The United States Tortures Prisoners

Not new “News” and certainly front and center since Gina Haspel, who has been proven to have run a CIA Torture Site in Thailand, still managed to get approved as DCI.

Wait ek, isn’t she a “good guy” for standing up to Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio?

Well, that’s a little like saying a Serial Killer was a nice quiet neighbor who loved animals, it’s kind of a non sequitur.

Cable: There’s a list we’re goin to work down, together. Number 1, I’m going to bend something that’s not meant to bend.

Weasel: I’m going to stop you right there because I’m not going to make it to 2. I won’t even make it to 1. I don’t do well with pain, you know. I stub my toe, I’m done for the day. I cried when they canceled Felicity I think. When I get scared, I get nervous erections. I have one right now. Don’t look. It will only make it worse. I don’t want you to hurt me and I’ll tell you anything, anything you want to know. Except for where they are.

[Ominous Glare from Cable]

Russell’s in a convoy headed southbound on Gerry Duggan Parkway. The monster’s with them. I wouldn’t mess with him.

And that’s why torture doesn’t work ladies and gentlemen, I’ll tell you anything I think you want to hear. I’m not proud like that and I will lie my ass off to avoid pain. I’m a completely unreliable.

Except in matters related to the torture which are corroborated by the meticulous notes and videos (at least there used to be, and I’m not convinced all the copies were destroyed; by the way- Haspel was complicit in that Obstruction of Justice too) we, just like the Nazis, kept.

As testimony, even in a Kangaroo Court like the Guantánamo Military Tribunals, it’s useless. Merely evidence of War Crimes by W and Cheney and every President of the United States since who are Accessories After the Fact because of their complicity in the coverup. We hung Japanese and Nazis on less evidence.

The United States has gone to great lengths to pretend this never happened, even letting some bloodthirsty murdering terrorists walk scott free so they don’t have to explain and excuse our heinous behavior in Court.

Guantánamo Trials Grapple With How Much Evidence to Allow About Torture
By Carol Rosenberg, The New York Times
April 5, 2019

Seventeen-and-a-half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and a decade after President Barack Obama ordered the C.I.A. to dismantle any remnants of its global prison network, the military commission system is still wrestling with how to handle evidence of what the United States did to the Qaeda suspects it held at C.I.A. black sites. While the topic of torture can now be discussed in open court, there is still a dispute about how evidence of it can be gathered and used in the proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

By law, prosecutors cannot use evidence gained through torture — or any other involuntary statements — at the war court, where eight of Guantánamo’s 40 prisoners are accused of being complicit in terrorist attacks. Prosecutors have made clear that nothing the defendants said at the black sites will be used as evidence.

But defense lawyers have continued to press for details of what happened to their clients and to be able to use the information either to fight the charges or to win more lenient sentencing. And they have been aided by changing circumstances, not least the government’s declassification of some details of how the prisoners were interrogated by the C.I.A.

The issue has been most intensely debated in Guantánamo’s two death-penalty cases: the 9/11 terror attacks that killed 2,976 people and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 in which 17 American sailors died.

Defense lawyers in those cases have sought for years to get access to eyewitnesses and graphic details from the C.I.A. sites. The lawyers want to use descriptions of torture to ask the judge to exclude some of the defendant’s own statements after they left the black sites. The defense lawyers also have said they would cite torture to seek dismissal of the charges on grounds of outrageous government conduct, an extraordinary legal defense that is used in civilian courts but is seldom granted.

If the men are convicted, the lawyers want the details of how the defendants were treated to argue that the United States has lost the moral authority to execute men it has tortured.

The fight over access to evidence and witnesses from the black sites is one of the factors that has slowed progress in the cases. In the process, it has illustrated how fundamental legal issues about the rights of Guantánamo defendants remain unresolved — and how the passage of time is altering how some of them are handled.

The conflict is not limited to the death penalty cases, as Mr. Khan’s proceedings show.

The topic of his torture was strictly taboo on Feb. 29, 2012, when he made his first court appearance since disappearing from his native Pakistan in 2003 at age 23. At that first hearing, Mr. Khan, who lived in suburban Baltimore for seven years and graduated from high school there in 1999, admitted to volunteering to work for Al Qaeda after Sept. 11 and plotting with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused architect of the attacks.

But in the intervening years, the Obama administration declassified details of what Mr. Khan said the C.I.A. did to him. By his account, he was beaten, hung naked from a wooden beam for three days with no food, kept for months in darkness, and submerged, shackled and hooded, into a tub of ice and water.

Additional details of his treatment were revealed in the partly declassified introduction to a Senate study of the George W. Bush administration’s black site program. In his second year of C.I.A. detention, according to a cable cited in the study, the agency “infused” a purée of pasta, sauce, nuts, raisins and hummus up Mr. Khan’s rectum, because he went on a hunger strike.

The C.I.A. calls this “rectal feeding.” Defense lawyers call it rape.

Mr. Khan’s lawyers now want to call witnesses and gather evidence to show his sentencing jury what happened to him.

Yup, we ass rape people.

Explain the difference between us and the Nazis again.