Or the END, for that matter....
Readers, see:
PROOF of Bush Administration War Crimes!
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/The First Abu Ghraib
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/Perversion
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/Dilawar and Habibullah
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/Chamber of Horrors
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/American Amnesty
Hell-oween: Afghanistan Torture File/Bagram
Afghanistan Torture Chamber
The Globe's Weekend Movie
Also see:
Memory Hole: Iraq's Jails
Memory Hole: Camp Nama and Task Force 6-26
Occupation Iraq: New Torture Techniques Revealed
Memory Hole: What Four Years of Torture Will Do to an Innocent Man
You all set now, readers?
"Iraqi detainee interrogations detailed; Congress told abuses predate Abu Ghraib" by Pamela Hess, Associated Press | September 26, 2008
WASHINGTON - A military interrogation specialist, Air Force Colonel Steven Kleinman, told Congress yesterday that prior to abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, he witnessed interrogations of Iraqi detainees that he considered violations of the Geneva Conventions.
One of those interrogations was conducted by an Air Force civilian and a contractor employed by the same organization, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which had sent a small team to Iraq in September 2003 to help a special forces task force make its interrogations of recalcitrant prisoners more effective.
Kleinman told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his two colleagues forcibly stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, shackled him, and left him standing in a dank, six-foot cement cell with orders to the guards that the prisoner was not to move for 12 hours. They could intervene only if he passed out, Kleinman said his two colleagues told the guards.
Had the prisoner passed out, he would have hit his head on a wall, Kleinman said. Kleinman said he put a stop to the interrogation. "Until their time in Iraq they had never seen a real world interrogation," he said of the colleagues.
The men work with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program for US forces, which includes stressful mock interrogations intended to prepare soldiers to withstand and resist abusive methods if they are taken prisoner. The program uses methods derived from the real-life experiences of US prisoners of war. The techniques include forced nudity, stress positions, exposure to extremes in weather, and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.
The mock interrogation program was once known as the Communist Interrogation Model. It was designed to "physically and psychologically debilitate an individual's ability to resist, with the primary objective of forcing compliance," according to Kleinman's testimony.
Where did they come up with this stuff?
The Soviets?
Kleinman also detailed sitting in on another interrogation. An Iraqi prisoner was on his knees in a room painted all black, with a light shining in his face. Behind him stood an American guard slapping an iron bar against his palm. After every question the Iraqi answered, his military interrogators slapped him across the face. That had been going on for 30 minutes, he said.Kleinman said he called his commander, Colonel Randy Moulton, to express concern about the methods being used. He said Moulton checked with his superiors and called him back to say the harsh techniques had been specifically approved by the Pentagon's general counsel, William Haynes, or higher.
Like, THIS HIGH?
"In addition to Bush, suspects in the alleged conspiracy include a who’s who of top officials in Bush’s first term, principally Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and their aides, says ABC News."
So, WHEN are the IMPEACHMENT TRIALS?
Moulton also said he had been told the prisoners were terrorists who were not protected by the Geneva Conventions, Kleinman said. Moulton is now retired. However, a July 2003 Defense Department memo directed that Geneva Conventions protections applied to all war prisoners and detainees in Iraq.
Kleinman said he also intervened to stop another planned interrogation involving painful and tiring stress positions, followed by interrogation, then 45 minutes of sleep. The interrogation would comply with rules requiring four hours of sleep every 24 hours for prisoners, but the sleep was not continuous.
His team left shortly thereafter. It was there for about a month as scheduled. "We did leave under a cloud," Kleinman told an Associated Press reporter after the hearing ended.
According to Kleinman and Moulton, the United States invaded Iraq and took control without expert interrogators or well-reasoned policies for dealing with prisoners and was grasping for information however it could get it.
"In far too many cases, we simply erred in pressing interrogation and interrogators beyond the edge of the envelope; as a result, interrogation was no longer an intelligence collection method; rather, it had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn't cooperate," Kleinman said in prepared testimony.
In a September 2003 e-mail to a senior officer, Moulton complained about the lack of interrogation expertise across the entire Defense Department. No Defense Department entity "has a firm grasp on any comprehensive approach to strategic debriefing/interrogation," Moulton wrote. The e-mail was released by the committee along with other documents.
Moulton told the committee, "I'm more than disappointed. I felt terrible that's where it went. However, at the time we were acting on good intentions."
Good intentions is not an excuse or justification for the WAR CRIMES, guy, because they pave the road to hell!!!!
Yeah, AFTER the ELECTION!!!
PFFFFFTTT!
--more--"
Let's hope this kind of treatment isn't doled out to our kids (see post directly below).
