Darkness

Tyranny and impunity under the guise of Terror War


Dark Lords: Bush, Gonzales (peeking in background), and Congressional henchmen celebrate the destruction of human rights and justice.

Let's get one thing clear right away, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 signed yesterday has not one thing to do with ``Protecting America.'' This entire episode is about acquisition by the president of heretofore illegal tools designed for intimidation and domination of both foreign and domestic opponents, regardless of the likelihood of these opponents to commit acts of violence.

President Bush says that, ``The Military Commissions Act will also allow us to prosecute captured terrorists for war crimes through a full and fair trial.''

But he leaves out the following: The Act, along with other post-911 travesties like the Patriot Act, allow the president to declare any person an ``enemy combatant'' merely on his own suspicion. That person may then be arrested and permanently disappeared into a dark system of dungeons, in perpetuity, without the legal right to file a petition of habeas corpus.

Bush says that, ``These military commissions will provide a fair trial, in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them. These military commissions are lawful, they are fair, and they are necessary.''

And he says that, ``this bill complies with both the spirit and the letter of our international obligations.''

This is all nonsense. Not one word was mentioned by Bush yesterday, nor does one appear in the accompanying White House fact sheet about the elimination of habeas corpus, the legality of ``coerced'' evidence (obtained through techniques any reasonable person would consider torture), legality of evidence that can be spun from whole cloth and then be immune from ``hearsay'' rules, and the ability of evidence to be declared secret if a senior US official says so.

Furthermore, to great effect, Bush explains how the Act, ``provides legal protections that ensure our military and intelligence personnel will not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists simply for doing their jobs.''

This is an unimaginable travesty of justice. These provisions grant impunity to CIA torturers and senior officials who have designed, promoted, and executed horrendous acts upon human beings. Details of these acts are well known to readers of this blog:

· involuntary injection of a prisoner with a tranquilizer

· prisoner put in sensory deprivation garb and blackened goggles

· prisoners shackled in uncomfortable positions for many hours

· prisoners left to soil themselves

· prisoners wrapped in humiliating positions while exposed to blaring music or incessant meowing

· forcible enema

· sleep deprivation

· flashing lights in prisoners' eyes

· preventing visits by the Red Cross

· sexual humiliation, including squeezing of testicles, sexual taunts by female interrogators, sodomizing with a rifle muzzle, forced public masturbation, and piling prisoners into naked human pyramids

· shackling in fetal positions for 24 hours or more

· deprivation of food and water

· forcing prisoners' heads into the dirt

· prisoner placed in a sleeping bag and tied with an electrical cord

· strangulation

· beatings

· burning, including placing lit cigarettes into prisoners' ears and dousing a prisoner with alcoholic liquid and setting on fire

· terrorizing prisoners with military dogs

· rape of a juvenile male prisoner

· chaining in a cold room/hot room

· striking a prisoner with an empty 5 gallon plastic water jug

· administering electric shocks

· use of Taser guns on prisoners

· killing through dragging by the neck and other unknown means

· mock executions

· cuffing and pouring cold water on a subject in an act called the scorpion

· prisoner photographed with a pistol being held to head

· dragging of feet over barbed wire

· hooking wires on the hands and feet of a hooded prisoner who was told to stand on a box or else be electrocuted

All of this violates the ``spirit and letter'' of international law. To wit, the follwing principles embodied in The Universal Declaration for Human Rights:

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 8: Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10: Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11: (1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Everything about the Military Commissions Act is contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Arrest in the Terror War largely is arbitrary, based on bounty or hearsay. Hundreds of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay open-air dungeon have zero evidence against them, as this blog has discussed before. The tribunals cannot be ``impartial''. Mostly the president speaks like the guilt of his suspects in the 911 horror is already established, and he offers no evidence for his examples of supposed instances where ``lives were saved''.

The US administration has at no point in the last five years taken one step to insure any sort of just, internationally-recognizable verdict against a surviving 911 criminal can ever be entered. They have rounded up lots of people who had nothing to do with 911. They have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, they have tortured and murdered and granted themselves impunity for these acts. It is a sad, dark time in America.