Saturday, September 24, 2005

America, America, America: Torture For Fun? No problema!

Torture.

From the New York Times, "3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine: Told Rights Group Goals Were Intelligence and Fun."

You heard that right.

Torture, American-style: that would be torture "for fun."

Recall tubby druggie Rush yapping about torture at Abu Ghraib and at Gitmo as being nothing more than frat boy high-jinx?

Recall Rummy's comments that since he stands for eight hours a day, "stress positions" couldn't be all that bad?


Consider:

"Three U.S. army personnel-two sergeants and a captain-describe routine, severe beatings of prisoners and other cruel and inhumane treatment. In one incident, a soldier is alleged to have broken a detainee's leg with a baseball bat. Detainees were also forced to hold five-gallon jugs of water with their arms outstretched and perform other acts until they passed out.

"Soldiers also applied chemical substances to detainees' skin and eyes, and subjected detainees to forced stress positions, sleep deprivation, and extremes of hot and cold. Detainees were also stacked into human pyramids and denied food and water. The soldiers also described abuses they witnessed or participated in at another base in Iraq and during earlier deployments in Afghanistan.

"According to the soldiers' accounts, U.S. personnel abused detainees as part of the military interrogation process or merely to 'relieve stress.'

"In numerous cases, they said that abuse was specifically ordered by Military Intelligence personnel before interrogations, and that superior officers within and outside of Military Intelligence knew about the widespread abuse.

"The accounts show that abuses resulted from civilian and military failures of leadership and confusion about interrogation standards and the application of the Geneva Conventions."


Gee, why would that be? Thanks again, future Supreme Court Justice, "No-Genevas" Gonzalez.


"They contradict claims by the Bush administration that detainee abuses by U.S. forces abroad have been infrequent, exceptional and unrelated to policy.

"'The administration demanded that soldiers extract information from detainees without telling them what was allowed and what was forbidden,' said Tom Malinowski, Washington Director of Human Rights Watch. 'Yet when abuses inevitably followed, the leadership blamed the soldiers in the field instead of taking responsibility.'"


Hmm. Sounds like Rummy, sounds like Bubble Boy.


"Soldiers referred to abusive techniques as "smoking" or "fucking" detainees, who are known as "PUCs," or Persons Under Control. "Smoking a PUC" referred to exhausting detainees with physical exercises (sometimes to the point of unconsciousness) or forcing detainees to hold painful positions.

"Fucking a PUC" detainees referred to beating or torturing them severely. The soldiers said that Military Intelligence personnel regularly instructed soldiers to "smoke" detainees before interrogations.

"One sergeant told Human Rights Watch: "Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport… One day [a sergeant] shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger, a metal bat."

"The officer who spoke to Human Rights Watch made persistent efforts over 17 months to raise concerns about detainee abuse with his chain of command and to obtain clearer rules on the proper treatment of detainees, but was consistently told to ignore abuses and to "consider your career." He believes he was not taken seriously until he approached members of Congress to raise his concerns.

"When the officer made an appointment this month with Senate staff members of Senators John McCain and John Warner, he says his commanding officer denied him a pass to leave his base."


I love black-heart neo-con moral values. Don't limit the size of your family; go ahead and beat the crap out of jailed furriners.

When we will be able to see Rush and Rummy hamstrung into pretzel-positions and hung out over a boiling vat of Katrina's toxic waste?

When will we be able to see Condi and Cheney with in black KKK hoods, their arms outstretched, teetering above a pile of slippery boxes, attached to real electrodes?

When will we be able to see John Bolton, naked and humiliated, forced to urinate and defecate all over himself, whacking off at the pleasure of his captors?

And--what about George?

It would be just for fun!

Tell me once again about the 'moral values' of these wretched neo-cons, crying crocodile tears about all the lonely embryoes whilst encouraging our boys to break the legs of their boys with baseball bats.

For fun.

2 comments:

Jacqueline Gens said...

Dear fellow card carrying Buddhist or maybe sister is more like it ---Thanks for commenting on my blog, Poetrymind this morning. I love your rants and references---have to introduce more politics into mine as promised.

Anonymous said...

Enjoyed reading your posts.