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kpete Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 08:46 AM
Original message
The CIA Torture Cover Up
Source: Daily Beast

The CIA Torture Cover Up

by John Sifton

John Sifton

Why doesn’t Leon Panetta want the agency investigated or prosecuted for torture allegations? Maybe because some of the men implicated, John Sifton reports, are the ones advising him.

On Monday night the confidential report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program was published on the website of the New York Review of Books. The report confirms previous allegations about CIA abuses against detainees. Unlike earlier reporting, however, the document is based on irrefutable first hand information: interviews with detainees and U.S. officials. The document describes in stark detail the CIA’s use of forced standing, sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, assaults, and waterboarding. It also discloses the participation of CIA medical personnel in torture.

Some revelations in the IRCR report have already become known through the reporting of journalists Mark Danner and Jane Mayer. As a result, press accounts have focused on the fresh news of medical personnel supervising and overseeing abuse. But other important facts about the report have been overlooked that make the question of torture not simply a matter of the past.

Since the basic facts about their involvement in the CIA interrogation program are now known, Panetta’s actions are increasingly looking like a cover-up.

The New York Times reported that Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, has taken the position that “no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.” Yet a number of CIA officials implicated in the torture program not only remain at the highest levels of the agency, but are also advising Panetta. Panetta’s attempt to suppress the issue is making Bush’s policy into the Obama administration’s dirty laundry.

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-08/the-cia-torture-cover-up/
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90-percent Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 08:48 AM
Response to Original message
1. links to my thoughts on this
Edited on Wed Apr-08-09 08:49 AM by 90-percent
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Solly Mack Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 08:50 AM
Response to Original message
2. K&R
see sig line
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chill_wind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 08:56 AM
Response to Original message
3. Some of us have been talking about Panetta from day 1.
Edited on Wed Apr-08-09 09:07 AM by chill_wind
(despite his media-pronounced "rock star reception", and his smooth sailing approval by Senate voice vote)


February 7

Panetta: No Prosecutions For CIA Torturers

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x423143
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xiamiam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 09:19 AM
Response to Reply #3
6. leon panetta is a decent man...I think his appointment was genius..I still have hope that this will
be resolved...properly...
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chill_wind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 09:16 AM
Response to Original message
4. We've known about the medical personnel since AT LEAST *2004*
Edited on Wed Apr-08-09 09:46 AM by chill_wind
And so has Congress.

re: "press accounts have focused on the fresh news of medical personnel supervising and overseeing abuse."

MSNBC | August 19 2004

LONDON - Doctors working for the U.S. military in Iraq collaborated with interrogators in the abuse of detainees at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, profoundly breaching medical ethics and human rights, a bioethicist charges in The Lancet medical journal.

In a scathing analysis of the behavior of military doctors, nurses and medics, University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles calls for a reform of military medicine and an official investigation into the role played by physicians and other medical staff in the torture scandal.

He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured. No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found.

“The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations,” Miles said in this week’s edition of Lancet. “Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib.”



(...)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5761936/

And oh yeah--- Bush got a second term 3 months later ANYWAY.

Where has the other half of America been? Where has CONGRESS been?

FIVE YEARS. We've given the government FIVE YEARS now to figure out to how run away from this.


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Gregorian Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 10:09 AM
Response to Reply #4
8. How could such an important story have gone nowhere?
Edited on Wed Apr-08-09 10:10 AM by Gregorian
I've watched over and over as these stories came and went.

I want to say it's the media. But I honestly do not know why they all seemed to just vaporize. Not all of them. Plame was given some effort. I guess. Not really. I think it's the lack of sensationalism that they gave other stories. Like Clinton's nothing. Which speaks to the people. And the people just sleep.

No flashing lights. No sceaming news heads with perfect hair. Am I wrong? I mean, you reveal a covert CIA agent, and I would expect shouting from the rooftops.


By the way, I am saying the msm is complicit.
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chill_wind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 10:27 AM
Response to Reply #8
9. Because Congress, for one, has been vastly relieved to see it go nowhere.
Feinstein is busy investigating CIA torture matters behind *closed doors.* May take up to a year yet, may or may not make the report public, so go away. She doesn't want a "media circus" or an informed public.

And Herr Bush isn't even President any more.

Where's the damn "State Secrets Protection Act" in the meantime?



http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5404964&mesg_id=5412201
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MarjorieG Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 09:18 AM
Response to Original message
5. We didn't want insider, someone who'd be comfortable shaking things up; we wanted outsider.
Outsiders less reluctant to do that and gain confidence, continuing necessary work by staff.
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annabanana Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 09:26 AM
Response to Original message
7. I have sent a copy of the Red Cross report to my whole contacts list
(You can download a .pdf here)
http://www.nybooks.com/


When confronted with the reality of torture... most people are repulsed. The corporate media has allowed most people to ignore it.

How can we stand by when this is done IN OUR NAME?
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chill_wind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 11:21 AM
Response to Original message
10. MSNBC alone has 212,000 article results indexed under the word torture.
full article results partway down the page.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/?id=11881780&q=torture&p=1&st=1&sm=user


Let's say if even only half of that was explicitly relevant-- Americans KNOW. We've KNOWN.

AND----we keep allowing the MF's who either outright support it - or want to run away from confronting it - to stay in our government.


MSNBC 2005





Why torture issue hasn’t had political traction
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo don’t bar Gonzales, Chertoff confirmations

But the Senate voted to confirm Gonzales after Democrats decided that the torture issue was not worth a filibuster.

On Tuesday, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were again lingering phantoms as the Senate voted to approve former Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff, now a federal appeals court judge, to be homeland security secretary.



Torture sometimes justified?

Last June, in the immediate aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee, “If we knew that there was a nuclear bomb hidden in an American city and we believed that some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe, would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off, my guess is most Americans and most senators, maybe all, would say, ‘Do what you have to do.’”

Schumer added, “It's easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you're in the foxhole, it's a very different deal.”



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6970081/

And that was in 2005. How many other enablers have we restored to Congress and other places of power since? Four years later, who's in prison?



J'accuse
Facilitating Fascism
by Zbignew Zingh
www.dissidentvoice.org
February 21, 2006


What kind of doctors has the United States trained who stand by idly while prison guards force-feed prisoners in Guantanamo Bay with plastic pipes shoved down the noses of the shackled and tortured?

What kind of psychologists have we educated who assist the Pentagon inventing new ways to torture men and women, breaking their minds without breaking their skin; who help create government propaganda, plant false news stories, devise “psy-ops” to mislead us all?

What kind of lawyers are these who work for the Department of “Justice”, the “Defense” Department, the Pentagon or the White House, who waste their careers finding legal loop-holes justifying torture, deceit, eavesdropping and imprisonment without charge?

What manner of scientists, hardware and software engineers have we graduated who dedicate their intelligence and creativity to devising deadlier weapons, more secretive ways to snoop, and more innovative ways to kill?

What types of ministers, priests, rabbis, chaplains and reverends are these who mutter empty palliatives to their congregations, run through empty chants and mindless prayers and paeans to Love and Holiness in pursuit of a Life to Come, while today, right now, human carrion burns in their names, and naught do they do at all?

What types of writers, journalists, editors, reporters, actors, what types of men and women are these who slavishly say and write and do as they are told knowing that they spread lies and deception and blather?

Although this nation is led by a few, its actions are facilitated by many. We are the facilitators -- the professionals, the educated, the trained -- we are the ones whose skills and knowledge keep the whole machinery moving, the cogs oiled, the system operating smoothly.

(...)



http://dissidentvoice.org/Feb06/Zingh21.htm

And we continue to facilitate it, among other ways, by re-electing our rat-bastards to Congress and other places of power again and again and again.

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Bigmack Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 11:46 AM
Response to Original message
11. If you think THIS sort of stuff is nasty,
read JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W Douglas. Ms Bigmack, who lives in Tin-foil Hat land
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ConcernedCanuk Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 03:46 PM
Response to Original message
12. World knows - USA tortures people
.
.
.

What's more to say??

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chill_wind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 04:10 PM
Response to Original message
13. ..
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Supersedeas Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 04:20 PM
Response to Original message
14. Leon Panetta, Eric Holder, Jim Jones, Greg Craig, and John Brennan -- who has Obama's ear?
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chill_wind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Apr-08-09 10:14 PM
Response to Reply #14
15. I hope the guy who now has John Yoo's desk
gets a word in on the subject.


The Anti-Torture Memos: Balkinization Posts on Torture, Interrogation, Detention, War Powers, Executive Authority, DOJ and OLC

Marty Lederman partway down the page (almost 250 articles)

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/09/anti-torture-memos-balkinization-posts.html
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pleah Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-09-09 08:19 AM
Response to Original message
16. K&R
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