If you
would like to be removed from this mailing list,
please indicate so by return mail.
Pour se désinscrire
de cette liste, renvoyez svp ce mèle avec votre demande.
___________________________________________________________________
Subject: ON
THE
POST-MODERN PRINCE : FROM THE CENTER FOR
THE ADVANCED
STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS,
8 November 2005
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The Machiavellian nature of the ends and
means of
the Bush-II administration in
We at CEIMSA share with our readers the following information, which we
believe
is necessary to know, if we are to make humane and democratic judgments
on the
conditions of military hegemony by the United States of America at this
time,
and to evaluate the charges of War Crimes currently
being lodged
against its government.
The brutal images captured on the video clips which are included in
this
message, and the graphic descriptions of torture by CIA-supported
technicians
are an inescapable part of the information necessary in order to make a
balanced judgment on this episode of
We sadly share with our readers in Europe and
Item A.
is an Italian documentation of the use of chemical weapons in
Item B. is the
repeat of a video message we received last December, providing
important
documentation on the use of nuclear weapons in
Item C. is a
written report by British Ambassador Craig Murray, ambassador to
Uzbekistan
2002-2004, who declares : "I will tell you what torture
means". . . .
Item D. is an article from Associated Press sent to us
by Information
Clearing House, detailing Vice-President Cheney's personal lobby
efforts in
the U.S. Senate, asking Republican senators this week to allow CIA
exemptions
to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10886.htm
And finally, Item E. is an article by Professor Majorie
Cohn, U.S. Representative to the Executive Committee of the American
Association of Jurists, on "The Torturers' Puppetmasters," in which
the author compels us to "connect the dots" and finally see the
picture,
which "is not a pretty one". . . .
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble
III
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
_____________
A.
from "RAI News 24"
11 November 2005
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10907.htm.
White phosphorous used
on the
civilian populace:
This is how the
Shocking
revelation RAI News
24 : Veteran
admits that "bodies melted away before us."
11/07/05 "
La Repubblica"
-- --
A
RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah,
The
Concealed Massacre, will be broadcast tomorrow on RAI-3 and will
contain not
only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents. A rain of fire descended on
the city.
People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn.
We found
people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes
intact,
relates Mohamad Tareq
al-Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah
resident.
I gathered accounts of the use of phosphorus and napalm from a few Fallujah refugees whom I met before being
kidnapped, says
Manifesto reporter Giuliana Sgrena,
who was kidnapped in Fallujah last
February, in a
recorded interview. I wanted to get the story out, but my kidnappers
would not
permit it.
RAI News 24 will broadcast video and photographs taken in the Iraqi
city during
and after the November 2004 bombardment which prove that the US
military,
contrary to statements in a December 9 communiqu頦rom the US
Department of State, did not use phosphorus to illuminate enemy
positions
(which would have been legitimate) but instend
dropped white phosphorus indiscriminately and in massive quantities on
the
city's neighborhoods.
In the investigative story, produced by Maurizio Torrealta,
dramatic footage is shown revealing the effects of the bombardment on
civilians, women and children, some of whom were surprised in their
sleep.
The investigation will also broadcast documentary proof of the use in
Fallujah. La strage
nascosta [Fallujah,
The
Concealed Massacre] will be shown on RAI News tomorrow November 8th at
07:35
(via HOT BIRDTM statellite, Sky Channel
506 and
RAI-3), and rebroadcast by HOT BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at
17:00 [5
pm] and over the next two days.
_______________
B.
from Professor Richard Du Boff
:
1 December 2004
http://www.ericblumrich.com/pl_lo.html
A short video
(slightly less than
three minutes) with sound and graphic, disturbing images.
__________________
C.
from Craig Murray :
The Independent
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article322520.ece
27 October 2005
The reality of
by Craig Murray*
*(British ambassador to Uzbekistan 2002-2004)
"I will tell you what torture means: Torture
means
the woman who was raped with a broken bottle, and died after 10 days of
agony."
10/27/05 "
The
Independent" -- -- The Government has been arguing before the
House of Lords for the right to act on intelligence obtained by torture
abroad.
It wants to be able to use such material to detain people without trial
in the
She omits to mention that no more ricin
was found
than is the naturally occurring base level in your house or mine - or
indeed
that no poison of any kind was found. But let us leave that for now.
She
argues, in effect, that we need to get intelligence from foreign
security
services, to fight terrorism. And if they torture,
so what?
Her chief falsehood is our pretence that we don't know what happens in
their
dungeons. We do. And it is a dreadful story. Manningham-Buller
is so fastidious she even avoids using the word "torture" in her
evidence. Let alone the reality to which she turns such a carefully
blind eye.
Manningham Buller
also
fails to mention that a large number of people have been tortured
abroad to
provide us with intelligence - because we sent them there to be
tortured. The
CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme
has become notorious. Under it, detainees have been sent around the
world to
key torture destinations. There is evidence of British complicity - not
only do
these CIA flights regularly operate from
So the
It means the woman who was raped with a broken bottle in both vagina
and anus,
and who died after ten days of agony. It means the old man suspended by
wrist
shackles from the ceiling while his children were beaten to a pulp
before his
eyes. It means the man whose fingernails were pulled before his face
was beaten
and he was immersed to his armpits in boiling liquid.
It means the 18-year-old whose knees and elbows were smashed, his hand
immersed
in boiling liquid until the skin came away and the flesh started to
peel from
the bone, before the back of his skull was stove in.
These are all real cases from the Uzbek security services which we
viewed as
friendly liaison, and from which we obtained regular intelligence, in
the Uzbek
case via the CIA.
A month ago, that liaison relationship was stopped - not by us, but by
the
Uzbeks. But as Manningham-Buller sets out,
we
continue to maintain our position as customer to torturers in
The great majority of those who suffer torture at the hands of these
regimes
are not terrorists, but political opponents. And the scale of this
torture is
vast. In
Across Manningham-Buller's web of friendly
intelligence agencies, the number may reach tens of thousands. Can our
security
really be based on such widespread inhumanity, or is that not part of
the
grievance that feeds terrorism?
These other governments know that our security services lap up
information from
their torture chambers. This practical condoning
more than
cancels out any weasel words on human rights which the Foreign Office
may
issue. In fact, the case for the efficacy of torture
intelligence is not
nearly as clear-cut as Manningham-Buller
makes out.
Much dross comes out of the torture chambers. History should tell us
that under
torture people would choke out an admission that they had joined their neighbours in flying on broomsticks with cats.
We do not receive torture intelligence from foreign liaison security
services
sometimes, or by chance. We receive it on a regular basis, through
established
channels. That plainly makes us complicit. It is worth considering, in
this
regard, Article 4 of the UN Convention Against
Torture, which requires signatories to make complicity with torture a
criminal
offence.
When I protested about these practices within the Foreign and
Commonwealth
Office, I was told bluntly that Jack Straw and the head of MI6 had
considered
my objections, but had come to the conclusion that torture intelligence
was
important to the War on Terror, and the practice should continue. One
day, the
law must bring them to account.
A final thought. Manningham-Buller is
arguing about
the efficiency of torture in preventing a terrorist plot. If that
argument is
accepted, then in logic there is no reason to rely on foreign
intermediaries.
Why don't we do our own torturing at home? James VI and I abolished
torture -
New Labour is making the first attempt in
English
courts to justify government use of torture information. Why stop
there? Why
can't the agencies work over terrorist suspects?
The Security Services want us to be able to use information from
torture. That
should come as no surprise. From Sir Thomas Walsingham
on, the profession attracts people not squeamish about the smell of
seared
flesh from the branding iron. That is why we have a judiciary to
protect us. I
pray the Law Lords do.
2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
___________________
D.
from Information Clearing House :
Associated Press
5 November 2005
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10879.htm
Cheney asks that the
CIA be allowed to continue
torture
11/05/05 "
AP" -- -- WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney made an
unusual
personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA
exemptions to a
proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody,
according to
participants in a closed-door session.
Cheney told his audience the United States doesn't engage in torture,
these
participants added, even though he said the administration needed an
exemption
from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment
in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist
attack.
The vice president made his comments at a regular weekly private
meeting of
Senate Republican senators, according to several lawmakers who
attended. Cheney
often attends the meetings, a chance for the rank-and-file to discuss
legislative strategy, but he rarely speaks.
In this case, the room was cleared of aides before the vice president
began his
remarks, said by one senator to include a reference to classified
material. The
officials who disclosed the events spoke on condition of anonymity,
citing the
confidential nature of the discussion.
"The vice president's office doesn't have any comment on a private
meeting
with members of the Senate," Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Cheney,
said
on Friday.
The vice president drew support from at least one lawmaker, Sen. Jeff
Sessions
of
McCain, who was tortured while held as a prisoner during the Vietnam
War, is
the chief Senate sponsor of an anti-torture provision that has twice
cleared
the Senate and triggered veto threats from the White House.
Cheney's decision to speak at the meeting underscored both his role as
White
House point man on the contentious issue and the importance the
administration
attaches to it.
The vice president made his appeal at a time Congress is struggling
with the
torture issue in light of the Abu Ghraib
prison
scandal and allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at
Additionally, human rights organizations contend the
Cheney's appeal came two days before a former senior State Department
official
claimed in an interview with National Public Radio's "Morning
Edition" that he had traced memos back to Cheney's office that he
believes
led to
Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff in
the
first Bush administration and a former colonel, said Thursday that the
view of
Cheney's office was put in "carefully couched" terms in memos but
that to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using interrogation
techniques that "were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva
Conventions and the law of war" to extract better intelligence.
The Senate recently approved a provision banning the "cruel, inhuman or
degrading" treatment of detainees in
Comparable House legislation does not include a similar provision, and
it is
not clear whether anti-torture language will be included in either of
two large
defense measures Congress hopes to send to Bush's desk later this year.
The White House initially tried to kill the anti-torture provision
while it was
pending in the Senate, then switched course to lobby for an exemption
in cases
of "clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with
respect
to terrorists who are not citizens of the
Cheney also has met several times with McCain, including one session
that CIA
Director Porter Goss attended in a secure room in the Capitol.
2005 Times Argus
__________________
E.
from
Marjorie Cohn
7 November 2005
Marjorie Cohn |
Continuing in
His Defiance of the Law
The President and His Vice: Torturers' Puppetmasters
By Marjorie Cohn(*)
(*)Professor at
The
dots have finally been connected
and the picture is not a pretty one. It is the face of the president of
vice,
Dick Cheney. The policies on the treatment of prisoners emanating from
Cheney's
office triggered the abuse and torture, according to Lawrence
Wilkerson, former
Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff.
"It
was clear to me that there was
a visible audit trail from the Vice President's office through the
Secretary of
Defense down to the commanders in the field," Wilkerson, a former
colonel,
said on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." The interrogation
techniques sanctioned by Cheney "were not in accordance with the spirit
of
the Geneva Conventions and the law of war," Wilkerson declared.
Not
coincidentally, Cheney has been
lobbying Congress to prevent it from outlawing torture (which is
already
against the law, by the way). After Republican Senator John McCain
secured 90
votes in the Senate to codify the prohibition against cruel, unusual,
or
degrading treatment or punishment, Cheney began to sweat. With CIA
Director
Porter Goss in tow, Cheney paid a visit to McCain and tried to convince
the
senator to allow an exemption for the CIA. McCain refused to legalize
the CIA's
ongoing illegal torture of prisoners.
Last
week, Dana Priest wrote in the
Washington Post that the CIA has been surreptitiously interrogating
prisoners
in a Soviet-era compound in
Only
Bush and a few of his top
officials, undoubtedly including Cheney, have known about the existence
and situs of these "black sites," as they
are called
in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and Congressional
documents,
according to Priest.
The
secret prisons were established
pursuant to a presidential "finding" signed by Bush six days after
the September 11 attacks. That finding gives the CIA permission to
kill,
capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world.
Assassination, or
summary execution, violates US and international law.
More
than 100 suspected terrorists have
been taken to these "black sites." Many are held underground and
subjected to torture out of view of the International Committee of the
Red
Cross.
CIA
interrogators use "Enhanced
Interrogation Techniques," which violate
Several current and former intelligence
officials are nervous about these "black sites," which were set up in
a knee-jerk response to 9/11, Priest reported.
About the same time the "black
sites" were established, Cheney undertook a campaign to introduce
torture
as a standard interrogation technique, according to the Washington
Monthly. One
of his test cases was Ibn al-Shaykh
al-Libi, an al-Qaeda prisoner captured
shortly after
9/11. An ex-FBI official reported that "they duct-taped his mouth,
cinched
him up and sent him to
A
newly declassified memo reveals that
al-Libi provided us
with
false information that suggested
Dick
Cheney not only ordered the
torture; he was willing to use false information obtained through
torture to
support Bush's pre-determined decision to make war on
Now
that Cheney has been fingered as
complicit in the torture, it is just a matter of time before the
official
torture dots connect to the President himself. In December 2004, the
American
Civil Liberties Union released an internal FBI email that the ALCU
received
pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. The email, dated May 22,
2004,
describes an Executive Order that authorized sleep deprivation, placing
hoods
over prisoners' heads, the use of loud music for sensory overload,
stripping
detainees naked, the use of "stress positions," and the use of dogs.
The White House, Pentagon and FBI officials denied that Bush had issued
such an
Executive Order, saying that it was really a Defense Department
directive
instead.
It
is undisputed that Bush determined
in a February 7, 2002, order that he had the authority to suspend the
Geneva
Conventions, a position never before taken by an American president and
a clear
violation of
Bush
wrote in that order, "As a
matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to
treat
detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with
military
necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of
In
essence, Bush declared, incorrectly,
that as commander in chief, he had the power to override the law with
his
policy. Where did he get that idea? From a January
25, 2002,
memo sent by Alberto Gonzales to the President, which described the
Geneva
Conventions as "obsolete" and "quaint." That memo
was inspired by David Addington, just
named by Cheney
to replace the indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the Vice
President's chief of staff.
Addington was
assistant general counsel to the CIA when Reagan was funding the death
squads
in
Libby is charged with obstruction of
justice and lying to the FBI about the outing of a CIA agent. As in the
Watergate scandal, a White House official is being prosecuted for the
cover-up.
There is plenty of evidence that officials in the Bush administration
have been
trying to cover up their torture since the inception of Bush's "war on
terror."
The
earliest example of the official
cover-up was when John Walker Lindh,
captured in
Afghanistan shortly after September 11, 2001, was given a plea bargain
that
required him to keep mum about the mistreatment he suffered while in US
custody.
Col. Janis Karpinski told me in an August
3, 2005,
interview for t r u t h o u t (Abu Ghraib
General Lambastes Bush Administration) that after she first learned
of the
abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, Gen. Ricardo
Sanchez
took systematic steps to hush it up. Soldiers reported to Human Rights
Watch
that US soldiers, called "Murderous Maniacs," broke prisoners' bones
every other week at FOB Mercury; then, "those responsible would state
that
the detainee was injured during the process of capture and the
physician
assistant would sign off on this."
Most
recently, in an effort to smooth
over the torture of the hunger strikers by US officials at Guantᮡmo
prison, Donald Rumsfeld said, "There are a number of
people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go
off of it
at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that." Rumsfeld refuses to allow UN human rights
investigators to
meet with the prisoners there.
What
is Rumsfeld
trying to hide at Guantᮡmo? About 200 prisoners,
many
of whom have been there nearly four years without criminal charges,
have been
on a hunger strike for several weeks. Several of them are being
force-fed
through large tubes inserted into their noses and down into
their stomachs, with no sedatives
or anesthesia. One prisoner explained to his lawyer, "Now, after four
years in captivity, life and death are the same."
The
Washington Post reported today that
Cheney has waged an intense, largely unpublicized campaign over the
past year
to prevent Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from
restricting
interrogations of terrorist suspects.
Dick
Cheney is right in the center of
the Bush administration's government of dirty tricks. By replacing
Libby with Addington, Cheney has signaled
his determination to
continue Bush's torturous policies. In a recent editorial, the
Washington Post
called Dick Cheney "Vice President for Torture." The President and
his Vice continue to pull the torturers' puppet strings. Will Bush be
deemed
complicit in the torture? Or will his deputies cover up for him the way
Ronald
Reagan's men insulated him from liability in the Iran-Contra scandal?
*********************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble
III
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/