'Gitmo Is Like Being Alive in Your Own Grave'

[kpete]

Published on Thursday, December 14, 2006 by the Inter Press Service
'Gitmo Is Like Being Alive in Your Own Grave'
by Zofeen Ebrahim

''Guantanamo brings images of a man in orange overalls, his face down and a soldier holding him by the neck, like a dog on a leash," says 14-year-old Zahra Paracha. "Animals are treated better,'' she tells IPS.

................

''When we sold our soul and became a United States ally, we lost any bargaining power we (Pakistan) ever had," adds Farhat Paracha, wife of Guantanamo Bay prisoner Saifullah Paracha and mother of another, Uzair Paracha.

............

Paracha senior is being held in Camp-5 Delta, which, he told his wife, is ‘like living in your own grave.'

...............

Apart from exposing prisoners to extreme temperatures, Katznelson said, for a long time, deviation from the rules was met with violence. "For instance, if a prisoner being led to a shower looked at another prisoner, or spoke to anyone, he was beaten. If the prisoner put his food tray down in the wrong place for collection, he was beaten. Any guard at any time could order a beating or that a prisoner be sent to isolation. In isolation, prisoners' beards and heads are forcibly shaved." But, says Katznelson, the beatings have since become fewer now that a new commander is in place.

more at:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1214-05.htm

[madokie]

1. I could have writen those few words, like being in your own grave

so sad they are caught up in the little mans problem

[Bucky]

2. "The beatings have since become fewer"

Thank you for the crumbs, Mister Scrooge

[Peace Patriot]

3. I want Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld held accountable for every one of those

beatings, for all the disappeareds, for every instance of torture, and for Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other torture centers in general. I want them to sit for hours and days and weeks and months, having to listen to every account. I want them to have to listen to a war crimes tribunal condemn them for their heinous crimes. And I want them to be forced to give all their bloody war profits to the victims, and to be sentenced to lifetimes of community service in Veterans hospitals, cleaning bedpans.

Al Gore said it well: "How dare they? HOW DARE THEY?!"


-----------


Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW! --if it's democracy that you want, and president who is beholden to the people, and a truly representative Congress. (70% of the American people want this war ended. Do you see that reflected in Congress? Back in Feb. '03, before the invasion, 56% of the American people opposed the war on Iraq. Did you see that opinion reflected in the 2004 election?)

[Peace Patriot]

4. Al Gore's speech, Oct. 24, 2004...

There are many people in both parties who have the uneasy feeling that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush's relationship to reason, his disdain for facts, an incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country. One group maligns the President as not being intelligent, or at least, not being smart enough to have a normal curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second group is convinced that his religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups. I think he is plenty smart. And while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and that it is an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me and for many of you, most of the President's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. But it is crucially important to be precise in describing what it is he believes in so strongly and insulates from any logical challenge or even debate. It is ideology - and not his religious faith - that is the source of his inflexibility. Most of the problems he has caused for this country stem not from his belief in God, but from his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interests of the wealthy and of large corporations over the interests of the American people. Love of power for its own sake is the original sin of this presidency.

(snip)

The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals then cloaks it with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities. Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the citizenry of America and give as much as possible to the already wealthy and privileged, who look at his agenda and say, as Dick Cheney said to Paul O'Neill, "this is our due."

(snip)

In the international arena, treaties and international agreements are bad, because they can interfere with the exercise of power, just as domestic laws can. The Geneva Convention, for example, and the U.S. law prohibiting torture were both described by Bush's White House Counsel as "quaint." And even though new information has confirmed that Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in reviewing the specific extreme measures authorized to be used by military interrogators, he has still not been held accountable for the most shameful and humiliating violation of American principles in recent memory.

(snip)

t appears to be an important element in Bush's ideology to never admit a mistake or even a doubt. It also has become common for Bush to rely on special interests for information about the policies important to them and he trusts what they tell him over any contrary view that emerges from public debate. He has, in effect, outsourced the truth. Most disturbing of all, his contempt for the rule of reason and his early successes in persuading the nation that his ideologically based views accurately described the world have tempted him to the hubristic and genuinely dangerous illusion that reality is itself a commodity that can be created with clever public relations and propaganda skills, and where specific controversies are concerned, simply purchased as a turnkey operation from the industries most affected.


  George Orwell said, "The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

(snip)

There is a growing tension between President Bush's portrait of the situation in which we find ourselves and the real facts on the ground. In fact, his entire agenda is collapsing around his ankles: Iraq is in flames, with a growing U.S. casualty rate and a growing prospect of a civil war with the attendant chaos and risk of an Islamic fundamentalist state. America's moral authority in the world has been severely damaged, and our ability to persuade others to follow our lead has virtually disappeared. Our troops are stretched thin, are undersupplied and are placed in intolerable situations without adequate training or equipment. In the latest U.S.-sponsored public opinion survey of Iraqis only 2% say they view our troops as liberators; more than 90% of Arab Iraqis have a hostile view of what they see as an "occupation." Our friends in the Middle East - including, most prominently, Israel - have been placed in greater danger because of the policy blunders and the sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon officials have conducted the war. The war in Iraq has become a recruiting bonanza for terrorists who use it as their damning indictment of U.S. policy. The massive casualties suffered by civilians in Iraq and the horrible TV footage of women and children being pulled dead or injured from the rubble of their homes has been a propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden beyond his wildest dreams. America's honor and reputation has been severely damaged by the President's decision to authorize policies and legal hair splitting that resulted in widespread torture by U.S. soldiers and contractors of Iraqi citizens and others in facilities stretching from Guantanamo to Afghanistan to Iraq to secret locations in other countries. Astonishingly, and shamefully, investigators also found that more than 90 percent of those tortured and abused were innocent of any crime or wrongdoing whatsoever. The prestigious Jaffe think tank in Israel released a devastating indictment just last week of how the misadventure in Iraq has been a deadly distraction from the crucial war on terror.


  We now know from Paul Bremer, the person chosen to be in charge of U.S. policy in Iraq immediately following the invasion, that he repeatedly told the White House there were insufficient troops on the ground to make the policy a success. Yet at that time, President Bush was repeatedly asserting to the American people that he was relying on those Americans in Iraq for his confident opinion that we had more than enough troops and no more were needed.


  We now know from the Central Intelligence Agency that a detailed, comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the likely consequences of an invasion accurately predicted the chaos, popular resentment, and growing likelihood of civil war that would follow a U.S. invasion and that this analysis was presented to the President even as he confidently assured the nation that the aftermath of our invasion would be the speedy establishment of representative democracy and market capitalism by grateful Iraqis.

(snip)

when President Bush received his fateful and historic warning of 9/11, he did not convene the National Security Council, did not bring together the FBI and CIA and other agencies with responsibility to protect the nation, and apparently did not even ask followup questions about the warning. The bi-partisan 9/11 commission summarized what happened in its unanimous report: "We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 th between the President and his advisors about the possibility of a threat of al Qaeda attack in the United States." The commissioners went on to report that in spite of all the warnings to different parts of the administration, the nation's "domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law authorities were not marshaled to augment the FBI's efforts. The public was not warned."


  We know from the 9/11 commission that within hours of the attack, Secretary Rumsfeld was attempting to find a way to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11. We know the sworn testimony of the President's White House head of counter-terrorism Richard Clarke that on September 12 th - the day after the attack: "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this…I said, 'Mr. President…There's no connection. He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection…We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts…They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.' …I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."


  He did not ask about Osama bin Laden. He did not ask about al Qaeda. He did not ask about Saudi Arabia or any country other than Iraq. When Clarke responded to his question by saying that Iraq was not responsible for the attack and that al Qaeda was, the President persisted in focusing on Iraq, and again, asked Clarke to spend his time looking for information linking Saddam Hussein to the attack.


  Again, this is not hindsight. This is how the President was thinking at the time he was planning America's response to the attack. This was not an unfortunate misreading of the available evidence, causing a mistaken linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda, this was something else; a willful choice to make the linkage, whether evidence existed or not.


  Earlier this month, Secretary Rumsfeld, who saw all of the intelligence available to President Bush on the alleged connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, finally admitted, under repeated questioning from reporters, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."


  This is not negligence, this is deception.

(snip)

...He claimed that he was going to war to deal with an imminent threat to the United States. The evidence shows clearly that there was no such imminent threat and that Bush knew that at the time he stated otherwise. He claimed that gaining dominance of Iraqi oil fields for American producers was never part of his calculation. But we now know, from a document uncovered by the New Yorker and dated just two weeks to the day after Bush's inauguration, that his National Security Counsel was ordered to "meld" its review of "operational policies toward rogue states" with the secretive Cheney Energy Task Force's "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

We also know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against that Cheney Task Force by the odd combination of Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club that one of the documents receiving scrutiny by the task force during the same time period was a detailed map of Iraq showing none of the cities or places where people live but showing in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country, with dotted lines demarking blocks for promising exploration - a map which, in the words of a Canadian newspaper, resembled a butcher's drawing of a steer, with the prime cuts delineated.

(snip)

An extensive investigation published today in the Knight Ridder newspapers uncovers the astonishing truth that even as the invasion began, there was, quite literally, no plan at all for the post-war period. On the eve of war, when the formal presentation of America's plan neared its conclusion, the viewgraph describing the Bush plan for the post-war phase was labeled, "to be provided." It simply did not exist.

(snip)

(Note from Peace Patriot: The following is simply awesome--this was before Katrina!)

In the case of the global climate crisis, Bush has publicly demeaned the authors of official reports by scientists in his own administration that underscore the extreme danger confronting the United States and the world and instead prefers a crackpot analysis financed by the largest oil company on the planet, ExxonMobil. He even went so far as to censor elements of an EPA report dealing with global warming and substitute, in the official government report, language from the crackpot ExxonMobil report. The consequences of accepting ExxonMobil's advice - to do nothing to counter global warming - are almost literally unthinkable. Just in the last few weeks, scientists have reached a new, much stronger consensus that global warming is increasing the destructive power of hurricanes by as much as half of one full category on the one-to-five scale typically used by forecasters. So that a hurricane hitting Florida in the future that would have been a category three and a half, will on average become a category four hurricane. Scientists around the world are also alarmed by what appears to be an increase in the rate of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere - a development which, if confirmed in subsequent years, might signal the beginning of an extremely dangerous "runaway greenhouse" effect. Yet a third scientific group has just reported that the melting of ice in Antarctica, where 95 percent of all the earth's ice is located, has dramatically accelerated. Yet Bush continues to rely, for his scientific advice about global warming, on the one company that most stands to benefit by delaying a recognition of reality.

(snip)

(Note: Awesome, again...)

 In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind related a truly startling conversation that he had with a Bush White House official who was angry that Suskind had written an article in the summer of 2002 that the White House didn't like. This senior advisor to Bush told Suskind that reporters like him lived "in what we call the reality-based community," and denigrated such people for believing that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality…that's not the way the world really works anymore…when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality, judiciously as you will, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."


  By failing to adjust their policies to unexpected realities, they have made it difficult to carry out any of their policies competently. Indeed, this is the answer to what some have regarded as a mystery: How could a team so skilled in politics be so bumbling and incompetent when it comes to policy?


  The same insularity and zeal that makes them effective at smashmouth politics makes them terrible at governing. The Bush-Cheney administration is a rarity in American history. It is simultaneously dishonest and incompetent.

(snip)

(MORE)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102004X.shtml

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NOTE:

Well, this wasn't the torture speech I had intended to quote from (the "how dare they?" quote). This is an analysis of the entire Bush Junta--a brilliant one. He ends by endorsing Kerry-Edwards. This was two weeks before the 2004 election. I will go find that other speech (one of many he has given on national policy over the last 4 years).

I find it odd, though-- nowhere in this entire speech does he mention that Bushite corporations had gained control of our election system, with new electronic voting systems run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code. For the "inventor of the internet," you'd think he would have noticed. (Sorry, Al!) Our Democratic leaders seemed so blind to this! It amazes me.

[Peace Patriot]

5. Al Gore on the torture at Abu Ghraib - May 26, 2004...

George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.

How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib.

To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of "preemption." And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat - and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President.

More disturbing still was their frequent use of the word "dominance" to describe their strategic goal, because an American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does.

Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens - sooner or later - to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul.

One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one's soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded. We also know - and not just from De Sade and Freud - the psychological proximity between sexual depravity and other people's pain. It has been especially shocking and awful to see these paired evils perpetrated so crudely and cruelly in the name of America.

Those pictures of torture and sexual abuse came to us embedded in a wave of news about escalating casualties and growing chaos enveloping our entire policy in Iraq. But in order understand the failure of our overall policy, it is important to focus specifically on what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison, and ask whether or not those actions were representative of who we are as Americans? Obviously the quick answer is no, but unfortunately it's more complicated than that.

(snip)

What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by "a few bad apples," it was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and has made war on America's checks and balances.

The abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from the abuse of the truth that characterized the Administration's march to war and the abuse of the trust that had been placed in President Bush by the American people in the aftermath of September 11th.
(snip)

(Note: After a long list of generals who said we're losing the war--back in spring '04....)

The Post also quoted an unnamed general as saying, "Like a lot of senior Army guys I'm quite angry" with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Administration. He listed two reasons. "I think they are going to break the Army," he said, adding that what really incites him is "I don't think they care."

In his upcoming book, Zinni blames the current catastrophe on the Bush team's incompetence early on. "In the lead-up to the Iraq war, and its later conduct," he writes, "I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption."

(snip)

The soldiers who are accused of committing these atrocities are, of course, responsible for their own actions and if found guilty, must be severely and appropriately punished. But they are not the ones primarily responsible for the disgrace that has been brought upon the United States of America.

Private Lynndie England did not make the decision that the United States would not observe the Geneva Convention. Specialist Charles Graner was not the one who approved a policy of establishing an American Gulag of dark rooms with naked prisoners to be "stressed" and even - we must use the word - tortured - to force them to say things that legal procedures might not induce them to say.

These policies were designed and insisted upon by the Bush White House. Indeed, the President's own legal counsel advised him specifically on the subject. His secretary of defense and his assistants pushed these cruel departures from historic American standards over the objections of the uniformed military, just as the Judge Advocates General within the Defense Department were so upset and opposed that they took the unprecedented step of seeking help from a private lawyer in this city who specializes in human rights and said to him, "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" where the mistreatment of prisoners is concerned."

Indeed, the secrecy of the program indicates an understanding that the regular military culture and mores would not support these activities and neither would the American public or the world community. Another implicit acknowledgement of violations of accepted standards of behavior is the process of farming out prisoners to countries less averse to torture and giving assignments to private contractors

President Bush set the tone for our attitude for suspects in his State of the Union address. He noted that more than 3,000 "suspected terrorists" had been arrested in many countries and then he added, "and 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 allies."

George Bush promised to change the tone in Washington. And indeed he did. As many as 37 prisoners may have been murdered while in captivity, though the numbers are difficult to rely upon because in many cases involving violent death, there were no autopsies.

(NOTE: Here's the "how dare they" part...)

How dare they blame their misdeeds on enlisted personnel from a Reserve unit in upstate New York. President Bush owes more than one apology. On the list of those he let down are the young soldiers who are themselves apparently culpable, but who were clearly put into a moral cesspool. The perpetrators as well as the victims were both placed in their relationship to one another by the policies of George W. Bush.

How dare the incompetent and willful members of this Bush/Cheney Administration humiliate our nation and our people in the eyes of the world and in the conscience of our own people. How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace. How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison.

(MORE)

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/2004/05/iraq-040526-gore.htm

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Note from Peace Patriot: Why is this man not President of the United States? How dare they say he isn't?