In Guantanamo. Dear God.
Category: War Crimes
Heroes and villains
All I know is, we send people to war and they come back broken.
Auschwitz
I don’t even know what to say about these anniversary observances. I mean, the people who were the victims are now the perpetrators. Hooray?
The kill team
Since so many people are successfully selling us on the hagiography that is “American Sniper,” I thought I’d remind you of this film that came out last July: “Kill Team”. It was on PBS’ Independent Lens last night:
Kill Team is not just a video game anymore, not just the inevitable pairing of two of the most popular words in American English. “Kill Team” is now a movie, and against the odds it’s not a celebration of killing, but a particular take on an actual series of events made widely known by Rolling Stone.
U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan developed the practice of killing civilians for sport, placing weapons beside the bodies or otherwise pretending to have been attacked, keeping body parts as trophies, and celebrating their “kills” in photographs with the corpses.
For months, according to Rolling Stone, the whole platoon knew what was going on. Officers dismissed complaints from the relatives of victims, accepted completely implausible accounts, and failed to help victims who might still be alive (instead ordering a soldier to “Make sure he’s dead.”)
A key instigator, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, arrived in Afghanistan recounting a successful murder of a family in Iraq and bearing tattoos recording his kills. “Get me a kill” soldiers asked who wanted to participate in the kill team. Killers were treated as heroes, and the widespread understanding that they were killing civilians who’d never threatened them didn’t seem to damage that treatment.
“Drop-weapon” has been a common term among vets returning to the United States from Afghanistan and Iraq for over a decade, referring to a weapon used to frame a victim. “We’re just the ones who got caught,” says Pfc. Justin Stoner in the film. He also raises an important question that the film does not seriously pursue, remarking: “We’re training you from the day you join to the day you’re out to kill. Your job is to kill. You’re infantry. Your job is to kill everything that gets in your way. Well, then why the hell are you pissed off when we do it?”
Eleven soldiers have been convicted of crimes as part of the kill team, including Gibbs who has been sentenced to life in prison. Why were these kills crimes and others not, wonders Stoner. (I might add: Why are the murders committed by the “American Sniper” not crimes?) It’s a question worthy of consideration. The cover stories for the kills, including claims that people made some threatening movement, don’t seem enough to justify these murders even if they had been true. What were the soldiers doing in these people’s villages to begin with?
That’s the question the movie opens with the soldiers asking themselves. They’d been trained for exciting combat and then sent to Afghanistan to be bored, hungry for action, eager to test out their training. This is a point often missed by those who advocate turning the U.S. military into a force for good, an emergency rescue squad for natural disasters, or a humanitarian aid operation. You would have to train and equip people for those jobs first. These young men were trained to kill, armed to kill, prepped to kill, and left to kick sand around.
They began premeditating the worst sort of premeditated murder. They openly recount their conversations in the film. They had weapons to drop, grenades that weren’t “tracked,” they’d pretend someone had a grenade and kill him. Who? Anyone. They saw everyone as fair game.
And they did as planned. And they were welcomed back to the “FOB” as heroes. And they did it again. And again.
Continue reading “The kill team”
Oh look
Mass graves of Palestinians discovered in Jaffa from the 1947 Israeli-Arab war. We now have proof that their promise to destroy Palestinians wasn’t just rhetorical.
Why not Bush?
Seems to me they’re missing a rather prominent player:
In a Monday editorial titled “Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses,” The New York Times called on the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an investigation of former Vice President Dick Cheney and several other Bush administration officials for actions they took to counter terrorism and root out terrorists, post Sept. 11, 2001.
The press for a federal query came in response to the Senate’s Democratic-fueled analysis on the administration’s response to terrorism — the so-called torture report.
“[This] report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like ‘rectal feeding,’ scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten,” The New York Times opined. “These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law.”
As such, the Justice Department should launch a full investigation of the key players, The New York Times said.
“The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? … Any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; former CIA Director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the office of legal counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos,” The New York Times wrote.
Holy torture
Conservative Christians are invoking their God-given right to support torture. Somehow, this does not surprise me. After all, conservatives are people who like to ignore the transcendental and instead refer to the Bible as a cosmic penal code.
The Catholic Church has an unfortunate history in these matters (as do the Protestants) but I don’t think anyone should claim those episodes as templates. Or as truly Christian. But that’s just me!
The author quotes Thomas Aquinas reducing criminals to beasts. Maybe Tom was just having a bad day:
Perhaps before he had a chance to clarify his writings on the matter, St. Thomas Aquinas declared he would write no more. On 6 December 1273 he reportedly experienced a long episode of ecstasy during Mass, and later said that such things had been revealed to him that his previous writings seemed nothing in comparison.
You see? He had a transcendent experience that put his writings in a whole new light.
This has always been the problem with religions. Somebody has a transcendent experience, he or she tells their friends, who eventually try to form a group and try to codify the sublime. It’s silly. And conservatives do love their rules, so when you give them authority to use a Bible as a blunt instrument, they’re never happier. Imagine how disingenuous the author of this statement must be:
If we choose not to torture someone so we can save a life, then we are placing the dignity of the criminal over the life and dignity of the innocent person who is about to die.
You have to love that. You’re not “choosing” to torture, the circumstances force you. It’s actually the Christian thing to do! But here’s the hole in that little scenario: The times of which we speak are not episodes of “24.” Nope. There is no timer on a nuclear bomb, we do not “know” anything. We torture on the off chance we’ll get some useful information. And if the person we torture gives us gibberish (because he’s being tortured), let’s torture him some more.
For many years now, representatives of our nation (propped up by the bed-wetting night terrors of our neocon establishment) used this morally bereft argument to torture. And conservative Christians embrace it! The author argues at great length and with a deep fervor that God wouldn’t have a problem with torture. She quotes the Old Testament (conservatives love the Old Testament — none of that pesky “turn the other cheek” stuff) to illustrate that God is actually quite bloodthirsty. So there!
You know, you can argue all you want about torture (incidentally, we did sign the Geneva Conventions, promising not to use it), but don’t go fucking blessing yourself over it. Just don’t.
Everyone knows the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes — and in this case, does.
I don’t think I like this country much anymore
If half the people are this fucking immoral:
Just over half of Americans say they believe the interrogation methods the CIA used against terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, polling data released Monday showed.
About 30% said they believed the tactics were unjustified, and the remaining 20% said they did not know, according to the survey by the Pew Research Center.
Opinion on the CIA’s torture of its prisoners differs notably by partisanship. Democrats were split, the poll found, with liberals much more likely to say that the CIA’s tactics were not justified. Republicans across the board said the interrogations were justified.
President Obama banned the CIA’s use of methods such as waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation and beatings, which had been authorized under President George W. Bush. Obama and other Democratic elected officials have referred to the CIA’s actions as “torture.”
Intravenous bullshit
Jake Tapper shows occasional signs of actually doing his job:
Former CIA director Michael Hayden on Thursday defended the agency’s use of rectal rehydration, calling it a “medical procedure.”
The back and forth with CNN’s Jake Tapper was in reference to the Senate’s report released this week that describes interrogation techniques the CIA employed in the years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
When Tapper began talking about specific torture methods and mentioned the use of rectal rehydration, Hayden interrupted the host, saying, “Stop, that was a medical procedure that was done because of detainee health.”
Hayden said officials saw dehydrated detainees and had “limited options” and that using an intravenous needle would be “dangerous with a non-cooperative detainee.”
Tapper retorted, “But puréeing hummus and pine nuts?”
“Jake, I’m not a doctor and neither are you, but what I am told is this is one of the ways that the body is rehydrated, these were medical procedures,” Hayden said.
“You’re really defending rectal rehydration?” Tapper asked.
Who are the people in your neighborhood?
So you have to figure we have a one out of four chance at guessing, right?
WASHINGTON — For several months before the Senate Intelligence Committeereleased a summary of its controversial report on the CIA’s torture program on Tuesday, Senate Democrats were locked in a well-publicized battle with the executive branch over whether to redact the aliases used for CIA officials used in the document.
But even as the White House and the CIA engaged in this dispute with the Senate, a separate, and potentially more serious, set of revelations was at stake.
According to several U.S. officials involved with the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the Senate document would enable readers to identify the many countries that aided the CIA’s controversial torture program between 2002 and roughly 2006. These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.
The officials all told The Huffington Post in recent weeks that they were nervous the names of those countries might be included in the declassified summary of the Senate report.
The names of the countries ultimately did not appear in the summary. This represents a last-minute victory for the White House and the CIA, since Senate staff was pushing to redact as little as possible from its document.