[Marxism] Gonzales says torture is "abhorrent" but legal for U.S. president

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

"I will ensure the Department of Justice aggressively pursues those 
responsible for such abhorrent actions." That echoed the language of a 
new Justice Department memo repudiating another of those earlier memos 
- "torture is abhorrent to American law and values and to international 
norms."

The senators couldn't ask for more concrete commitments; it should 
satisfy Gonzales' critics. But, still, a key principle remains 
unaddressed.

Does the president have the power to ignore U.S. laws and international 
treaties against torture? Does he have the power to order the torture 
of detainees?

Gonzales' response was, in effect, that Bush is opposed to any torture 
of prisoners so therefore the question is moot.

A similar point came up in hearings on Jose Padilla, an American 
citizen jailed indefinitely without charge on Bush's finding that he 
was an enemy combatant. Pressed on whether the president has the power 
to imprison without charge, government lawyers said there was no risk 
that the president would begin rounding up American citizens.

Clearly the administration would like to reserve those powers for the 
president. The point here is that while President Bush might not use 
those powers, that's not to say another president wouldn't.

http://www.modbee.com/24hour/opinions/story/1989388p-10007984c.html
_________

But whatever his role, Gonzales clearly agreed with the memo, and does 
to this day.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the ranking Democrat on the committee, tried 
every way he could to get Gonzales to answer "yes" or "no" to a simple 
question: "Now, as attorney general, would you believe the president 
has the authority to exercise a commander-in-chief override and 
immunize acts of torture?" Gonzales tried all kinds of tacks to avoid 
answering: The question is hypothetical because Bush opposes the use of 
torture, etc. Leahy persisted, and finally Gonzales said, "Senator, I 
do believe there may come an occasion when the Congress might pass a 
statute that the president may view as unconstitutional," and therefore 
he can ignore it. The answer was disingenuous because the issue isn't 
laws Congress might pass, but established U.S. and international laws 
that prohibit the use of torture. Thus, the only reasonable way to 
interpret Gonzales' answer in the context it was asked is that, indeed, 
the president has the power to permit torture by immunizing those who 
do it.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/5175284.html

========================================

So far, I haven't seen any media point out that the "Torture Memos" 
came after the fact, i.e., after the torture and murders in Afghanistan 
and Guantanamo. We should recall that it was in Afghanistan where the 
prisoners who lead an uprising at Mazar al Sharif (sp?) were surrounded 
and bombed and killed instead of being waited out by the 
traditionaldeprivation of food and water.  As in Fallujah, the U.S. 
wanted to kill them all. John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," 
only survived by standing in water in the depths of that prison. (1)

And it was in Afghanistan that American soldiers cooperated or directed 
the suffocation of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of prisoners in 
container trucks, an act almost identical to the railroad car 
suffocation of Jewish and other prisoners by Nazi Germany during WW II. 
(2)

Any study of the timeline of all of these events will show that the 
Torture Memos were designed to give cover to U.S. government military 
agencies and were requested by the CIA and military itself.

Brian Shannon

(1)
“I saw two Americans there. They were taking pictures with a digital 
camera and a video camera. They were there for interrogating us. As 
soon as the last of us was taken out of the basement, someone either 
pulled a knife, or threw a grenade at the guards, and got their guns, 
and started shooting. I don’t really know how it happened. As soon as I 
heard the shooting and the screaming, I jumped up and ran about one or 
two meters, and was shot in the leg. It’s not as bad as you would 
think, but after that I was down in the basement.”

The Americans were CIA agents Mike Spann and another called Dave. Spann 
was badly beaten, possibly to death, and then shot by the prisoners. 
Dave and local Red Cross doctors were able to escape with the help of a 
team of U.S. Special forces. Then, said Hamid, “they hit us with 
everything they had. The Americans were bombing us. It was horrible. 
Nearly everyone in the basement was wounded.”

After Tuesday, all resistance above ground stopped. Alliance soldiers 
poured diesel fuel into the basement and lit it, assuming that any 
remaining Taliban would be killed by the fire and the fumes. But when 
workers on Thursday went into the basement of a pink, one story 
building in the center of the compound to take bodies out, they ran 
into as many as 100 Taliban, mostly wounded, still alive in the cells. 
Two of the workers were wounded, and a third was abducted or shot.

The Alliance then spent Thursday afternoon dropping large artillery 
rockets into the basement and setting them off with fuses. “It was 
horrible,” said Hamid. “But the rockets were exploding in the hallway 
of the basement, and we were all hiding in the cells. The stairway was 
just a pile of rubble, and there were parts of bodies all over.” Still 
they survived, with no food or water.

Finally, on Friday, Alliance troops flooded the basement with water. 
“We spent the night in the freezing cold water,” said Hamid “Those who 
could stand up survived, but there were a lot of wounded who couldn’t 
stand, and they drowned. Most of the dead down there drowned yesterday. 
At that point we had one rifle with 15 bullets and one hand grenade.” 
On Saturday morning they gave up. They came out of the basement, 
soaking wet and shivering, clambering over the rubble and body parts. 
Saturday afternoon they sat and lay in the truck, waiting to be 
transported two hours away to a camp in Sherbagan. It is unclear what 
will happen to Abdul Hamid, who says he lost his U.S. passport in 
Konduz. But he may well be headed for a U.S. military tribunal.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3067394/

(2)
After the surrender of the fortress of Kunduz, at the tail end of the 
Afghan war in November 2001, hundreds of Taliban prisoners -- "young 
men who had expected the protection of the Geneva conventions" after 
surrendering to U.S. and U.S.-backed forces -- "instead died horribly" 
at the hands of the U.S.'s Northern Alliance surrogates, either by 
suffocation in the container trucks used to transport them towards the 
Shebarghan prison, or by outright execution in killings fields around 
Shebarghan.

So wrote Jamie Doran, producer of a television documentary titled 
Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death, in the respected French journal 
Le Monde diplomatique (September 2002). Thousands more prisoners were 
still missing, according to Doran. "A few may have escaped ... But 
according to to a number of eyewitnesses found during a six-month 
investigation, most lie [buried] in the sand" at Dasht-e Leili, a site 
only ten minutes' drive from Shebarghan.

Doran went further still. He claimed that U.S. soldiers were present 
when the containers were opened, and ordered the destruction of the 
ghastly evidence inside. "When the containers were finally opened, a 
mess of urine, blood, faeces, vomit and rotting flesh was all that 
remained ... As the containers were lined up outside the prison, a 
[U.S.] soldier accompanying the convoy was present when the prison 
commanders received orders to dispose of the evidence quickly." He 
cites witness testimony to the effect that "In each container maybe 
150-160 [prisoners] had been killed. ... The Americans told the 
Shebarghan people to get them outside the city before they were filmed 
by satellite."

A key question is who, precisely, was in charge at Shebarghan. There is 
strong prima facie evidence that the U.S. was in fact in control -- at 
least in the sense that Israeli forces were directing events when they 
ushered their Christian Phalangist allies into the Palestinian refugee 
camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Newsweek's detailed investigation 
into the Afghan atrocities ("The Death Convoy of Afghanistan," 26 
August 2002) stated straightforwardly that "American forces were 
working intimately with 'allies' who committed what could well qualify 
as war crimes."
http://www.redrat.net/BUSH_WAR/conex/


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