[Peace-discuss] Obama and Bush as torturers

[C. G. Estabrook]

 From <http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn01072011.html>:

...In his first state of the Union address ... Obama declared to the joint 
session of Congress that “I can stand here tonight and say without exception or 
equivocation that the United States of America does not torture. We can make 
that commitment here tonight.” Within days of this guarantee, Obama's Justice 
Department lawyers were telling U.S. judges in explicit terms that the new 
administration would not be moving on from Bush's policies on the legal status 
of renditions and of supposed enemy combatants.

These lawyers from Obama’s Department of Justice emphasized to judges that they, 
like DoJ lawyers instructed by Bush’s lawyers, held that captives seized by the 
US government and conveyed to secret prisons to be tortured, had no standing in 
US courts and the Obama regime has no legal obligations to defend or even admit 
its actions in any US courtroom. “Enemy combatants” would not be afforded 
international legal protections, whether on the field of battle in Afghanistan 
or, if kidnapped by US personnel, anywhere in the world.

The torture system is flourishing, and the boundaries of the American empire 
marked by overseas torture centers such as Bagram. There are still detainees in 
Guantanamo – as of November last year 174 of them. They are supposedly destined 
for a Supermax in Illinois.

For the past seven months 22-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, first 
an army prison in Kuwait, now in Quantico, Virginia, has been held 23 hours out 
of 24 in solitary confinement in his cell, under constant harassment. If his 
eyes close between 5am and 8pm he is jolted awake. In daylight hours he has to 
respond “yes” to guards every five minutes. An hour a day he is taken to another 
cell where he walks figures of eight. If he stops he is taken back to his other 
cell.

Manning is accused of giving documents to Wikileaks. He has not been tried or 
convicted. Visitors report that Manning is going downhill mentally as well as 
physically. His lawyer’s efforts to improve his condition have been rebuffed by 
the Army. Accusations that his treatment amounts to torture has been indignantly 
denounced by prominent conservatives and some liberals. Gov. Huckabee and others 
have called for him to be summarily executed. After the columnist Glenn 
Greenwald publicized Manning’s treatment in mid-December, there was a moderate 
commotion. The U.N.’s top monitor of torture is investigating his case.

Meanwhile Manning fights for sanity in Quantico. He faces months, if not years, 
of the same. Will he end up like accused Chicagoan Jose Padilla, four years in 
total isolation and silence before his trial in 2007 (convicted as a terrorist 
and given 17 years) , with his lawyer informed by prison staff that Padilla had 
become docile and inactive to the point that he resembled “a piece of furniture.”

Memo to British prime minister David Cameron: Resist all extradition requests by 
the US government, on the grounds that those accused of terrorism cannot 
possibly expect anything but torture and a kangaroo trial. Imagine Julian 
Assange’s fate in a US prison, awaiting trial.

As the British lawyer, Yvonne Ridley, put it on this site earlier this week:

“As 2011 dawns the British Prime Minister David Cameron is faced with some hard 
choices this year, none more difficult than probably deciding whether or not to 
scrap our extradition treaty with the US and refuse to hand over a group of 
British citizens to Barack Obama’s America….

“It was Blair’s government that introduced the one-sided 2003 Extradition Treaty 
to please and appease the Bush Administration. Legislation drawn up in panic and 
haste is never a good idea nor was it wise to allow America to extend its 
jurisdiction in to the UK for that is exactly what has happened. And I wonder if 
the legislation was really drawn up by UK lawyers since a close inspection of 
the original documents reveal the liberal use of American English.

“I would urge Cameron to resist all of the existing US Extradition requests just 
as he would if the same demands were being made by some banana republic.”

I wrote here last year,

“The irony is that a moral debate is finally in motion over America’s horrifying 
sentencing laws. In New York State, the Rockefeller drug laws, which destroyed 
so many thousands of lives with mandatory sentencing, are being modified. 
Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is courageously trying to coax into life a national 
commission to review the criminal justice system. Webb tells the Washington Post 
that cops and prosecutors often target the wrong people and says he believes 
society can be made safer while making the system more ‘humane and 
cost-effective.’ He flourishes a fine piece by Atul Gawande in the March 30 
issue of The New Yorker stigmatizing solitary confinement (‘at least twenty-five 
thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons’) as torture.”

That forecast sounds foolish now. But then, maybe I was assuming that a man I 
mistrusted from the day I clapped eyes on his speeches, would nonetheless 
improve the public tone on issues of torture and punishment. In fact Obama in 
this area as in so many others has merely given the ethics and practices of the 
Bush era his seal of approval.

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