A general who investigated US troops sexually humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison says Rumsfeld and other Pentagon honchos lied. Imagine that! Of course, they lied! When have they ever told the truth?
NEW YORK (AFP) - A general who investigated US troops sexually humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison said in a report out Saturday that top Pentagon officials denied knowledge of lurid photographs of the acts.
Army Major General Antonio Taguba said he met with then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials and described to them some of the contents of a report he had prepared on the notorious prison.
But Rumsfeld testified before Congress the following day that he had no idea of the extent of the abuse, Taguba told the New Yorker magazine in an interview.
"He's trying to acquit himself and a lot of people who are lying to protect themselves," the magazine quoted him as saying, referring to Rumsfeld's May 7, 2004 testimony.
The photographs taken by US jailers humiliating prisoners who were naked or hooded, on leashes or piled in a pyramid, rocked the world, becoming one of the few things President George W. Bush has said he regretted about the war".
[A tip of the hat to Buzzflash]
It is an indication of his guilt that when Bush says "we don't torture" he has tried to make it legal after the fact. Nevermind the logical contradictions, Bush does not do nuance. The US has carried out a program of official torture at Abu Ghraib, GITMO, and throughout the "secret" Eastern European archipelago.
Every single underpinning of law that restrains the conduct of the government in dealing with detainees, they are destroying. And what are they leaving in its place? Chaos. They're looking for a way to justify torture.
-Scott Horton, a New York City bar association expert
It has never made sense to commit war crimes under the cover of "truth, justice and the American way". Under Bush, the American way, the American ideal no longer exists. Bush, his "bone" head buddies and his gang of NEOCONS are subversive, actively seeking even now to undermine the US Constitution. Many of their efforts have been illegal. The US has at least one honest journalist --Seymour Hersh --who states bluntly: "We have been taken over by a cult!"
The "President"himself is a liar, a fraud, a pervert, and a mass murderer. There is about this
President a perverse and immoral stench.
It's hard to tell just how long Bush has been holding himself and his henchmen above the law. Most of those efforts involve this vast program of torture. In the year 2004, the Bush gang were at work trying to convince the nation's highest court that Bush was above the law, specifically, he could not be prosecuted for war crimes. As all other American Presidents have been so constrained, I could never figure out why Bush would want to be absolved by a law sponsored by Tom DeLay in the House of Representative. If he had not been planning to break existing laws, why would he seek absolution before the fact? Clearly --George W. Bush had planned in advance to commit war crimes and other atrocities. In other cases, Bush sought absolution
ex post facto. His public denials, meanwhile, are bald-faced lies and for those alone he should be impeached and removed. Innocent folk don't have to issue decrees absolving themselves of crimes.
At the SCOTUS hearing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg mused:
Suppose the executive says, 'Mild torture we think will help get this information.' ... Some systems do that to get information."
The answer from government lawyer, Paul Clement, was a disingenuous eye opener. Declaring that Bush would not torture, he insisted that the US would stand by its international commitments. In other words,
"we" will not torture but we sure would like to have the right to do so. It had been over a year that Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers crafted, nay,
conspired to get around the law,
international prohibitions against torture. They have conspired with Bush to put Bush above the law.
Section 2441. War crimes
(a) Offense. - Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.- US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441
It was most certainly all Bush's idea to begin with. Sycophantic simps and other bureaucratic kiss-ups have been scrambling since to keep Bush's sorry ass off death row for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.
Consider the chilling implications of this smirking statement to the Congress from his State of the Union Address of 2003.
All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies. (Applause.) --George W. Bush, President Delivers "State of the Union", 2003
Was Bush referring to his campaign of torture at Abu Ghraib, GITMO, Eastern Europe? Or was he referring to his having sanctioned murder? Or both? Since that speech, Bush has sought ways to cover his ass, to make legal crimes he's already committed.
There are indications however that if the case should ever make it to the high court, Bush will lose and badly:
Although the abuses at Abu Ghraib have not come before the Supreme Court and might never come before it, [Justice] Stevens was hinting that he and his fellow justices should not be — and weren’t — ignorant of the events at the now-infamous prison.
The government has argued that Padilla is an al Qaeda soldier. In his June 9, 2002, statement justifying Padilla’s detention, Bush said he “represents a continuing, present and grave danger to the national security of the United States,” such that his military detention “is necessary to prevent him from aiding al Qaeda in its efforts to attack the United States.” A soldier or a subversive?
But Stevens took a quite different view: He used the term “subversive” to describe Padilla, almost implying he is akin to a political dissident or revolutionary.
Long-term detention of American citizens such as Padilla, Stevens said, cannot be justified “by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by more extreme forms of torture is of no consequence.”
Is Stevens correct in calling Padilla’s two years of being held in the Charleston, S.C., Navy brig a form of torture?--Rulings hint at Abu Ghraib. Possibility of torture seems to weigh on some justices, Tom Curry -National affairs writer, MSNBC
Bush’s war on terrorism is a crime against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq and a hoax upon the people of the United States. Because of Bush’s war on terrorism, America, a net debtor nation thanks to Ronald Reagan and the GOP, has, at last, found some exports: brutality, perversity and torture.
If there is any good news to be found in this slimy residue it is this: a revolt against Bush may be brewing inside the CIA. Many are said to live in fear of indictments and subpoenas. What’s called “
Wehrmacht group” have leaked sordid details about how the Bush administration conducted torture and perversion at Abu Ghraib and how Bush deliberately tried to skirt US and international laws with a program of “rendition”, that is, flying victims to other countries for the purpose of skirting the law and fooling the US and international public.
Racking someone is bad enough but torture American-style seems especially abhorrent and sexually perverse. In US torture will be found Satanism, and various degrees of psycho-sexual morbidness that defies description and digestion. For example, Seymour Hersh says that the US has
video tapes of children being raped, sodomized and tortured at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and 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. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."Seymour Hersh: Children Raped at Abu Ghraib
Reprehensible images to be found among unreleased photographs include images of rape, torture, mutilated animals, circles of candles, swastikas, and sexual activity among the torturers themselves, often in front of the detainees.
There’s much, much more. From
Salon's exclusive:
"A review of all the computer media submitted to this office revealed a total of 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse, 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, 660 images of adult pornography, 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts, 20 images of a soldier with a Swastika drawn between his eyes, 37 images of Military Working dogs being used in abuse of detainees and 125 images of questionable acts." 
It’s hard to believe that the entire torture program is anything other than an excuse by perverts to indulge in psycho-sexual and/or satanic rituals that might be more at home inside the walls of the
Skull and Bones or the Nazi SS than in a legitimate program to elicit useful information in a “war on terrorism”. In fact, the “war on terrorism” itself is premised upon lies and propaganda, nothing but an excuse to indulge satanic perversity not seen since the Holocaust. As one blogger put it: “…it's right out of a dark occultist's playbook.” Indeed, it is.
Who but a Bonesman could be its chief architect? Who but the man who set records for executions in Texas could create its policies? Who but the man who ridiculed death row inmates would defend the perverted rationale of torture? Who but someone who got his jollies blowing up horned toads in West Texas could defend it, encourage it, and, at the same time, deny it and cover it up?
This program of torture creates terrorism where none had existed before. The US campaign of terrorism is sure to inspire another generation of terrorists. Yet, the Bush administration’s defense and active cover up of these atrocities bespeaks its complicity in heinous crimes against humanity. The only rational explanation is this: Bush
needs new enemies to justify a
permanent occupation. Meanwhile, a report on US interrogation tactics entitled “
Human Rights Standards Applicable to the United States' Interrogation of Detainees,” challenges the various rationalizations cited inexplicably in defense of an act that had been denied by Bushies. Why defend an act that had not occurred?
Scott Horton, a human rights activist has since cited various “torture memoranda” to disprove Rumsfeld's position that Abu Ghraib was but the work of a few “bad apples”. The reports by Seymour Hersh are consistent with Horton’s work; they tend to support the conclusion that Abu Ghraib is but one “island” in the American
gulag archipelago. Torture is Bush’s policy and it will be his sorry legacy, a cancer on the American body politic, an indictment of the national morality, a final chapter in what
Theodore Dreiser called "Tragic America".
When it all comes crashing down, Bush will defy the Supreme Court of the United States in a critical case, a divisive case brought about by the reckless and incompetent leadership of brinkmanship played out with innocent American and Iraqi lives.
It is the
duty of those Americans, true patriots still loyal to the Constitution, to make sure Bush loses and loses decisively.
The future of the US absolutely depends upon the utter and ignominious defeat of this subversive, perverted cultist, this sociopath for whom nothing we hold dear is sacred.
This is a dangerous game on which Bush is willing to wager the farm that his weak-kneed opposition will buckle! A recent Democratic concession on war funding is not a good omen.
The stakes are too high and when the Constitution itself is at stake, there is no center to triangulate. Bush likes absolutes. Here is one he most certainly understands: if Bush wins, the people of the US lose. America will no longer have the legal recourse of removal; impeachment will be a dead issue. If impeached, Bush will not go willingly into that good night. There will be no jaunty salutes from a helicopter. There will be no teary farewells. I don't like to think about the worst case scenario except to say that Bush must, for the sake of legitimate government and the Constitution, lose!
Having subverted every protection afforded the people by our founders, Bush and company will have left us no choice but slavery under a dictatorship or a popular uprising and revolution. It's his
modus operandi.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
—Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
Nixon was called an “imperial President”. Interestingly, the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon were concerned with his obstruction of justice in connection with the Watergate Scandal and various abuses of agencies to include the CIA and the IRS. Bush makes Nixon look like a boy scout.
When the final us v them showdown occurs, I wonder: will the Congress support the restoration of the US Constitution, American Democracy, Due Process of Law?
Additional resources:
The Existentialist CowboySpread the word:
In the years leading up to World War II, the phrase "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" had taken on a series of increasingly ominous meanings in the Nazi vocabulary.2 The various implications had included voluntary emigration, confinement to ghettos in cities located along rail lines, forced removal to concentration camps, and finally, extermination. Heydrich wanted to be certain there was no confusion among the group that, now, the term referred specifically to the murder of all European Jews.
