FBI: US Does Torture

The Bush administration has waged a concerted war against the United States from its first days in office. No where is that more apparent than in our support-for and upholding-of human rights. Today, we have a new report out by the FBI that is a gross indictment of the Administration and its unfortunate influence within the American military. Not only does the US have a systematic approach to the torture of individuals, but we have even collaborated with the Chinese to perfect our techniques. You can just imagine how seriously our credibility will be in the future when we implore China and other countries to uphold basic human rights, including the Geneva Conventions. From David Kurtz at TPM Muckraker:

But as you dig down into the 370-page report (.pdf), it's most revealing for what it shows the U.S. government was actually doing to detainees. Because of the limited jurisdiction of the DOJ inspector general, the report was focused on the FBI. But in establishing the environment in which the FBI was operating, the report paints a picture of ghastly treatment of detainees by the United States on a consistent long-term basis.

In the course of his investigation, the IG interviewed 450 FBI agents who were detailed to Gitmo at one time or another. Nearly half reported witnessing or hearing about "rough or aggressive treatment of detainees, primarily by military investigators."

The report contains a chart of the conduct FBI agents reported at Gitmo and the manner in which the agents learned of the conduct. [Me: Chart one & Chart two]

...

Similar charts were created for cataloging the conduct reported by FBI agents in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Most of the "techniques" listed have been previously revealed but there were some surprises:

In one of several previously undisclosed episodes, the report found that American military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Muslims held there, waking them every 15 minutes the night before their interviews by the Chinese. In another incident, it said, a female interrogator reportedly bent back an inmate's thumbs and squeezed his genitals as he grimaced in pain.

The charts, though, are less telling in the specifics than they are in the totality of the scheme the U.S. government came up with to legalize and then implement a policy of torture.

If this doesn't shame you as an American, then you completely lack a moral center. These actions are anti-American at their very heart. Indeed, they are anti-human. And this consideration is not only one of theory. These policies fan the flames of anti-Americanism abroad and make each and every one of our men and women in uniform less safe. And I think we can all agree that they are already vulnerable enough to begin with without their own government continually sticking a knife in their backs.

21 May 2008