Surely this work is not more twisted than its subject matter.
"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap."
- C. S. Lewis
"There will be no whitewash in the White House."
- Richard Nixon
|
"If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"
"No treaty."
"Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo..."
"I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."
This is a text transcript excerpt of a Dec. 1, 2005 exchange between International Human Rights expert Doug Cassel and John Yoo, an architect of U.S. legal policy on torture. Yoo and the Bush administration publicly claimed the authority to order the torture of children. The Obama administration is currently defending Yoo against a civil lawsuit for his complicity in the torture of an American citizen |
"The evidence is sitting on the table. There is no avoiding the fact that this was torture."
- Manfred Nowak, the UN official appointed by the Commission on Human Rights to examine cases of torture. Nowak has concluded that President Obama is legally obligated to prosecute former Pres. George W. Bush & former Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld
"I never knew in the course of all those operations, any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or . . . thrown out of helicopters."
- former CIA agent Bart Osborn testifying before Congress in 1971
"I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum… (I saw) a video of a American soldier in uniform sodomizing... I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia... the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."
- Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba
"Some of those that were tortured were innocent. How do we come to terms with those that were cruelly mistreated and were innocent, never charged, were illegally detained and never compensated for their suffering? This is not a political issue, but a moral and ethical dilemma which has far-reaching implications."
- Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba
The Obama administration also told a federal court February 20, 2009 that detainees incarcerated elsewhere had no rights whatsoever. "Having considered the matter, the government adheres to its previously articulated position," the Justice Department argued before the Washington, D.C., federal court. In other words, the Bush policy of denial of basic human rights and the use of torture will continue against detainees. The case argued before the court involved the treatment of five detainees at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan. The detainees were seeking treatment in accord with Geneva Convention protocols, and the Obama administration took the Bush position that detainees have no human rights.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that Obama’s highly publicized emphasis on Guantanamo is a whitewash that will allow torture to continue in Afghanistan and elsewhere.