Mother Of God... No Wonder The CIA Doesn't Want The Report To Come Out...

[WillyT]

Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.

The CIA also oversold the role of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. CIA officials claimed he was the “mastermind.”

The committee described a similar sequence in the interrogation of Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative who provided a critical lead in the search for bin Laden: the fact that the al-Qaeda leader’s most trusted courier used the moniker “al-Kuwaiti.”

But Ghul disclosed that detail while being interrogated by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts. The information from that period was subsequently conflated with lesser intelligence gathered from Ghul at a secret CIA prison in Romania, officials said. Ghul was later turned over to authorities in Pakistan, where he was subsequently released. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in 2012.

And...

Two other terrorism suspects, from Libya — Mohammed al-Shoroeiya and Khalid al-Sharif — endured similar treatment at Salt Pit, according to Human Rights Watch. One of the men said CIA interrogators “would pour buckets of very cold water over his nose and mouth to the point that he felt he would suffocate. Icy cold water was also poured over his body. He said it happened over and over again,” the report says. CIA doctors monitored the prisoners’ body temperatures so they wouldn’t suffer hypothermia.

The CIA denies waterboarding them and says it used the technique on only three prisoners.

The two men were held at Salt Pit at the same time as Baluchi, according to former U.S. intelligence officials.

Officials said a former CIA interrogator named Charlie Wise was forced to retire in 2003 after being suspected of abusing Abu Zubaida using a broomstick as a ballast while he was forced to kneel in a stress position. Wise was also implicated in the abuse at Salt Pit. He died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA, former U.S. intelligence officials said.

From: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-misled-on-interrogation-program-senate-report-says/2014/03/31/eb75a82a-b8dd-11e3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html

[LiberalEsto]

1. What kind of doctor could stand by and watch torture?

"CIA doctors monitored the prisoners’ body temperatures so they wouldn’t suffer hypothermia. "

This is all sickening beyond belief.
These doctors should lose their medical licenses.

[riqster]

2. A very good point. Sounds like a clear violation.

Hypocrisy instead of Hippocrates.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

70. Cheney's men

[enlightenment]

4. Just tossing out this thought.

There are a couple of ways to view these doctors. One would be, as you suggest, as complicit - standing by with no regard for what was happening. The other would be as compassionate - standing by because it is the best of difficult choices.

Assume for a moment that you are a doctor, working for the CIA, and brought into a situation like this. You have choices - argue that it is wrong; refuse to render aid (refuse complicity); or stand by and monitor the situation, choosing complicity because it is the only way to help those being tortured.

Which, honestly, would you choose, knowing that arguing or refusing would only result in your removal from the situation - not an end to the torture? I suspect that you might choose to stand by - if only because it would be the only way you could render any aid at all.

We all like to think that we would do the "right" thing all the time - but what is the right thing in that situation? What authority could you go to, hoping to make it stop? Would the CIA admit what they were doing because you go to some authority or tell the press? History says no, they wouldn't. This horror was covered up for years.

I don't disagree that there are some people with medical licenses that should not be practicing medicine - and maybe some of them were CIA doctors - but over the course of history there have been many, many occasions when doctors have found themselves between Scylla and Charybdis.

[marions ghost]

10. I'd have to put these complicit doctors

in the category of those who "should not be practicing medicine."

Surely they knew what they were getting into and didn't just get called in one day without a clue. "Hey doc, can you help us not kill this guy today?"

They were undoubtedly selected for their willingness. Doctors with integrity were not selected.

[enlightenment]

15. Could be.

I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, since situations are rarely as black and white as they appear.

[marions ghost]

20. Unless I hear personal testimony

to the contrary, I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt. Their actions speak.

Part of the problem in this country is that people think everything is grey and debatable.

If I heard one of these doctors speak about how he was in agony over this choice and regrets it, I might consider it plausible, until then I reserve any sympathy.

Sorry, some people really are without compassion.

[enlightenment]

21. Okay.

I'm not trying to change anyone's opinions.

[marions ghost]

55. I get that

just chattin...

[Raksha]

75. Exactly.

Re "Part of the problem in this country is that people think everything is grey and debatable."

It has gotten to the point where it's politically incorrect to say it, but some things really ARE black and white.

[marions ghost]

77. Thx

[DhhD]

96. Agreed. I think that you would find a CIA doctor in a group of college campus conservatives but

never really outwardly joining the club, if you went back in time; true followers of the Conservative sociopathic brotherhood, to the bottom feeder Right, depressed under the norm. The ones that would invade the body of a found animal before killing it in childhood.

[marions ghost]

103. They would

fit a certain pathological profile for sure. You cannot be a person with a sense of integrity and stand by passively while torture is carried out.

These doctors were not forced to do this. They chose the work and knew exactly what it involved. If no doctors had agreed to do it, it would have made it difficult to carry out. They made it possible.

They are complicit.

[ReRe]

86. Bet they were paid a pretty penny too.

... Remember, "everyone has their price."

[alfredo]

97. You can't torture a dead person. They are kept alive so they can be tortured.

[enlightenment]

13. You're entitled to your opinion.

I think you could try for a little civility in expressing it in future.

[stonecutter357]

35. You're not outraged enuff !

<----just in case.

[WinkyDink]

18. The term "whistle-blower" comes to mind, not to mention "ethics," "morality," "war crimes," etc.

[Demeter]

32. surely you have heard of war crimes? the Nuremberg trials? No?

Well, that would surely explain why you don't have a clue about the difference between right and wrong.

[enlightenment]

45. Pretty strong response.

and quite personal, considering you don't know me at all. You are certainly free to disagree with the idea that there may have been something exculpating in the choices the doctors made in this case. I'm not sure why you had to assume that the thought reflects both my character and my intelligence - I suppose it is easier to do that than respond to the thought presented.

[arikara]

37. I remember reading something about psychopaths

that some of them are drawn towards medicine, especially surgery, because the scalpel and the blood gives them an outlet. I would imagine that doctors with that propensity would also enjoy working for the CIA.

For the life of me I cannot imagine a normal doctor being able to sit and watch a person being tortured just to monitor their vitals.

[enlightenment]

47. It is entirely possible

that these doctors are all of the worst sort - maybe even sociopaths. I don't know, which is why I tossed out the thought experiment. I thank you for responding to what I wrote. I posted it because it is hard for me to imagine someone who chooses medicine as a career doing this, and I was looking for conclusions that didn't revolve around the "bad person" argument. I probably should have phrased it more carefully, since the considered opinion of most here is that I'm an idiot or worse for even entertaining the idea that they could be anything but modern-day Mengeles.

[Divernan]

39. Guantanamo docs were as compassionate as Josef Mengeles & the Nazi death camp doctors.

I'll tell you about a compassionate doctor. My 63 year old orthopedic surgeon, whose dad was a minister, spends a MONTH each year performing surgery in Nigeria at a mission hospital. And the rest of the year he takes time to consult by email, including reviewing xrays & other tests to supervise treatments in Nigeria. He is considered the best orthopod in my area - the one the other docs go to for treatment/surgery. He obviously gives up a considerable amount of income each year to travel to Africa and spend a month there donating his services, not to mention the time each week in consulting with doctors at the mission hospital.

Physicians aren't gods and don't deserve a presumption of saintliness. Furthermore they all took an oath to do no harm. Notwithstanding that oath, some physicians are far more skilled than others, and some have a much stronger commitment to medical ethics than others. Several family members, friends and I myself have each been the victim of negligent or greed-motivated misdiagnoses & treatments by physicians over the decades. That's why we all do lots of medical research online and once we find a top specialist in one field, we turn to them for references for specialists in other fields.

And from the New England Journal of Medicine/ Reuters, via Huffington Post

By Jane Sutton GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba, June 12 (Reuters) - U.S. military doctors should refuse orders to force-feed hunger strikers at the Guantanamo detention camp because it violates their ethical obligations, two doctors and a medical ethics professor wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

"Force-feeding a competent person is not the practice of medicine; it is aggravated assault," the trio said in an article posted on the website of the respected medical journal.

"Physicians at Guantanamo cannot permit the military to use them and their medical skills for political purposes and still comply with their ethical obligations," wrote Doctors Sondra Crosby and Leonard Glantz, and George Annas, a lawyer who chairs the Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights Department at Boston University.

The detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba holds 166 men captured in counterterrorism operations, more than half of whom have been cleared for release during U.S. military and intelligence reviews.

A report released today has made disturbing allegations that doctors and psychologists working with the US military designed methods for - and became involved in - the systematic torture of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

The Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers found that, in the decade after 9/11, US military physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists allowed 'cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment' of prisoners while acting at the direction of military leaders under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.

Described as a 'big, big, striking horror' by one member of the 19-man panel, the report suggests that doctors who had taken the Hippocratic Oath advised the military on how best to deploy waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sensory overloading to get information out of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2486998/CIA-ordered-US-military-doctors-design-new-torture-methods-use-Guantanamo-Bay.html#ixzz2xwDgiFgz
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[enlightenment]

48. Okay. nt

[erronis]

71. Not just to be argumentative, but there are other ways to view these doctors

One other would be that they actively engaged in helping the CIA thugs.

[awoke_in_2003]

72. Interesting angle...

I never thought of it that way.

[delrem]

85. I would say that

all of those complicit in these heinous crimes against humanity are the same, since the crimes are the same and they all, each and every one of them from the bottom to the top of the totem pole, were/are part of the orchestration.

It's the orchestration which is the crime.

[sabrina 1]

9. I remember back during the Bush years this issue was raised. Doctors 'monitoring torture'. NO doctor

'monitors' torture.

Any doctor involved in this disgusting, criminal behavior should long ago have had their licenses to practice removed.

I always thought this was absolutely forbidden in this society.

The last few years have revealed a horrific aspect of this country's foreign policy.

It's a violent society. Many Americans reading this report will SUPPORT what they did.

And more will remain silent now, though were pretty vocal during the Bush years, for political reasons.

We are sinking lower and lower and until this is all dealt with, some serious actions taken against the LEADERS who put these policies in place, we are only going to get worse.

[JEB]

33. There will be no looking forward

until these horrific abuses are addressed and authorities who allowed or called for such activities are held accountible. This is not something a nation just walks away from. Already seeing a loss of moral authority in the eyes of the world.

[Auntie Bush]

26. They should not only lose their license but they should be in jail.

[Enthusiast]

40. "These doctors should lose their medical licenses."

Yes they should lose their license to practice.

[LiberalEsto]

63. The AMA code of ethics prohibits doctors' invlvement in torture

Report: U.S. Doctors Participated in Torture After 9/11
Rolling Stone (2013)
Link:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/report-u-s-doctors-participated-in-torture-after-9-11-20131104

Excerpt:
""The DoD's policies and procedures are not completely in accord with medical ethics, principles, and guidelines," says Gerald Thomson, professor of medicine at Columbia University and a member of the task force that authored the report. He calls the Department of Defense's hunger strike policy an "egregious" violation of medical ethics, in part because "it didn't happen in secret." He adds that if the medical community and the public at large "can't do anything about that, we all become part of the problem." "

Excerpt:
"The report alleges that military and CIA physicians oversaw the torture of detainees to ensure they didn't suffer "severe harm" – a phrase that comes from a legal definition of torture, in contrast with the traditional professional responsibility of doctors to "do no harm." CIA medical personnel were tasked with being present for waterboarding to perform an emergency tracheotomy if interrogators damaged the detainee's windpipe. "

So moderate harm would be okay, as long as it's not "severe harm" - LE


AMA Opinion 2.067 - Torture
(1999)
Link: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics/opinion2067.page

Excerpt: "Torture refers to the deliberate, systematic, or wanton administration of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatments or punishments during imprisonment or detainment."

"Physicians must oppose and must not participate in torture for any reason. Participation in torture includes, but is not limited to, providing or withholding any services, substances, or knowledge to facilitate the practice of torture. Physicians must not be present when torture is used or threatened."

Doctors and Torture
Herbert Rabatansky, MD
Rhode Island Medical Society, 2008-9
Link:
http://www.rimed.org/medhealthri/2009-08/2009-08-288.pdf

"The American Medical Association (AMA) Code of ethics unequivocally prohibits doctors’ participation in torture. Notably, “participation” includes the monitoring of the victim so that the torture does not “go too far.” "

[Enthusiast]

92. That is pretty clear.

Thanks.

[thecrow]

60. The Nazis had doctors, too.

Maybe this is where the CIA learned these tactics.

[LiberalEsto]

64. I wouldn't be surprised nt

[Helen Borg]

68. A sadistic doctor?

...

[AtheistCrusader]

69. Probably a dentist.

Hahaha oh goddamn, I'm sorry, that was wrong.

[Maynar]

84. Haha!!

[BlueMTexpat]

90. Isn't there something about

"do no harm" in the oath that doctors are supposed to take?

If doctors stand by and knowingly let harm be done or, as was clearly the case, aid and abet harm's being done, that is in effect doing harm.

They should not - repeat not - be allowed to practice medicine. They are potential, if not actual, Mengeles and are as monstrous as he.

Sorry for those who find this a "gray" area. We are clearly on different planets. If this issue is not black-and-white, what on Earth is?

There are Rubicons that should never be crossed. Never. This is one of them.

[gordianot]

3. The people who authorized this are well known even though one was fond of bunkers.

Who in recent years was so addicted to manufactured intelligence?

[Z_California]

5. I wish there really was a heaven and hell

because all these sick fucks would be burning eventually. Makes me so ashamed of my shadow government.

[rhett o rick]

6. President Obama may decide to pardon the top level war criminals for political reasons or whatever,

but we should prosecute those that actually carried out the torture to the fullest extent of the law. "Just following orders" doesnt cut it.

[msanthrope]

16. Can you name the pardon he's issued? nt

[rhett o rick]

28. Ralph.

[BlueMTexpat]

91. I haven't seen any pardons issued.

Perhaps you could point out where. Yes, there was "looking forward, not back," which has understandably led to much gnashing of teeth.

But "looking forward" can also mean working on other fronts for justice - perhaps not quite as overtly as holding trials for war criminals in a country that has never been so polarized - and that was also financially devastated when Prez O took office - where the same Big Money that worked its will on our politicians to go to war (and, in effect, subsidized torture) in the first place could once again control the outcome.

What I do see is that cases are steadily being built, block by block, against the monsters and their enablers.

And I also see that it is more important than ever for Dems to hold the Senate and try, as best we can, to recover the House. This is absolutely crucial.

[rhett o rick]

101. I guess I missed your point. I clearly said that Pres Obama may pardon the War Criminals

when he leaves office to try to help the nation forget this horrible chapter in our history. You know, the "let's look forward" shit. Big D Denial.

[Fumesucker]

7. We can take comfort in the fact that Putin is more recent

And worse.

[JDPriestly]

11. Do you have any news reports on Putin torturing prisoners?

I must have missed them. I am not defending Putin. I think he is a megalomaniac who lacks good judgment and more important social skills. But I am unaware of news reports that Putin torture prisoners. As I said, I may have missed those reports.

[Fumesucker]

17. Boy, you can't engage in a little random hyperbole here without someone getting snippy

Of course Putin is worse, he invaded a country without properly performing shock 'n awe.

[WinkyDink]

19. He didn't even look under his desk!

[DocMac]

24. lol!

[Enthusiast]

41. Shock 'n awe is essential in a proper invasion.

[Mnemosyne]

22. Pussy Riot. nt

[Heidi]

8. Kick!

[L0oniX]

14. The US justice system is sooooo last century anyway.

These sociopaths who work for the CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS and the military live among us. That should scare the shit out of you!

[progressoid]

23. "says it used the technique on only three prisoners"

ri-i-i-i-ght.

[Solly Mack]

25. When the claim is made that the "CIA misled" the govt. & public about torture

Are they saying had the CIA not misled them there would never have been any torture?

Are they saying they didn't think waterboarding was torture because the CIA told them it wasn't?

Are they saying since the "CIA misled" them - as Congress - they would have done something about it had they only known?

Are they saying they - Congress - believed the lies that torture works because the CIA told them so?


Much as I didn't buy the bullshit "Bush fooled me" line, I don't buy that the CIA fooled anyone either.

Sure, I can believe the CIA lied. They lied each and every time they couched torture in mitigating language. So did every single person who ever referred to torture as "enhanced interrogation techniques". And I'm sure they lied about what kinds of information they were getting. ( But how many experts do you need telling you that torture doesn't work to know anyone saying it does is a liar?) So someone telling me that got intelligence from torture isn't someone I'm going to believe. Someone I would be a fool (or a liar) to believe.

Every single person that claimed "We don't torture" lied.

Every single person who dared claim that it was only a matter of opinion about whether or not waterboarding is torture lied.

And if torture is wrong (and it is) and illegal (and it is and was), then whether it works or not doesn't matter. So, only someone who didn't give a damn about torture (or its victims) would take its merits into consideration against the illegality of torture.


Am I to believe that Bush and Cheney would never have tortured if the CIA hadn't "misled" them?

That, somehow, the torture memo writing DOJ and the constantly enabling Bush Congress were duped by the CIA about torture? Seriously? Seriously?

U.S. officials said the committee refrained from assigning motives to CIA officials whose actions or statements were scrutinized. The report also does not recommend new administrative punishment or further criminal inquiry into a program that the Justice Department has investigated repeatedly.

Snort.

Release the report. But don't ever expect me to excuse the actions of the guilty or the complicit.

[marions ghost]

102. Excellent questions

The scariest thing is how nobody at the top seems to have any sort of moral compass anymore. They are all complicit.

When you resort to torture or condone it, you lose your own humanity.

'What happens in Gitmo stays in Gitmo' is what they're hoping, but the truth leaks out....

[Solly Mack]

105. I said while Bush was still in office that an effort would be made to rush

everything into the past and treat it has if it was something that happened years and years ago.

But Bush didn't leave office until 2009. That was only 5 years ago. Yet you hear people talk about how torture was just so long ago and how it is all in the past, as if that past was some distant point beyond memory.

As if it's too late to do anything.

When did it become too late to do the right thing?

[Ichingcarpenter]

27. There is a lot of studies on who tortures and why

I pity the fool that is buying torture as what was necessary for the 'agenda'

[octoberlib]

29. I think the CIA has probably

been doing stuff like this for decades. I'm glad we'll have some transparency.

[Scootaloo]

51. The CIA has also been helping other nations do it

Iran's SAVAK, for instance, regularly employed rape and torture as methods of extracting information... And the relationship between Iran's monarchy and the US made it that SAVAK was essentially an arm of the CIA. Same goes for much of the rightist dictatorships in Latin America, as well as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan.

[MisterP]

57. they even ordered Americans killed

in Honduras

[justabob]

62. indeed

I actually have a book right here on my desk.... Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists. This book is about the Manchurian Candidate/mkultra et al, not the current stuff, but you are right they've been doing this kind of thing for decades. The author wrote it to call out the medical people in their complicity. From the back cover blurb.... "The funding of the experiments by the CIA, Army, Navy, and Air Force is proven from CIA documents and the doctors' own publications. BLUEBIRD proves that there was extensive political abuse of psychiatry in North America throughout the second half of the twentieth century, perpetrated not by a few renegade doctors, but by leading psychiatrists, psychologists, pharmacologists, neurosurgeons and medical schools." There is no reason to believe that medicos' complicity in torture is any different.

[blkmusclmachine]

30. ,

,

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

31. "We need to look forward..." The audacity of covering up crimes.

[catchnrelease]

34. "Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said"

I remember when every person that got wiped out was 'Al-Quaida's Number 2 man!!!!!!' It became a running joke that there must have been about 50 Number 2's. Disgusting.

[grasswire]

36. doesn't anyone think it suspicious that the interrogator died...

.....shortly after retiring from CIA?

See last paragraph of OP. Charlie Wise, torturer. Died shortly after retiring.

[Enthusiast]

42. I thought the very same.

[Rex]

58. Seems like a dangerous business to be in, even more so if you try and leave. nt.

nt.

[tblue37]

87. Kinda like the process of being "jumped out" if someone wants to leave a gang. nt

[Rex]

98. Exactly like that!

Or like trying to leave the mafia.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

38. They raped a little boy in front of his father to get him to talk....

Lawmakers said the audio of his cries were described as the worse part.

[Enthusiast]

44. They claim they did this for our country.

"Fightin' for our freedom(s)!"

In 2000, with the help of a corrupt supreme court, our nation turned a page. Nothing has been the same since. And these evil fuckers are still in complete control. I believe every word of criticism we make is noted and recorded.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

53. "Fightin' for White Supremacy" is more like it....

There is a significant element in our government that subscribes to the Southern White Master method of beating lesser races into submission. Forget all the talk of bringing them "freedom". It was just the opposite. To HURT THEM and break their will and teach them a lesson of what happens to them when they get uppity.

[Enthusiast]

54. Oh, I agree completely. The freedom talk is complete nonsense.

The Afghanistan and Iraq Wars did nothing to advance the cause of freedom here or abroad.

They are seeking to apply the "plantation mentality" to the nation. And they are well on their way.

[Maedhros]

67. As is often the case, Bruce Cockburn lyrics are apt:

Who robs life of its quality?
Who renders rage a necessity?
By turning countries into labor camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom.

[Enthusiast]

93. Thank you, Maedhros.

[TheKentuckian]

46. There is no defense and such a breach goes so far beyond the pale that I don't know if

I have an argument against the death penalty for all involved, as much as it disgusts me with myself to even think much less to openly say it.

It is the institutional nature of such an evil crime that pushes it beyond anything else I can anchor to that causes the reaction. This isn't just some random twisted fuck. Not some sicko who needed help long before this cross. Not a single or a few crazies that can be simply removed from society.

It also embodies maybe the biggest reason I'm against the death penalty, at least on the visceral level. The cold, calculating, predetermined, systemic nature of it. To apply this mode of thinking to raping a child to torture and break their parent is something I just can't process in a rational way, it is offensive in a way that is far beyond the worst individual acts of atrocity.

I also will not apologize in the slightest for having no comfort level with folks that can "look forward" on this level of evil, to let stuff like this fester and be passed off as in any way remotely tolerable is to foster malignancy in an insane fashion, even to the risk of civil war. To give a pass for acts like this is to sell our collective soul. There is no "moving on" and to think there can be I think puts you on a damn similar path to the one taken to get to this.

At this point, our intelligence network is potentially a greater danger to ourselves and the world than any threat it would protect us from.

The cancer is too deep. I think we will have to blow it up and start very carefully from scratch.

MONSTEROUS!

There comes a place where "pragmatism" simply becomes enabling evil while kinda patting yourself on the back for rationalizations made to sell it.

If this shit stands we have become an evil people.

[grasswire]

50. how is it that we allow these people the comforts of our society?

We allow them to move about freely (or nearly freely) and we allow them to continue to profit from their evil ways (Condoleezza, Bush, Cheney, Rum, and all the underlings), and we allow them the freedom from open, public vilification and shaming.

Meanwhile, the torture will never end for millions of Iraqis and families of our service members.

[TheKentuckian]

56. I don't know and I don't like what it implies about the collective "us" to allow it.

Now, imagine if this was say a gang then the howling for blood would be eardrum shattering just from the breathless pounding of keyboards alone. The shrieking from Nancy Grace would leave a good portion of the country deaf.

Make it an institution and on the rich and powerful though and it becomes more along the lines of a misunderstanding kinda at the level of a property line dispute or something and maybe even just the unpleasant cost of doing business.

[Raksha]

78. Thank you! Very well said, and I agree with all of it.

Couldn't have said it better, and wish I could say it as well.

[tblue37]

88. I suspect that anyone who pushes too hard to bring the most powerful

"shadow government" operators to justice might need to give careful consideration to issues of personal survival.

[kelliekat44]

43. No wonder there were so many 2nd and 3rds and top officials of Al-quaeda. nt

[Rex]

49. My it sure is odd how former CIA workers end up dead from natural causes.

Odd in that they were perfectly healthy until the cause decided they needed to die, naturally. William Casey's very well timed brain tumor comes to mind.

[warrprayer]

52. "He died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA..."

[neverforget]

59. Senator Wyden says we'll be "profoundly disturbed" by this report.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024778171

Bush and Cheney need to be held accountable but I doubt they will be. They'll get the ones that carried out the orders but not those that gave them.

[tblue37]

89. No, I doubt they will "get" anyone. nt

[BelgianMadCow]

61. Thanks for posting, WillyT

even though I don't particularly look forward to the release, I think it's important.

[WillyT]

65. You Are Quite Welcome !!!

[Soylent Brice]

66. k&r

[Bonobo]

73. What better illustration could there be

for why people that defend unexplained drone strikes are fucked in the head?

Essentially we are supposed to trust their methodology for choosing targets -and yes, this includes the Americans they killed as well- without any form of oversight by the people.

[WillyT]

74. Speaking Of Which... Did You See This:

DULinl: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024782364

[Bonobo]

76. Holy fuck...and here is something to add to that from my POV.

This attention to "But they're Americans!" is scary in a way because the implication buried in there is that if you're not an American, then you DON'T have the right to not be targeted for killing (or that that right is less.)

My wife, for example, is not a US Citizen. Does she somehow deserve less rights to not be targeted extra-juducually at the secret order of the Executive Branch of the US?

[TheKentuckian]

99. Absolutely, they know it too but the politics are too messy so they are inclined to just double down

and gives the previous monsters a pass too after gnashing their teeth about them for the decade as the cost of doing business, preferring murder from a distance as their move toward moderation because they fear or plain don't want to behave as sentients.

[marions ghost]

104. Also

the govt & country is in such a mess after Booshcheney...and Americans trust in govt is at an all time low--it's easier to let this one stay buried.

We need to know--how much info did we glean from torture? Probably very little.

Was (is) it primarily to display our ruthlessness and vindictiveness to the subterranean world, Mafia style?
Probably.

In any case, it is horrific that so many Americans were (still are?) complicit in criminal atrocities.

[TheKentuckian]

106. If this is "government" or an acceptable policy for it's toolbox then trust should be low.

[marions ghost]

107. I think that's what we're fighting about

after all these years. If we let the issue go, then it just becomes locked in as business as usual.

Which is totally unacceptable and undermines any trust in a civilized government. We become the accomplices allowing a brutal, inhumane policy to stand.

This issue is worth fighting for. Torture crosses a line that we must not cross, no matter what.

And yet we have.

Some people have a lot of atoning to do.

[TheKentuckian]

108. Atonement would be great but they need to stop patting themselves on the back for being "pragmatic"

and for "being the adults in the room" way before we can even think about that.

[marions ghost]

109. True

and of course they'll justify it all the way to their own death beds. That's what torturers do.

I guess the rest of us will have to atone for them. And stop this atrocity.

[TwilightGardener]

79. Professional sadists, allowed to run amok for at least 5 or 6 years.

Terrible black eye for this country.

[Jefferson23]

80. Have you ever read The Torture Doctors, Willy?

An expert panel concludes that the Pentagon and the CIA ordered physicians to violate the Hippocratic Oath

By Scott Horton


The Hippocratic corpus, which requires that a physician “first do no harm” to his patient, lies at the heart of medical ethics. Now, an important independent study of the conduct of doctors engaged by the CIA and Defense Department at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility has concluded that the U.S. government forced these doctors to systematically violate their oaths by aiding in the torture and abuse of patients in their care. The study also makes clear that CIA and Defense Department officials were conscious of the ethics guidelines their policies would violate, and took measures to exempt medical professionals in their service from ethics requirements. The DoD and CIA also consistently refused to cooperate with state ethics boards investigating the unethical conduct of physicians at Guantánamo, effectively leaving the boards unable to act.

The two-year study, whose findings were issued in a report called “Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the “War on Terror,” was conducted by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, and was supervised by a board of nineteen preeminent physicians, lawyers, and health-policy experts. After extensively surveying publicly available information, the report’s authors concluded that health professionals at Guantánamo had “designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees.”

The report acknowledges that the Obama Administration has made changes to the Guantánamo system, but expresses serious concerns about systematic and ongoing ethics lapses in the detention center’s notorious force-feeding program. The Pentagon, it notes, “continues to follow policies that undermine standards of professional conduct” with respect to interrogation, hunger strikes, and the reporting of abuse. Doctors and nurses at Gitmo are required to participate in the force-feeding of detainees, who are placed in extensive bodily restraints for up to two hours twice a day, which the report’s authors conclude (as the American Medical Association did earlier this year) violates basic ethical rules.

The report leaves little doubt that intelligence services and the Pentagon have offered doctors a sort of pact, amounting to: Leave your professional ethics behind when you come to work with us, and torture your patients if we ask you to. In exchange, we will keep quiet about what you’ve done, and will ensure that the ethics bodies responsible for policing the medical profession won’t get the evidence they need to act against you. What this equation leaves out, of course, is the patients — both those who were abused, and the ones these doctors might treat in the future, who have a right to know who is treating them. A doctor who is willing to torture his patients can hardly be counted upon to render the highest standards of professional care, even without the CIA standing over his or her shoulder. Or, as one of the study’s researchers, Columbia University professor of medicine Gerald Thomson, put it:

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/11/the-torture-doctors-2/

[WillyT]

81. Printing It Now... Thank You !!!

[Jefferson23]

82. You're welcome. Scott Horton is an excellent source, he does not write as often lately for Harpers,

he has been working on a book.

You might be interested to see this latest interview..if you have not already.

A Debate on Torture: Legal Architect of CIA Secret Prisons, Rendition vs. Human Rights Attorney

From Democracy Now

As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence feuds with the CIA over the declassification of its 6,000-page report on the agency’s secret detention and interrogation programs, we host a debate between former CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo and human rights attorney Scott Horton.


This comes as the United Nations Human Rights Committee has criticized the Obama administration for closing its investigations into the CIA’s actions after September 11. A U.N. report issued Thursday stated, “The Committee notes with concern that all reported investigations into enforced disappearances, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that had been committed in the context of the CIA secret rendition, interrogation and detention programmes were closed in 2012 leading only to a meager number of criminal charges brought against low-level operatives." Rizzo served as acting general counsel during much of the George W. Bush administration and was a key legal architect of the U.S. interrogation and detention program after the Sept. 11 attacks. He recently published a book titled, "Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA." Attorney Scott Horton is contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and author of the forthcoming book, "The Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy."

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/28/a_debate_on_torture_legal_architect

[JoeyT]

83. Well that sort of kicks the legs out from under the

argument that they kept us safe from all those bad dudes they had when it comes out that the 2nd most powerful terrorist in the world they've got detained is actually just a guy that aided terrorism by selling Osama's third cousin a sandwich.

[sdougreid]

94. private contractors of Titan and Casi

I would like to know who authorized the private contractors in Abu Ghraib to torture. This was a stain on our nation and a reason to not privatize our military.

[secondwind]

95. "he died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA." HMMMMM

[drokhole]

100. Sounds to me like he was Spooked to death.