Awhile back, I wrote a note on torture called "The 'Ticking Time Bomb,'" so you should check out that note before reading this one. According to the article, "The Evolution of CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition Operations," the definition of "extraordinary rendition" is the "transfer - without legal process - of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for purposes of detention and interrogation." The past 3 presidents, and possibly more, have ordered and allowed suspected terrorists to be sent to prisons in other countries (such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, Egypt, etc.) to be detained indefinitely, interrogated, and tortured. However, this extraordinary rendition and torture got way, way worse after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Government officials, including these past 3 presidents, have assured the U.S. that these prisoners are being treated properly. However, even CIA Director Porter Goss has reported that there is really no way of knowing if the prisons in these countries are going to treat the prisoners right or not. They say they will, but are they really going to? There's no way to be sure. U.S. government officials know that these prisoners are being tortured, even though prison officials say they aren't. The reason we know this is because there have been all kinds of prisoners recovered who have given accounts of being tortured. Even photos and videos of torture have been recovered from some places. Also we know this, because it's not JUST people of other countries doing the torturing. Some prisons are run by people in the U.S. military. But the prisons are in other countries, because if they were in our country, there would be an insane uproar, and the government wants to keep this as quiet as possible. The United States government has also been caught funding such prisons and providing training for the prison officials in these countries. And bear in mind that these detainees have not been given a trial and have not been convicted of any crimes; they are only SUSPECTED terrorists. Also, keep in mind that this torture is not just happening to people while they're under interrogation. In a lot of prisons, the prison officials are just randomly using torture techniques on the prisoners for fun, or are just punishing their prisoners for doing or saying something wrong with insane measures.
There's one other thing I want you guys to keep in mind before reading further. In my last note on torture, I talked about the "Ticking Time Bomb" situation in which it's very possible that torture is constitutional. This situation is when the government knows a person has information that they really need in order to save a ton of people's lives, and that person will not give up the information, and there is a time crunch. In this situation, the U.S. government has deemed torture to be constitutional, and I do agree with it, for the most part. For instance, say someone came up to our government and told them they knew where a bomb was hidden in New York City, and that it was going to detonate in 10 minutes, but he/she refused to tell the government the exact location of the bomb. In that case, I think most people agree it is ok to torture that asshole until he tells us where the bomb is, because if we don't get the information in less than 10 mintues, the bomb will detonate, and hundreds of people could die. These accounts of extraordinary rendition and torture that I'm bringing to light in this note are ones that are NOT considered to be constitutional and are NOT "Ticking Time Bomb" situations. They are outside the realm of what is considered to be legal and constitutional, and I really hope you guys read all this, because it will blow your mind.
Now what kinds of torture are we talking about? "Cramped confinement" in a box, "stress positions," forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, "waterboarding," the smearing of feces on prisoners' faces, the act of peeing on prisoners' heads, the injection of medicine for dog cysts, threats of ill-treatment, and exposure to cold temperature are just the beginning. Many people have suffered intense beatings, where they've been almost killed, and some have been actually killed. In some cases, bones have been broken, eyes have been gouged, and heads have been forcibly beaten against concrete. This doesn't even touch the insane number of similar ways these people are being tortured. These people have been sexually assaulted, as well as physically, and it's insane the things I've read in the three articles I'm going to talk about in this note, including the one I've already introduced to you guys. It's also insane what I saw happened at Abu Ghraib, which can be seen in the documentary "Standard Operating Procedures," which I highly recommend you guys watch. Abu Ghraib is an Iraqi prison, where all kinds of torture took place. Oh, and U.S. soldiers ran the place and committed all of the acts of torture there. Prisoners there were forced to masturbate with each other, while the prison officials took photos of them. They were forced to get naked and climb on top of each other while pictures were being taken of them. They were beaten and killed, and I can't even explain to you everything I saw that happened to them in the documentary. You just have to watch it yourselves.
Here are some accounts of actual people and actual events from the aforementioned article.
1. "Maher Arar was imprisoned for more than ten months in a tiny grave-like cell, beaten with cables, and threatened with electric shocks by the Syrian government, despite its assurances to the U.S. government that it would not torture him and despite post-transfer consular visits by Canadian officials."
2. "Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery reported being subjected to electric shocks in Egyptian custody, despite Egypt's assurances to the Swedish government that they would not be tortured, and despite a post-transfer monitoring mechanism that involved Swedish diplomats visiting the men while they were held in Egyptian custody."
3."In April 2011, the Associated Press reported that suspected terrorists in Afghanistan were being secretly detained and interrogated for weeks at 20 temporary sites including one run by the military's elite counterterrorism unit, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), at Begram Air Base. More than a dozen former detainees reported that they were held for weeks at the JSOC site in 2010, forced to strip naked and kept in solitary confinement in windowless, often cold cells with lights on 24 hours a day."
4. "U.S. officials reportedly provided intelligence that led to Kenya's kidnapping and extraordinary rendition of Kenyan citizen Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan to Somalia for interrogation and detention without charge or trial. Subsequently, the New York Times reported that the CIA has financed and provided training for Somali intelligence operations in addition to joining Somali operatives in interrogating detainees, including Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan."
5. "The Washington Post further reported that Eritrean citizen Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed was held by Nigerian authorities in a Nigerian jail for four months under pressure from U.S. officials. He was first interrogated by a 'dirty' team of U.S. agents who ignored the suspect's right to remain silent or have a lawyer."
Now, I'd like to introduce another article that is solely about a thug squad being deployed by the U.S. military in prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. By the way, the use of thug squads is illegal. They have been told to torture prisoners, even for the slightest resistance and petty reasons. They call these acts done by the thug squad "IRFings." According to the CCR, "Violence can be inflicted by the guards at any moment for any perceived infraction, or sometimes without provocation or explanation." According to this article, "Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama," "former Guantanamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described 'the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke.' Yee said he believed that, during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of of the Muslim prisoners' 'private areas' and Korans to 'rile the detainees,' saying it 'seemed like harrassment for the sake of harrassment, and the prisoners fought it. Those who did were always IRFed.'"
According to the article I just mentioned, Omar Deghayes, was a Libyan citizen who had lived in England since 1986. In the late 1990s, he was a law student and traveled to Afghanistan, simply because he was Muslim and wanted to see what the country was like. He met and married an Afghan woman while he was there, and they had a son together. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Deghayes was detained in Lahore, Pakistan for a month. There he was subjected to "systematic beatings" and electric shocks. They later transferred him to a prison in Islamabad, Pakistan, where "he claimes he was interrogated by both U.S. and British personnel." He recounts his imprisonment there: "One day they took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes. The room was all painted black and white, with dim lights. They threatened to leave me there and let the snakes out with me in the room. This really got to me, as there were such sick people that they must have had this room specially made." Eventually, Deghayes was sent to an Afghan prison, where he was beaten and "kept nude, as part of the process of humiliation due to his religion." Deghayes was also placed by U.S. personnel into a closed, locked box with little air. He recalls seeing U.S. guards sodomize an African prisoner. These guards "forced petrol and benzene up the anuses of the prisoners." Deghayes said that "the camp looked like the Nazi camps That I saw in films." In September 2002, Deghayes was sent to a prison in Guantanamo Bay, where he was sprayed in the eyes with pepper spray, had one eye gouged, and was refused medical attention after the fact. This caused him to go permanently blind in the eye that was gouged and temporarily blind in the other. Later an officer came into Deghayes's cell with the feces of another prisoner and smeared the feces on Deghayes's face. One time, prison officials pushed Deghayes's face into a toilet and repeatedly flushed it in his face. Deghayes was beaten by having a prison official knee him in the nose, trying to break it. Later he was in the recreation yard when 17 soldiers came up to him, armed with guns, and sprayed him and others. "Then they pulled him up into the air and slammed his face down, on the left side, on the concrete." He was then sent to isolation. One time, prison officials brought a strong water hose into his cell and forced water up his nose, so that he was suffocating.
All of the actions done by the IRF team were supposed to have been documented on paper, videotaped, and recorded by photographs. All the IRF team members were required to write sworn statements after every IRFing, and every person that was IRFed was supposed to obtain immediate medical treatment after each IRF. According to Army Spec. Brandon Neely, who was apart of one of the first IRF teams in Guantanamo Bay, "every time I witnessed an IRFing, a camera was present, but one of two things would happen: 1. the camera would never be turned on, or 2. the camera would be on but pointed straight at the ground." In a lot of cases, the video and photograph evidence were destroyed or simply never made. "As for the 'sworn statements' by IRF team members, a review of hundreds of pages of declassified incident reports reveals an almost robotic uniformity in the handwritten accounts, overwhelmingly composed of succinct portrayals of operations that went off without a hitch. Almost all of them contain the phrases 'minimum amount of force necessary' and the prisoner 'received medical attention and evaluation' before being returned."
Here are some accounts from other released prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison: (All of these accounts are from the article I've been referring to for the past few paragraphs.)
1. One released prisoner recounts seeing prisoners being IRFed while trying to pray or for refusing medication.
2. David Hicks, an Australian citizen who had been held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, said he "witnessed the activites of the [IRF,] which consists of a squad of soldiers that enter a detainee's cell and brutalize him with the aid of an attack dog.
3. According to Binyam Mohamed, "They nearly broke my back. The guy on top was twisting me one way, the guy on my legs the other."
4. British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce put together documentation of the torture of one prisoner, Bahraini citizen Jumah al Dousari, by an IRF team. Jumah was previous known to be mentally ill. Many other prisoners gave accounts to the attack on Jumah. One prisoner recounted that one prison official "did a knee drop onto Jumah's back just between his shoulder blades with his full weight. He must have been about 240 lbs. in weight. His name was Smith. He was a sergeant E-5. Once he had done that, the others came in and were punching and kicking Jumah. While they were doing that, the female officer then came in and was kicking his stomach. Jumah had had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in the operation. The officer Smith was the MP sergeant who was punching him. He grabbed his head with one hand, and with the other hand, punched him repeatedly in the face. His nose was broken. He pushed his face, and he smashed it into the concrete floor. All of this should be on video. There was blood everywhere. When they took him out, they hosed the cell down, and the water ran red with blood. We all saw it." All of this was done, because Jumah had previously allegedly insulted a female soldier.
5. One active-duty U.S. soldier, Sergeant Sean Baker, was actually sent in to a prison in Guantanamo Bay to see what it was like to be a prisoner there. He was told to take off his uniform and put on an orange jumpsuit, and he was told to yell out the code word "red" when the pain was too much. "They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and, unfortunately, one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he - the same individual - reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic, and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.' ...That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: 'I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.'" The first thing Baker wanted to do after the incident was obtain a videotape of the incident, but there wasn't one. "Baker was soon diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. He began suffering seizures, sometimes 10 to 12 per day."
Now, my third article is from the New York Times. I highly recommend you guys read it. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/hunger-striking-at-guantanamo-bay.html?_r=0. It's about a man who is being kept in a prison in Guantanamo Bay, where he is force-fed with a tube that prison officials shove down his nose. It's apparently an extremely agonizing pain. This man, who is from Yemen, is Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel. He has been detained in Guantanamo Bay for more than 11 years, without trial, and without having been charged of any crimes. He was said to have been a guard for Osama bin Laden, but the prison officials no longer believe this to be true, yet they continue to hold him prisoner. Samir holds that the allegations against him are "nonsense." Read the article, though. There's more detail, although it is short and sweet, unlike this forever-long note.
So what's been going on at the White House? President Obama has been going back and forth on shutting down these prisons. Currently, nothing seems to be being done about them. According to the second article I discussed, the prisons in Guantanamo Bay seem to have been "ramping up" on the torture since Obama's presidency began. What should be done about this? I think you all know the answer to that.
This is a picture that was taken at the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib. You can see so much more in the documentary I mentioned above. Or you can google more pictures if you want to see something extremely disturbing. I'm not posting anything more disturbing than this on here, because you guys seriously won't understand how horrible the pictures are until you actually see them. In most of the pictures, peoples' heads have been bashed in, they're forcibly nude, etc. If you google the pictures and watch the documentary, you'll agree with me that those images are not appropriate to put in here.
This photo was also taken at Abu Ghraib. The man in the picture is dead and was killed there.
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