Sodomized to Protect Our Freedoms

Sodomized to Protect Our Freedoms

By Allan Uthman, Buffalo Beast
Posted on August 3, 2009, Printed on August 3, 2009

Would we really need debate on the torture question if we discussed the numerous acts of sodomy instead of the nuances of waterboarding?

"Yasser tearfully described that when he reached the top of the steps 'the party began. … They started to put the of the rifle the wood from the broom into . They entered my privates from behind.' ... Yasser estimated that he was penetrated five or six times during this initial sodomy incident and saw blood 'all over my feet' through a small hole in the hood covering his eyes." – by Physicians for Human Rights' "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," a report containing firsthand accounts of men who endured torture by U.S. personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

Waterboarding. It's all we seem to discuss when comes to American torture. Whenever you see people discussing "enhanced interrogation" on your TV, chances are they'll be throwing around the same tired arguments, all revolving around waterboarding.

Why, of all the things we've done to our suspected (and not-so-suspected) terrorist detainees, is waterboarding the issue? Why confine the rapidly dwindling debate to that single technique? We've engaged in a lot of other practices that qualify universally as torture. Are sleep deprivation or "Palestinian hanging" not controversial enough? Is solitary confinement too mundane?

How about sodomy? Is that something we consider unremarkable?

"This is highly consistent with the events Amir described, including a traumatic injury and subsequent scarring process. Examination of the perianal area showed signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having been sodomized with a broomstick."
-- "Broken Laws, Broken Lives"

That's right; sodomy. Forcible anal penetration. The documentation of this and other forms of sexual humiliation is too extensive to be denied or pawned off on a couple of redneck privates. And we know now that sexual humiliation techniques were among those discussed and approved by the National Security Principals Committee, a White House group including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet and John "History will not judge this kindly" Ashcroft.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/141722/

Torturing Children: Bush's Legacy and Democracy's Failure

Monday 03 August 2009
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

This is an excerpt from Henry A. Giroux's forthcoming book, "Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror," to be published by Paradigm Publishers.

Nowhere is there a more disturbing, if not horrifying, example of the relationship between a culture of cruelty and the politics of irresponsibility than in the resounding silence that surrounds the torture of children under the presidency of George W. Bush - and the equal moral and political failure of the Obama administration to address and rectify the conditions that made it possible. But if we are to draw out the dark and hidden parameters of such crimes, they must be made visible so men and women can once again refuse to orphan the law, justice, and morality. How we deal with the issue of state terrorism and its complicity with the torture of children will determine not merely the conditions under which we are willing to live, but whether we will live in a society in which moral responsibility disappears altogether and whether we will come to find ourselves living under a democratic or authoritarian social order. This is not merely a political and ethical matter, but also a matter of how we take seriously the task of educating ourselves more critically in the future.

We haven't always looked away. When Emmett Till's battered, brutalized, and broken fourteen-year-old body was open to public viewing in Chicago after he was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, his mother refused to have him interred in a closed casket. His mutilated and swollen head, his face disfigured and missing an eye, made him unrecognizable as the young, handsome boy he once was. The torture, humiliation, and pain this innocent African-American youth endured at the hands of white racists was transformed into a sense of collective outrage and pain, and helped launch the Civil Rights movement. Torture when inflicted on children becomes indefensible. Even among those who believe that torture is a defensible practice to extract information, the case for inflicting pain and abuse upon children proves impossible to support. The image of young children being subjected to prolonged standing, handcuffed to the top of a cell door, doused with cold water, raped, and shocked with electrodes boggles the mind. Corrupting and degenerate practices, such despicable acts also reveal the utter moral depravity underlying the rationales used to defend torture as a viable war tactic. There is an undeniable pathological outcome when the issue of national security becomes more important than the survival of morality itself, resulting in some cases in the deaths of thousands of children - and with little public outrage. For instance, Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, appearing on the national television program "60 Minutes" in 1996 was asked by Leslie Stahl for her reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children in five years as a result of the U.S. blockade. Stahl pointedly asked her, "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it."(1) The comment was barely reported in the mainstream media and produced no outrage among the American public. As Rahul Mahajan points out, "The inference that Albright and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale - a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one's political ends - does not seem to be one that can be made in the U.S. mass media."(2) More recently, Michael Haas has argued that in spite of the ample evidence that the United States has both detained and abused what may be hundreds of children in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, there has been almost no public debate about the issue and precious few calls for prosecuting those responsible for the torture. He writes:

The mistreatment of children is something not so funny that has been neglected on the road to investigations of and calls for prosecution of those responsible for torture. George W. Bush has never been asked about the abuse of children in American-run prisons in the "war on terror." It is high time for Bush and others to be held accountable for what is arguably the most egregious of all their war crimes - the abuse and death of children, who should never have been arrested in the first place. The best kept secret of the Bush's war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime.(3)

While it is difficult to confirm how many children have actually been detained, sexually abused, and tortured by the Bush administration, there is ample evidence that such practices have taken place not only from the accounts of numerous journalists but also in a number of legal reports. One of the most profoundly disturbing and documented cases of the torture of a child in the custody of U.S. forces is that of Mohammed Jawad, who was captured in Afghanistan after he allegedly threw a hand grenade at a military vehicle that injured an Afghan interpreter and two U.S. soldiers. He was immediately arrested by the local Afghan police, who tortured him and consequently elicited a confession from him. An Afghan Attorney General in a letter to the U.S. government claimed that Jawad was 12 years-old when captured, indicating that he was still in primary school, though other sources claim he was around 15 or 16.(4) Jawad denies the charges made by the Afghan police, claiming that "they tortured me. They beat me. They beat me a lot. One person told me, 'If you don't confess, they are going to kill you.' So, I told them anything they wanted to hear."(5) On the basis of a confession obtained through torture, Jawad was turned over to U.S. forces and detained first at Bagram and later at Guantánamo. This child caught in the wild zone of permanent war and illegal legalities has spent more than six years as a detainee. Unfortunately, the Obama administration, even after admitting that Jawad had been tortured illegally, has asked the court to detain him so that it can decide whether or not it wants to bring a criminal charge against him. After a federal judge claimed the government's case was "riddled with holes," the Obama administration decided it would no longer consider Jawad a "military detainee but would be held for possible prosecution in American civilian courts."(6) This shameful decision takes place against any sense of reason or modicum of morality and justice. Even Jawad's former military prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a Bronze Star recipient, has stated that there "is no credible evidence or legal basis" to continue his detention and that he does not represent a risk to anyone.(7) In an affidavit filed with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he claimed "that at least three other Afghans had been arrested for the crime and had subsequently confessed, casting considerable doubt on the claim that Mr. Jawad was solely responsible for the attack."(8) It gets worse: Vandeveld also pointed out that the confession obtained by the Afghan police and used as the cornerstone of the Bush case against Jawad could not have been written by him because "Jawad was functionally illiterate and could not read or write the statement was not even in his native language of Pashto."(9) The ACLU points out that "the written statement allegedly contain Mohammed's confession and thumbprint is in Farsi," which Jawad does not read, write, or speak.(10) Vandeveld was so repulsed by the fact that all of the evidence used against Jawad was forcibly obtained through torture that he "first demanded that Jawad be released, then, when Bush officials refused, unsuccessfully demanded to be relieved of his duty to prosecute and then finally resigned."(11) Since resigning, he is now a key witness in Jawad's defense and works actively with the ACLU to get him released. As Bob Herbert has written, "There is no credible evidence against Jawad, and his torture-induced confession has rightly been ruled inadmissible by a military judge. But the administration does not feel that he has suffered enough."(12) And, yet, Jawad was the subject of egregious and repugnant acts of torture from the moment he was captured in Afghanistan and later turned over to American forces.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthout.org/080309A?n

I was a part of this group from 1976 to 1982

My mom became involved with them after a wealthy couple that my grandmother went to church with, took her (my mom) into their home to try and help her overcome her addictions and the problems that she was having at the time. I eventually became a part of it because I was with living with her in D.C. at a place called Agape House, a Christian house for recovering addicts or alcoholics, that was also a soup kitchen on Tuesday nights. She worked for the Prison fellowship ministries, under Chuck Colson, among other things the Fellowship had going on. You see, the rich people and the powerful people don't do any hands on charitable works, they foster at risk people to do it for them. This rich couple never helped my mother to become self sufficient or responsible. They "took care" of us, while she did what they wanted. I was exploited as a child by the Fellowship, by actually working in different charitable functions, like emceeing events at the prison, or the fixing up of a dilapidated inner city nursing home, where at age 8, I cleaned maggots out of a women's bedsores.

To make a very long story short, my mother couldn't stay clean, and the rich couple dumped her, after "caring" for her and I for over ten years. She overdosed when I was 16 and died. Her funeral was paid for and presided over by the Reverend Richard Halverson, the Chaplain of the Untied States Senate, and a prominent figure in the Fellowship Foundation at the time. He also was the Reverend who married my mother and step father 4 years prior to her death. I went to live with my paternal grandparents, and never herd form the rich couple again, or from Reverend Halverson. These people were like family to me, so I thought. But once our usefulness was gone, we didn't matter at all. Since my mother never received a paycheck for her work, I was not able to collect social security after she dies, and I lived with a totally disabled grandfather, and a grandmother who didn't have any marketable skills. I was an innocent child that believed in the Christian idea of doing unto others as I would have them do to me and to help anyone that needed it if I was able to. These people taught me that only those with money and power count, and the little people are expendable and can be kicked aside when they aren't giving enough of their time to the Fellowship. I feel like they stole my childhood from me and very possibly my mother, because her life might have turned out much differently if she was helped by those who cared about her, not how helping a lesser human inflated people's egos. I wish everyone would learn about these people, and warn everyone else that they know, to stay far away from them if they are in recovery or in prison for sure. Because those are the people that they exploit to do their charitable works, while they make business and political connections to further their own selfish agendas.

And Hillary is not really a member of this group and hasn't had much contact with them, except for the people in government who are members that surround her, both at home and abroad. She has obviously seen something that caused her to back away. And they have such power that she wouldn't speak out against them, because they would destroy her. They were the vast right wing conspiracy that she spoke of, maybe she figured that out, I don't know. And they are a bit misogynistic as well.

SOURCE:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6202847&mesg_id=6205606