Re: OT: Physicians for a National Health Program

[Roger W <allucan8@xxxxxxx>]

On Dec 20, 4:25 am, "Robert L Bass" <RobertLB...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The only thing that bothers me about that sentence is the
> > implication that you might be willing to give that power to some
> > different president.
>
> > Personally, I wouldn't trust any of 'em with it.
>
> The following was actuually written by a *former* friend and
> supporter of Bush:

The opinions of a "former friend" would not mean shit to me.

>
> "Bush's torturers follow where the Nazis led" -- Andrew Sullivan

Who the fuck is Andrew Sullivan and why should we care?
>
> "I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and
> torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration
> or deliberate deception. I didn't believe America would ever do those
> things. I'd also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it
> necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime,
> and knew Donald Rumsfeld as a friend."
>
> "It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by
> the far left or was part of Al-Qaeda propaganda. After all, they
> train captives to lie about this stuff, don't they? Bottom line: I
> trusted the president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that
> we were and are defending. And then I was forced to confront the
> evidence."
>
> "From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the
> Bush administration made a strong and formative decision: in the
> absence of good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after
> 9/11, it would do what no American administration had done before. It
> would torture detainees to get information."
>
> "This decision was and is illegal, and violates America's treaty
> obligations, the military code of justice, the United Nations
> convention against torture, and US law. Although America has allied
> itself over the decades with some unsavoury regimes around the world
> and has come close to acquiescing to torture, it has never itself
> tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from the evils of
> Nazism and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done
> more than any other nation to banish torture from the world. George
> Washington himself vowed that it would be a defining mark of the new
> nation that such tactics, used by the British in his day, would be
> anathema to Americans."
>
> "But Bush decided that 9/11 changed all that. Islamists were
> apparently more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom
> Americans fought and defeated without resorting to torture. The
> decision to enter what Dick Cheney called "the dark side" was made,
> moreover, in secret; interrogators who had no idea how to do these
> things were asked to replicate some of the methods US soldiers had
> been trained to resist if captured by the Soviets or Vietcong."
>
> "Classic torture techniques, such as waterboarding, hypothermia,
> beatings, excruciating stress positions, days and days of sleep
> deprivation, and threats to family members (even the children of
> terror suspects), were approved by Bush and inflicted on an unknown
> number of terror suspects by American officials, CIA agents and, in
> the chaos of Iraq, incompetents and sadists at Abu Ghraib. And when
> the horror came to light, they denied all of it and prosecuted a few
> grunts at the lowest level. The official reports were barred from
> investigating fully up the chain of command."
>
> "Legally, the White House knew from the start that it was on
> extremely shaky ground. And so officials told pliant in-house lawyers
> to concoct memos to make what was illegal legal. Their irritation
> with the rule of law, and their belief that the president had the
> constitutional authority to waive it, became a hallmark of their
> work."
>
> "They redefined torture solely as something that would be equivalent
> to the loss of major organs or leading to imminent death. Everything
> else was what was first called 'coercive interrogation', subsequently
> amended to 'enhanced interrogation'. These terms were deployed in
> order for the president to be able to say that he didn't support
> 'torture'. We were through the looking glass."
>
> "After Abu Ghraib, some progress was made in restraining these
> torture policies. The memo defining torture out of existence was
> rescinded. The Military Commissions Act was crafted to prevent the
> military itself from being forced to violate its own code of justice.
> But the administration clung to its torture policies, and tried every
> legal manoeuvre to keep it going and keep it secret. Much of this
> stemmed from the vice-president's office."
>
> "Last week The New York Times revealed more. We now know that long
> after Abu Ghraib was exposed, the administration issued internal
> legal memos that asserted the legality of many of the techniques
> exposed there. The memos not only gave legal cover to waterboarding,
> hypothermia and beating but allowed them in combination to intensify
> the effect."
>
> "The argument was that stripping a chained detainee naked, pouring
> water over him while keeping room temperatures cold enough to induce
> repeated episodes of dangerous hypothermia, was not 'cruel, inhuman
> or degrading'. We have a log of such a technique being used at
> Guantanamo. The victim had to be rushed to hospital, brought back
> from death, then submitted once again to 'enhanced interrogation'."
>
> "George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase 'enhanced
> interrogation technique'. By relying on it, the White House spokesman
> last week was able to say with a straight face that the
> administration strongly opposed torture and that 'any procedures they
> use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful'."
>
> "So is 'enhanced interrogation' torture? One way to answer this
> question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Versch=E4rfte
> Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact
> term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the
> 'third degree'. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress
> positions and long-time sleep deprivation."
>
> "The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948.
> The victims were not in uniform - they were part of the Norwegian
> insurgency against the German occupation - and the Nazis argued, just
> as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections
> (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions)."
>
> "The Nazis even argued that 'the acts of torture in no case resulted
> in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not
> result in permanent disablement'. This argument is almost verbatim
> that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration's house lawyer, who
> now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American
> Enterprise Institute."
>
> "The US-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheney's arguments.
> Base-line protections against torture applied, the court argued, to
> all detainees, including those out of uniform. They didn't qualify
> for full PoW status, but they couldn't be abused either. The court
> also relied on the plain meaning of torture as defined under US and
> international law: 'The court found it decisive that the defendants
> had inflicted serious physical and mental suffering on their victims,
> and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment
> . . .'"
>
> "The definition of torture remains the infliction of 'severe mental
> or physical pain or suffering' with the intent of procuring
> intelligence. In 1948, in other words, America rejected the semantics
> of the current president and his aides. The penalty for those who
> were found guilty was death. This is how far we've come. And this
> fateful, profound decision to change what America stands for was made
> in secret. The president kept it from Congress and from many parts of
> his own administration."
>
> "Ever since, the United States has been struggling to figure out what
> to do about this, if anything. So far Congress has been extremely
> passive, although last week's leaks about the secret pro-torture
> memos after Abu Ghraib forced Arlen Specter, a Republican senator, to
> proclaim that the memos 'are more than surprising. I think they are
> shocking'. Yet the public, by and large, remains indifferent; and all
> the Republican candidates, bar John McCain and Ron Paul, endorse
> continuing the use of torture."
>
> "One day America will come back- the America that defends human
> rights, the America that would never torture detainees, the America
> that leads the world in barring the inhuman and barbaric. But not
> until this president leaves office. And maybe not even then."
>
> --www.timesonline.co.uk
>
> --
>
> Regards,
> Robert L Bass
>
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