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Torture
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★ Torture

You will be tortured to the edge of madness, believe me.  Climax! Casino Royale 1954 starring Barry Nelson & Peter Lorre & Linda Christian & Michael Pate & Eugene Borden & Jean del Val & Gene Roth & Kurt Katch & William Lundigan, director William H Brown junior, Lorre

 

 

The CIA meanwhile began using what would later become a controversial tactic in the war on terror – known as rendition. Frontline: The Dark Side, PBS 2006

 

 

Abu Ghraib: On Capitol Hill Congress was beginning to stir.  The issue: torture.  Frontline: Cheney’s Law, PBS 2007

 

Memorandum for Alberto R Gonzales, Counsel to the President: Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 USC 2340-2340A [John] Yoo’s new definition of torture was so narrow that it was almost impossible to commit the crime.  ibid.

 

 

Rumsfeld had been increasingly unhappy at the lack of actionable intelligence from Gitmo [Guantanamo].  Frontline: Bush’s War I, BBC 2008

 

Secretary Rumsfeld authorised much tougher interrogation techniques.  ibid.

 

The new definition of torture was so narrow that it was almost impossible to commit the crime.  ibid.

 

At the vice president’s office they decided to write the speech Powell would deliver.  ibid.

 

 

In secret the administration had authorised the CIA to use what they called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.  Frontline: Top Secret America, PBS 2011

 

cf.

 

Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms.  Re: Legal Standards Applicable Under 18 USC published Justice website

 

 

He [Obama] repeatedly invoked the state’s secrets privilege in lawsuits involving torture, extraordinary rendition and illegal NSA eavesdropping.  Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States X: Bush & Obama: Age of Terror, Showtime 2012

 

Those who accepted torture would tolerate vigilante justice.  ibid.

 

 

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government.  He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice.  On 24 April his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not ‘persons’, and therefore had no right not to be tortured.  His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works.  One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist.  As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of ‘defence’, Robert Gates, along with the same war-making officials, has been retained by Obama.


All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up.  During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, ‘the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel’ and being used to slaughter mostly women and children.  In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.


In Afghanistan, the US ‘strategy’ of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the ‘Taliban’) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely.  Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival.  He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing ‘a real threat’ to Europe and the US.  On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as ‘anti-nuclear’.  It was nothing of the kind.  Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead program, the US is building new ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.


Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood.  According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain ‘for the next 15 to 20 years’.  On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this.  It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it.  Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech.  Change you can believe in.  John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘ Obama’s 100 days – The Mad Men Did Well

 

 

There are also documents showing torture was officially sanctioned with established procedures for the torturer.  One such manual is entitled, Guiding the Village Comprehensively, and lists the dos and donts of torture.  And here they are: avoid taking photographs showing torture in progress; and when people are being subjected to electric current, and when they have been stripped naked etc.  Remember not to have photographs developed outside East Timor which could then be made available to public by irresponsible elements.  Interrogation should be repeated over and over again until the correct conclusion is drawn.  (East Timor & Indonesia & Torture & Genocide)  John Pilger, Death of a Nation – The Timor Conspiracy, ITV 1994

 

 

It is Elizabethans that pioneered state-authorised torture.  Dr Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England II: The Rich, BBC 2013

 

 

The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.  George W Bush 26th June 2003

 

 

The Pentagon knew American soldiers were torturing prisoners.  Secret Iraq: Insurgency, BBC 2010

 

 

Under previous president George W Bush the CIA and the military had been given free rein to wage a secret war against the terrorists using abduction, secret interrogation black sites, and torture.  Peter Taylor, The Secret War on Terror I, BBC 2011

 

 

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.  Noam Chomsky

 

 

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.  Noam Chomsky

 

 

An invisible network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the War on Terror began … Unknown numbers of suspects have been sent by rendition to countries where torture is virtually guaranteed.  Noam Chomsky, Failed States audio 

 

 

What I saw with my own eyes was someone from the middle of the square being dragged to the museum ... We’ve heard about people getting electrocuted, people getting beaten ... When you say the Egyptian museum the first thing that crosses their mind is torture.  Shahira Abouellail, activist

 

 

Since the early years of the occupation the service had been using various forms of torture during its interrogations ... standard procedure.  Storyville: The Law in These Parts, caption, BBC 2013

 

‘But I saw what state they were in, in the interrogation rooms.’  ibid.  Oded Pensensson, retired Colonel and military judge 1988-2008

 

Interrogated for thirty days.  And released without charge.  ibid.

 

 

The island of Jersey is a self-governing possession of the British Crown separate from the UK with its own laws, financial rules and Parliament.  Some of its most influential figures are appointed by the Queen.  When secrets from the past surfaced in 2007 they revealed deep divisions and mistrust between those now running the island, proud of Jersey’s reputation, and those who saw themselves as underdogs campaigning for change.  Storyville: Dark Secrets of a Trillion Dollar Island: Garenne, captions, BBC 2021

 

What about the victims and survivors, what they’ve been through?  A lot of them didn’t survive.  Some say it’s the lucky ones that died.  ibid.  bloke on boat  

 

Police search for more bodies at a former children’s home in Jersey.  ibid.  BBC news 

 

 

We’re going to torture you so your mother can see you suffer.  The Borgias: The Siege at Forli s2e7, Juan to Sforza boy, Showtime 2012

 

 

Push this down his throat.  The Borgias s3e1: The Face of Death, Lucrezia

 

 

Pope Innocent III created structures to deal with heresy – Inquisition ... Its difficult for modern westerners to understand the mind of an inquisitor but we need to bear in mind they were clergy who saw what they were doing as an aspect of the pastoral role of a priest – to make society better.  But theres a fine line in any system between idealism and sadism.  Inquisitions were no worse than most medieval courts.  Torture might be used to extract confession.  Those on trial had no right to defence counsel.  Penalty raised from wearing a cross of penance to pilgrimage to imprisonment to death by burning at the stake.  Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, BBC 2009

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