I was alarmed to read yesterday that up to 17 United States Navy warships may have been used to detain terror suspects by hiding them from international scrutiny, and the legal system, on “black water” prison ships — creating, in an alarming way — terrorist detainment camps in military hulks. Are the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu the new Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay?
Continue reading → Are USS Warships Serving as Prison Hulks?
We are having a heated political discussion in the USA this week wondering if waterboarding is torture or not as Michael Mukasey faces a Senate confirmation hearing on his attorney general nomination — but waterboarding has a long history as part of the human core in antiquity:
Waterboarding is a technique in which prisoners are subjected to simulated drowning by binding them to an inclined board, with their feet raised and head a bit below their feet. Then cellophane or cloth is wrapped over a prisoner’s face and water is poured over the person.
Vietnam 1968: In Da Nang, the U.S. military used waterboarding as an interrogation technique:
Is there a fine line or a bright line between a free and democratic nation interrogating a terrorism suspect and torturing a terrorism suspect?
The 279 images from Abu Ghraib appear to confirm the bright line between right and wrong has purposefully been pressed into the fuzzy and dark:
Although the world is now sadly familiar with images of naked, hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse, this is the first time that the full dossier of the Army’s own photographic evidence of the scandal has been made public.Most of the photos have already been seen, but the Army’s own analysis of the story behind the photos has never been fully told.
It is a shocking, night-by-night record of three months inside Abu Ghraib’s notorious cellblock 1A, and it tells the story, in more graphic detail than ever before, of the rampant abuse of prisoners there.
Continue reading → State-Sponsored Torture and the Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
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