USA - Where Torture and Lying Are National Policy

From Auschwitz, to Batista in Cuba, to Marcus in the Phillipines, to the Shaw of Iran, American trained dictators have tortured, mutilated and often kept their own people in slavery in return for great wealth.

The U.S. National archives detail the facts around the seizure of Bush property for "trading with the enemy throughout WWII."

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/33184/
Torture as National Policy

By Dahr Jamail, Tomdispatch.com. Posted March 9, 2006.

From Guantánamo to Iraq, the vicious abuse of prisoners by the U.S. military is business as usual.
More stories by Dahr Jamail

They told him, "We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell."
Ali Abbas, a former detainee from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was filling me in on the horrors he endured at the hands of American soldiers, contractors, and CIA operatives while inside the infamous prison.

It was May of 2004 when I documented his testimony in my hotel in Baghdad. "We will take you to Guantánamo," he said one female soldier told him after he was detained by U.S. forces on September 13, 2003. "Our aim is to put you in hell so you'll tell the truth. These are our orders -- to turn your life into hell." And they did. He was tortured in Abu Ghraib less than half a year after the occupation of Iraq began.

While the publication of the first Abu Ghraib photos in April 2004 opened the floodgates for former Iraqi detainees to speak out about their treatment at the hands of occupation forces, this wasn't the first I'd heard of torture in Iraq. A case I'd documented even before then was that of 57 year-old Sadiq Zoman. He was held for one month by U.S. forces before being dropped off in a coma at the general hospital in Tikrit. The medical report that came with his comatose body, written by U.S. Army medic Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, listed the reasons for Zoman's state as heat stroke and heart attack. That medical report, however, failed to mention anything about the physical trauma evident on Zomans' body --- the electrical point burns on the soles of his feet and on his genitals, the fact that the back of his head had been bashed in with a blunt instrument, or the lash marks up and down his body.





such treatment is ongoing:

Institutionalizing torture: Abu Ghraib

While President Bush has regularly claimed -- as with reporters in Panama last November -- that "we do not torture," Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Brigadier General whose 800th Military Police Brigade was in charge of 17 prison facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib back in 2003, begs to differ. She knows that we do torture and she believes that the President himself is most likely implicated in the decision to embed torture in basic war-on-terror policy.
While testifying this January 21 in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, Karpinski told us: "General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] himself signed the eight-page memorandum authorizing literally a laundry list of harsher techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission."
All this, as she reminded us, came after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been "specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantánamo Bay and run the interrogations operation," was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to "work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques."

(Someone's son, father, lover... whose country was illegally, immorally and criminally invaded and then HE was tortured for information about terrorists).

Such treatment is ongoing.

Institutionalizing torture: Abu Ghraib

While President Bush has regularly claimed -- as with reporters in Panama last November -- that "we do not torture," Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Brigadier General whose 800th Military Police Brigade was in charge of 17 prison facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib back in 2003, begs to differ. She knows that we do torture and she believes that the President himself is most likely implicated in the decision to embed torture in basic war-on-terror policy.

While testifying this January 21 in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, Karpinski told us: "General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] himself signed the eight-page memorandum authorizing literally a laundry list of harsher techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission."

All this, as she reminded us, came after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been "specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantánamo Bay and run the interrogations operation," was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to "work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques."
...
Let us bring these terrorists to justice. The Patriot Act and the Declaration of Independence combine to provide avenues for the immediate arrest of this criminally negligent, and
treasonous pack of psychopathic narcissists.

Then, perhaps the next President might want to ask God to "Bless America" rather than instruct, because frankly, I think God is really pissed off with America right now and she is slow to calm.

I am doing my humble bit having explained to the second census person that "no, I am not doing the census this year in Canada, because my government contracted the census system software and hardware to Lockheed Martin, a firm listed as one of the top 14 in the world for human rights abuses. " The Census man (poor dear) told me that Lockheed Martin would never
leave a backdoor to the system because "if anyone found it - it would ruin their reputation."

After I picked myself up from rolling on the ground, laughing, I said, "What reputation - they torture. There are photographs all over the internet ...over 58,000 links."

At that point the Census man said, "Wow, and I thought Halliburton was bad."

The USA, where torture and lying are national policy, and Canada
where we quietly support it in the background - ethically mute - dealing with a country that tortures as national policy and even handing our troops to them to command. Turning our heads the other way - is NOT supposed to be the Canadian way - but it is.