens as we read that at 1:30 a.m. he was awakened to a bunch of guns pointed at his face and has been sitting in Guantanamo ever since without a charge filed, a day in court or the ability to contact his family, scraping by in Sudan. What does the U.S. government have on this chairty aid worker? We don’t know. Neither does he. Project Hamad was set up to get this guy out.
Posted on Sunday, 18 December, 2005 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
I like having James Yee be from my town. I like that he lives here. If you want a firshand account on the current U.S. government’s war on Islam, his book has some firsthand accounts…
“Actually, it appears, all Captain Yee had to do to attract suspicion was to interced repeatedly at Camp Delta on behalf of the prisoners, as their chaplain, when he sa their guards being unnecessarily—and, he came to feel, deliberately—provocative: i handling Korans during cell searches, for instance, or taking detainees out of thei cells in shackles for interrogation just as the hour arrived for prayer. He had als begun to meet regularly with the forty or so Muslim servicemen on the base, for he was their chaplain, too. Since the mess halls didn’t provide halal food, some of the found it convenient to gather in the captain’s quarters for meals. Among thes American-born or naturalized Muslims were some who brought back stories o prisoner abuse from the interrogation rooms, where they were assigned as interpreter but which were off-limits to the chaplain, who soon began keeping a “personal journa of the atrocities that I was hearing about in the interrogation rooms and on the blocks. Some of this abuse the interpreters not unreasonably took to be abuse of Muslims a Muslims—for instance, wrapping prisoners in an Israeli flag, or playing a compac disc of verses from the Koran to set the scene for an interrogation session, only t drown it out with screeching rock music. The prisoners were also left chained in fetal position for hours.”
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider to be God-fearing and pious. — Aristotle
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider to be God-fearing and pious.
