SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
waterboarding
Donald Trump Vows Torture (Again): 'I Like Waterboarding A Lot'
"I don't think it's tough enough," Trump says of waterboarding.
Jun 29, 2016
Donald Trump has reaffirmed his backing of torture.
Speaking at a campaign rally Tuesday in St. Clairsville, Ohio, he said of the terrorist group ISIS, "We have to fight so viciously and violently because we're dealing with violent people."
"What do you think about waterboarding?" he asked the crowd. "I like it a lot," he said to cheers. "I don't think it's tough enough."
The comments, which came in the wake of the bomb and gun attack on Istanbul's Ataturk airport that killed scores, were "about as Trumpian as you could get," according to one commentator.
Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton, for her part, responded to the Turkish attack by calling for the U.S. to "deepen our cooperation with our allies and partners in the Middle East" to confront terrorism. "Such cooperation is essential to protecting the homeland and keeping our country safe," she said.
The presumptive Republican nominee has previously embraced the torture technique, saying in the last Republican presidential debate before the New Hampshire primary, "I would bring back waterboarding, and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding."
He also said following the deadly Brussels terror attacks in March that if he were commander-in-chief, "waterboarding would be fine," adding, "If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding."
During the Ohio speech Tuesday, Trump also denounced the Trans-Pacific Partnership and compared it to rape.
The trade deal was "done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country, just a continuing rape of our country. That's what it is, too," he said.
Jezebel writer Joanna Rothkopf called it "an obviously despicable turn of phrase for anyone who has been the victim of sexual assault, faces the constant threat of assault, or has any sympathy for people who do."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Former Guantanamo Chief Summoned by French Court Over Torture Allegations
General Geoffrey Miller presided over the U.S. military prison in Cuba from 2002 to 2004, after then-President George Bush approved of 'enhanced interrogation' techniques including waterboarding
Feb 19, 2016
A French judge has summoned the former chief of Guantanamo Bay, retired U.S. General Geoffrey Miller, to appear in court on March 1 to face allegations of torture against detainees.
Miller presided over the U.S. military prison in Cuba from 2002 to 2004, shortly after then-President George W. Bush approved the use of so-called "enhanced interrogation" tactics, including waterboarding, hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, removal of clothing, and exposure to extreme heat or cold.
Former prisoners of the camp for years have urged international courts to subpoena Miller over his role in the torture and mistreatment of detainees during his time as Guantanamo commander.
The investigation against Miller began after two French citizens, Nizar Sassi, and Mourad Benchellali, who were detained at Guantanamo from 2001 to 2004 and 2005, respectively, lodged a criminal complaint against Miller in a French court. The Paris Court of Appeals approved their request last April.
William Bourdon, an attorney who represents some of the detainees in the case, told France 24 on Thursday that it was unlikely Miller would show up because "top U.S. civilian and military officials refuse to be held to account by [foreign] judges."
Still, U.S. and international legal advocacy groups praised the judge's decision. The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which have submitted expert reports (pdf) in the proceedings, said Friday that "Miller played a key role in the implementation of the U.S. torture program at Guantanamo prison. It is time he answers for it."
"We commend the French justice system for pursuing its investigation into torture at Guantanamo despite the unwillingness of both Bush and Obama administrations to cooperate with the investigation," the groups said. "We urge the U.S. to make Miller available for questioning and let this judicial process run its course."
"The French nationals who endured torture at Guantanamo under Miller's command, and have persisted with this case, deserve their day in court," the groups continued. "As long as the U.S. remains unwilling to fully investigate its torture program and prosecute its architects and senior implementers, justice will be pursued in courts and countries, like France, where it can be found."
Sassi and Benchellali said they were arbitrarily arrested in Pakistan in alleged connection with the September 11 attacks and sent to Guantanamo, where they say they were tortured.
In an interview with France 24 in April, Benchellali said he wanted "redress" for what he endured, stating, "I've been mistreated. I want those responsible to be called to account."
Miller has also been accused of encouraging abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where the general presided for several months between 2003 and 2004. In September 2003, he submitted a report to the U.S. Department of Defense suggesting that prison guards use abusive tactics to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.
Keep ReadingShow Less
New Reporting Reveals Much More Expansive CIA Water Torture Program
"Whether you call it 'waterboarding' or 'water dousing', that’s torture—plain and simple," says Human Rights Watch
Oct 16, 2015
While the CIA claims it subjected just three prisoners to waterboarding, new lawsuits and documents, as well as further analysis of last year's Senate Torture Report, show that a separate water-torture technique known as "water dousing" was used on at least 13 men, the Guardian reported Friday.
According to journalist Spencer Ackerman, that tactic "created a drowning sensation or chilled a person's body temperature—sometimes through 'immersion' in water, and often without use of a board."
Moreover, Ackerman adds that water dousing often "added an element of hypothermia. Some detainees reported their CIA captors dousing them with 'cold or refrigerated' water, then wrapping them in similarly frigid sheets of plastic, keeping their temperatures low."
"Those familiar with their cases and an interrogator cited in the Senate report consider water dousing's departure from waterboarding to be 'a distinction without a difference'," the Guardian states.
The reporting continues:
The CIA did not ask the Justice Department for approval to use water dousing until summer 2004, two years after the torture program began. The description of the technique provided to department attorneys "made no mention of cold water immersion, which was used on CIA detainees and taught in CIA interrogator training", according to the Senate report.
McClatchy reported on water dousing last year, citing the Senate investigation.
"Interrogators used the water dousing technique in various ways," the Senate report reads. "At detention site Cobalt (in Afghanistan), detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or refrigerated water was poured on them. Others were hosed down repeatedly while they were shackled naked, in the standing sleep deprivation position."
A lawsuit filed this week by torture survivors Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, as well as the family of Gul Rahman, who died of hypothermia in his cell as a result of the torture he endured, describes water dousing as "a form of waterboarding."
The Guardian writes:
Rahman, an Afghan, is the only detainee known to have died in CIA custody, of hypothermia. A footnote in the Senate report cites a CIA linguist, quoted in an agency inspector general study, describing Rahman's dousing, referred to as a "shower".
"Rahman was placed back under the cold water by the guards at [redacted CIA officer]'s direction. Rahman was so cold that he could barely utter his alias. According to [the on-site linguist], the entire process lasted no more than 20 minutes. It was intended to lower Rahman's resistance and was not for hygienic reasons."
Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch, who has investigated the U.S. government's torture program established by President George W. Bush, told the Guardian the CIA was being "entirely disingenuous" in claiming it only waterboarded three people.
"First, more than three people were waterboarded," she said. "But second, the CIA used water to torture detainees in a variety of ways that cannot escape classification as torture. Whether on a board or the floor, they induced near suffocation using water. And whether you call it 'waterboarding' or 'water dousing', that's torture--plain and simple."
According to Ackerman, "CIA officials did not address questions from the Guardian as to why the agency considers the difference between waterboarding and water dousing to be substantive"--nor did they challenge the Guardian's tally of detainees subjected to water dousing.
As Common Dreams noted this week, despite the brutality detailed in the Senate Torture Report, the government has prosecuted only a handful of low-level soldiers and one CIA contractor for prisoner abuse. Meanwhile, the architects of the CIA's torture program have escaped any form of accountability.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Inspired by US, Israel Moves Toward Legalizing Torture of Palestinian Prisoners
Cabinet passed controversial bill that would allow force-feeding of hunger strikers
Jun 15, 2015
The Israeli cabinet over the weekend passed a controversial bill that approves the force-feeding of hunger striking prisoners--an act that is widely considered torture, including by the Israeli Medical Association.
The move means that the bill can now be sent to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, for its second and third readings.
However, Dr. Leonid Eidelman who leads the Israeli Medical Association reportedly told Haaretz, "If the law passes, we'll call on doctors to ignore it."
Force-feeding, which has been compared to water-boarding, involves the painful insertion of tubes and pumping of food and can cause stomach damage and asphyxiation. The U.S. military's routine force-feeding of peaceful protesters at Guantanamo Bay was condemned by the United Nations human rights office as torture and a violation of international law.
Yet, Israeli officials have openly referenced the U.S. practice to justify the bill. When advocating for the legislation last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly cited the U.S. policies at Guantanamo Bay.
Physicians for Human Rights declared that the Israeli bill, if passed, would "legalize torture and gross violations of medical ethics and international conventions."
"Instead of force-feeding prisoners who are humiliated and whose lives are in danger, Israel should deal with the demands of the hunger strikers--through the ending of administrative detentions," the advocacy organization added. Administrative detention refers to the widespread Israeli practice of incarcerating Palestinians without charge or trial on secret evidence.
Hunger strikes are a common tactic of Palestinian resistance against widespread detentions, which stem from Israeli policies of occupation and apartheid.
According to Palestinian human rights organization Addameer, in April 2015 there were 5,800 political prisoners in Israeli jails, including 414 people in administrative detention.
Many of those incarcerated are children. Defense for Children Palestine reports, "Since 2000, at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in an Israeli military detention system notorious for the systematic ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children."
Coordinated hunger strikes among those incarcerated continue to the present. Palestinian news agency Ma'an reports that the latest wave of strikes began in April with hundreds joining in since then.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Amid Torture, Experts Say CIA's Other Crime Was 'Human Experimentation'
Formerly classified document exposes how agency's attempt to legitimize abusive interrogation program was itself another layer of crime
Jun 15, 2015
After the Central Intelligence Agency was given authority to begin torturing suspected terrorists in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, newly published documents show that another of that program's transgressions, according to experts, was a gross violation of medical ethics that allowed the agency to conduct what amounted to "human experimentation" on people who became test subjects without consent.
"Crime one was torture. The second crime was research without consent in order to say it wasn't torture."
--Nathaniel Raymond, Harvard University
Reported exclusively by the Guardian on Monday, sections of a previously classified CIA document--first obtained by the ACLU--reveal that a long-standing policy against allowing people to become unwitting medical or research subjects remained in place and under the purview of the director of the CIA even as the agency began slamming people into walls, beating them intensely, exposing them to prolonged periods of sleep deprivation, performing repeated sessions of waterboarding, and conducting other heinous forms of psychological and physical abuse.
The document details agency guidelines--first established in 1987 during the presidency of Ronald Reagan but subsequently updated--in which the CIA director and an advisory board are directly empowered to make decisions about programs considered "human subject research" by the agency.
As journalist Spencer Ackerman reports:
The relevant section of the CIA document, "Law and Policy Governing the Conduct of Intelligence Agencies", instructs that the agency "shall not sponsor, contract for, or conduct research on human subjects" outside of instructions on responsible and humane medical practices set for the entire US government by its Department of Health and Human Services.
A keystone of those instructions, the document notes, is the "subject's informed consent".
That language echoes the public, if obscure, language of Executive Order 12333 - the seminal, Reagan-era document spelling out the powers and limitations of the intelligence agencies, including rules governing surveillance by the National Security Agency. But the discretion given to the CIA director to "approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research" has not previously been public.
The entire 41-page CIA document exists to instruct the agency on what Executive Order 12333 permits and prohibits, after legislative action in the 1970s curbed intelligence powers in response to perceived abuses - including the CIA's old practice of experimenting on human beings through programs like the infamous MK-Ultra project, which, among other things, dosed unwitting participants with LSD as an experiment.
The previously unknown section of the guidelines empower the CIA director and an advisory board on "human subject research" to "evaluate all documentation and certifications pertaining to human research sponsored by, contracted for, or conducted by the CIA".
Critics have long blasted any members of the medical community who participated in the torture program as traitors to their ethical and professional duties, but as the Guardian notes, "The CIA, which does not formally concede that it tortured people, insists that the presence of medical personnel ensured its torture techniques were conducted according to medical rigor."
But Steven Aftergood, a scholar of the intelligence agencies with the Federation of American Scientists, told the Guardian that these men who were tortured by the agency were, in fact, being studied by medical professionals to see how they would respond to such treatment. In addition to the inherent crime of that abuse, they were also unwitting subjects who never gave their informed consent to be studied in this way. "There is a disconnect between the requirement of this regulation [contained in the document] and the conduct of the interrogation program," Aftergood explained. "They do not represent consistent policy."
And Nathaniel Raymond, a former war-crimes investigator with Physicians for Human Rights and now a researcher with Harvard University's Humanitarian Initiative, put it this way: "Crime one was torture. The second crime was research without consent in order to say it wasn't torture."
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy