June 12, 2005

I have news for Frank Salvato ( http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=15061&c
atcode=13 ) , a columnist for ChronWatch (the "conservative," i.e., reactionary and self-declared alternative to the San Francisco Chronicle): Bush’s torture and sexual humiliation gulag exists and the liberal hand-wringing vacillation of Amnesty International will not change that gruesome (if not generally reported in the corporate media) fact.

How do I know this?

It is well-documented. Donald Rumsfeld enthusiastically signed off on a "grab whom you must and do what you want" so-called "special access program" in 2003, according to Seymour Hersh( http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact ) and the New Yorker, citing former intelligence officials. "Some people think you can bullshit anyone," a senior CIA official told Hersh after Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, under-secretary for intelligence, testified—or lied under oath—about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal before Congress. Of course, this CIA official may have lied as well, but I don’t think so because torture and sexual humiliation are the Pentagon’s middle name. It comes with the territory. It is standard operating procedure for most occupation armies facing a determined and completely justified resistance.

"Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate 'high-value’ suspects—considered by many to be in defiance of international law—an officially 'unacknowledged’ program that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantanamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq," adds Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1303105,0
0.html ). "A CIA analyst visited Guantanamo in summer 2002 and returned 'convinced that we were committing war crimes’ and that 'more than half the people there didn’t belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces,’ a CIA source told Hersh."

General John Gordon, an aide to Condi Rice, warned "that if the actions at Guantanamo ever became public, it’d be damaging to the president." Well, not really, since Bush’s teflon is more stick resistant than Reagan’s ever was and the corporate media consistently goes easy on Dubya the Destroyer, even with damaging facts (and memos) piled up like cordwood outside a Vermont cabin in October.

On occasion, however, the corporate media slips, as the New York Times did last month when it reported the findings of a "confidential U.S. army report" on the torture-murder of detainees in Afghanistan. Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, admitted the report exists and declared there "are criminal investigations going on right now about what this newspaper article discusses. People are being held to account." If you believe this, I have oceanfront property in Arizona to sell you. "In sworn statements to army investigators, soldiers described in details harsh interrogation methods used at the [Bagram] detention center, ranging from a female interrogator stepping on a detainee’s neck and kicking another in the genitals to a shackled prisoner being made to kiss the boots of a U.S. soldier as he rolled back and forth on the floor of a cell," reports the scourge of the Bush administration, al-Jazeera ( http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=8247 ).

In Abu Ghraib, according to the now never mentioned Taguba Report, "1,800 abuse photographs shot by U.S. guards inside Abu Ghraib included images of naked male and female prisoners, a male Military Police guard 'having sex’ with a female detainee, and naked male and female detainees forcibly arranged in various sexually explicit positions for photographing," according to al-Jazeera. Is it possible the rape-torture at Abu Ghraib was an "isolated incident" perpetuated by a handful of soldiers who spent too many hours previewing S/M videos and images on the internet or is it the standard MO of the CIA and military intelligence? Is it possible rape and torture (and murder) is established policy because Muslims are sexually conservative and humiliating them through anal rape and forced homosexual acts is about as low as you can go (and besides, for the Charles Graners of the world, it is great fun).

As Iraqi detainee Ameen Saeed al-Sheik ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner
_abuse#US_investigations_and_response ) told the Washington Post last year, his tormenters went out of their way to sexually humiliate him. "Are you married?" a soldier grilled al-Sheik, and when he answered in the affirmative the soldier replied, "But if I saw her [his wife] now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her." No doubt this sort of "interrogation" resulted in a bonanza of intelligence information on the resistance.

Dhia al-Shweiri, a former Abu Ghraib prisoner, now a resistance fighter with the al-Mehdi Army or Jaish-i-Mahdi (funny how torture motivates Iraqis to kill Americans), said his tormentors "wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman." Is it possible Lynndie England knew Arab men find it grievously insulting to be treated like women (especially at the hands of a woman), or did the decision to treat male detainees this way come form elsewhere, maybe somewhere deep inside military intelligence or possibly from Bush’s desk where the buck stops? (See Bush Approved Torture Techniques.: http://207.44.245.159/article7524.htm )

On December 21, 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union released copies of FBI internal memos ( http://www.yuricareport.com/PrisonerTortureDirectory/ACLU_Em
ailsReleased.html ) they had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act concerning alleged torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq (see previous link). One internal memo dated May 22, 2004 was from a person whose name was blanked out but was described as "On Scene Commander—Baghdad." This "On Scene Commander" referred directly to an Executive Order sanctioning the use of "extraordinary interrogation tactics" by US military personnel, although "physical beatings, sexual humiliation or touching" was supposedly forbidden (and so we are asked to believe the sadists of Abu Ghraib—maybe it was happenstance they all ended up in the same prison together—decided on their own to beat, turn dogs on, and sexual humiliate prisoners). I bet the CIA and those military contractors had nothing to do with it, even though the CIA has a long and sordid history of torturing people (see Alfred W. McCoy’s The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib < http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MCC409A.html > and Veteran sergeant accounts US torture coverup < http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Veteran_sergeant_accounts_US_torture_coverup > implicating "intelligence operatives" in systematic torture.)

Scads of first-hand reports of torture and abuse are on record, although I’m certain Mr. Salvato and other apologists for rape and torture would dismiss these (since Muslims lie because they hate America). "Detainees held at military bases in 2002 and 2003 described to Human Rights Watch being beaten severely by both guards and interrogators, deprived of sleep for extended periods, and intentionally exposed to extreme cold, as well as other inhumane and degrading treatment," explains Salt of the Earth ( http://salt.claretianpubs.org/sjnews/2005/05/sjn0505b.html ). "Videotapes of riot squads subduing suspects [in Guantanamo] reportedly show the guards punching some detainees, tying one to a gurney for questioning and forcing a dozen to strip from the waist down." But then this is precisely the sort of treatment meted out to prisoners in U.S. prisons, so I guess it is not confined to Muslims, nor unusual.

It appears U.S. soldiers have a fetish for rape. For instance, Hussian Youssouf Mustafa, a Palestinian, claims he was raped at Bagram AFB (which doubles as a torture gulag). Mustafa details in Mother Jones ( http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/03/03_2005_Baze
lon.html ) how "an American soldier took me blindfolded. My hands were tightly cuffed, with my ears plugged so I could not hear properly, and my mouth covered so I could only make a muffled scream. Two soldiers, one on each side, forced me to bend down, and a third pressed my face down over a table. A fourth soldier then pulled down my trousers. They rammed a stick up my rectum." Did Mustafa spill the beans on the Taliban or where Mullah Omar was hiding? Nope. In fact, according to Mustafa, they never even asked him about such things. "The Americans never said anything about why they were doing it to me, so I had to think for many hours and days later, to try to work out what was going through their minds… I think maybe they wanted to make me so embarrassed that it would live with me for the rest of my life." In other words, sheer terror inflicted on Muslims simply because they are Muslims and hate our freedoms.

In another case, a fifteen year old in Iraq was sodomized. Michigan-based attorney Shereef Akeel, who interviewed some 50 former detainees about their treatment at the hands of U.S. anal rape freaks, told Lisa Ashkenaz Croke of the New Standard the tawdry details ( http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-croke310804.htm ) . The fifteen year old "was told to go on all fours naked and was sodomized from behind…. He said they made him dance and he was crying." According to Akeel, "testimonials gathered individually from former captives held in US prisons all over Iraq indicate many of the common methods came into use across disparate, geographically distant detention centers," writes Ashkenaz Croke. In other words, we have a pattern here.

"It doesn’t take a leftist ideologue to deduce that [Amnesty International USA’s] accusations are a manifestation of their anti-war in Iraq, anti-War on Terror, anti-America and anti-George W. Bush doctrine," writes Frank Salvato— never mind the above and more are quickly and plentifully revealed through a simple Google search. Like a hear and see no evil monkey, Salvato refuses to consider the evidence before him (and it is right there out in the open, Frank, all you have to do is remove your hands from your ears and eyes and examine the evidence).

Of course, there may be something more sinister at work here—it may be that so-called "conservatives" (in the old days real conservatives were ashamed by revelations of anal rape) in fact approve of such repulsive behavior because they believe anything is valid in the war against Islam. For as Jack Wheeler told WorldNetDaily ( http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=446
27 ), neocons and black lagoon conservatives "are seriously sick and tired of squishing-out to the hadjis," who are not only Arabs and Muslims but "sympathizers" who "now include not just rioters on Pakistani streets but Newsweek magazine and Amnesty International."

I can’t prove Salvato and his friends agree with anal penetration of Iraqi men and the rape of Iraqi women—not the way I can prove that Muslims were (and are) tortured and sexually humiliated by "our troops" in countries Bush invaded in defiance of international law and moral conscience.

It’s up to Frank Salvato and the Chronwatch crazies to demonstrate otherwise.