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Democracy NowMark Danner: Bush Lied About Torture of Prisoners
Bush-torture-speech06web
The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report two years ago that the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners “constituted torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The findings were based on interviews with prisoners once held in the CIA’s secret black sites. Author and journalist Mark Danner broke the story when he published extensive excerpts of the report in the New York Review of Books. The Red Cross said the fourteen prisoners held in the CIA prisons gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding. ...........
AMY GOODMAN: We move on to a breaking story, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluding in a secret report, yes, it was two years ago that the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners “constituted torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions—the findings based on interviews with prisoners once held in the CIA’s secret black sites.
But the revelation was just made this weekend when the author and journalist Mark Danner published extensive excerpts of the Red Cross report in the New York Review of Books. In the article, Danner quotes from a speech President Bush delivered from the White House on September 6th, 2006. Danner writes, the speech is “perhaps the only historic speech Bush ever gave.” In it, Bush admitted the US was using what he called “an alternative set of procedures” to interrogate terrorism suspects.
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MARK DANNER: So, I think anyone who looks at the report or reads the extracts in the New York Review of Books article can have no doubt, first of all, that the United States tortured prisoners and, secondly, that this activity was illegal and constituted a breach of international and domestic law.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Mark Danner,
did President Bush lie?
MARK DANNER: Yes. Yeah, he did. ................
MARK DANNER: Well, I think that there are a number of things you can say about torture. The first thing is that it’s illegal, very illegal, under international and domestic law. The second thing you can say is that it’s politically damaging, enormously damaging, particularly in a war, the so-called war on terror, which is a political war. It’s essentially a worldwide counterinsurgency in which you are trying to persuade young Muslims, first of all, not to support al-Qaeda, not to join al-Qaeda, not to support a war, an insurgency, against the United States. So it’s politically damaging and illegal. These things are a matter of record. Third, it makes justice impossible. You end up with a bunch of prisoners in Guantanamo who, because they’ve been tortured, cannot be prosecuted.
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