JEA: George W. Bush, the man who “brought torture to America,” has recently declared that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is “the Winston Churchill of our time.” Perhaps he is, but not in the way that Bush would want to believe.
Churchill, as I described in “Winston Churchill’s Darkest Hour?“, was a mass murderer. George W. Bush is also a mass murderer, destroying an entire country (Iraq) for the state of Israel. Zelensky has already abducted political oponents in Ukraine. So, shall we say that birds of the same feather flock together?
If you would like to see pictures of Guantanamo torture, click here.
By Bret Wilkins
One of the psychologists paid tens of millions of dollars by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to oversee the interrogation of prisoners in the so-called War on Terror provided new details on Monday about the torture of a Guantánamo Bay detainee at CIA “black site” in Thailand.
The New York Times reports James E. Mitchell told a military judge during a pretrial hearing at Guantánamo that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri – a Saudi national facing possible execution for allegedly masterminding the deadly 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen – broke quickly under torture and became so obedient that he would crawl into a cramped confinement box before guards ordered him to do so.
Initially, guards had to force al-Nashiri into the box. But according to Mitchell, the prisoner “liked being in the box” and would “get in and close it himself.”
Annie W. Morgan, a former Air Force defense attorney who is a member of al-Nashiri’s legal team, told the Times that when she heard Mitchell’s testimony, “I got the image of crate-training a dog and became nauseous.”
“That was the goal of the program, to create a sense of learned helplessness and to become completely dependent upon and submissive to his captors,” she added, referencing a tactic taught in UStorture programs and documents dating back to the 1950s.
Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst who advocates Guantánamo’s closure, tweeted, “Imagine the hell Mr. Nashiri experienced outside of that box that made him prefer being inside it.”
Al-Nashiri’s attorneys – who argue that evidence in the case is tainted by torture – questioned Mitchell about what happened at the Thailand black site in November 2002, when former CIA Director Gina Haspel oversaw the secret prison.
The psychologist’s testimony is meant to shed light on abuse that may have been recorded on scores of videotapes documenting detainee torture that were later destroyed at the behest of then-CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez, who claimed in his memoir that Haspel drafted the 2005 cable ordering the move.
Mitchell – who along with fellow psychologist John “Bruce” Jessen was paid $81 million by the CIA to develop and supervise an interrogation regimen for terrorism suspects – described how the diminutive al-Nashiri was so scrawny that guards stopped subjecting him to the interrupted drowning torture commonly called waterboarding for fear the prisoner might be seriously hurt.
In addition to waterboarding and other approved torture techniques, a declassified 2014 US Senate Intelligence Committee report revealed how interrogators threatened to sexually assault al-Nashiri’s mother, and how he was terrorized with a power drill and raped with a garden hose in a practice known as rectal hydration that was administered to Guantánamo prisoners who refused to eat or drink.
Mitchell told the court that:
- One interrogator used a belt to strap al-Nashiri’s arms behind his back and lift him up from behind to his tiptoes. Mitchell said he objected after the prisoner howled in pain, fearing his shoulders would be dislocated. The torture continued.
- Guards forced the shackled prisoner onto his knees then bent him backward, with a broomstick placed behind his knees.
- In a bid to train al-Nashiri to call him “sir,” the chief interrogator gave him a cold bath before scraping a stiff-bristled brush from his anus to his face and mouth.
The Times previously reported:
Interrogators continually told Mr. Nashiri they did not believe he was telling everything he knew, threatening him with worse treatment if he did not tell them more. The prisoner, already subjected to the whole array of C.I.A. torture techniques – loud noise, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, wall-slamming, and waterboarding – insisted he was trying to remember and tell them everything.
But the interrogators appear to have ultimately concluded that Mr. Nashiri was not lying. Some of the cables back to headquarters, apparently written by Ms. Haspel, described him as “compliant and cooperative,” according to the 2014 report on the interrogation program by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In addition to the black site in Thailand, al-Nashiri – who was captured in Dubai in October 2002 – was imprisoned at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and possibly Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo in September 2006.
In 2010 he was granted victim status by the Polish government, whose cooperation with and complicity in the George W. Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition and torture program was later revealed and investigated.
In March, human rights advocates condemned the US Supreme Court’s decision allowing the Biden administration to block Mitchell and Jessen from cooperating with Polish prosecutors investigating the torture of Saudi terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.
The Bush administration officials who devised, approved, and implemented the post-9/11 torture regimen have enjoyed total impunity. Not only did Bush’s successor, former President Barack Obama, break a campaign promise to investigate and prosecute abuses as required by US and international law, his Justice Department actively shielded them from accountability as torture continued at Guantánamo.
Brett Wilkins is is staff writer for Common Dreams. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace. This originally appeared at CommonDreams and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
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Lol, America lies about the WMDs in Iraq and attacks there, and kills one million+ Iraqi civilians, but muslims are terrorist.
America kills three thousand of its own people in Twin Towers and thousands of its soldiers in the post 9 11 wars, but muslims are terrorist.
America and Israel creat ISIS (Israel’s Secret Intelligence Service) and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, but muslims are terrorist.
Hillary Clinton says “we created the jihadists to fight with Soviet” but muslims are terrorist.
America kills more than 100 million native Americans after Colombus finds the new lands, but muslims are terrorist.
America kills 20-30 million people by its wars, coups and attempts for government otherthrown in other countries since WWII, but muslims are terrorist.
Israel occupies, kills, loots, lies, tortures but finally muslims are terrorist.
There’s not a single nation othe earth that the US hasn’t ever attacked, sanctioned, killed, lied about and propagated against, but finaly muslims are terrorist, lol, the bubble that you live in might be a good place for an American but not for millions of innocent people who became the victim of your government.
Those people didn’t come to your country, you attacked them, you must know at least that, and 17 out of 19 of those alleged plotters of 9 11 were from Saudi Arabia not Iraq that you massacred 1 million of their people. All the terrorists on the earth are your govts and Zionists creatures, but finally muslims get blamed, WTF.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for these Muslim terrorists. They have sworn to kill us all and install an Islamic caliphate in America. As far as I’m concerned, they’re not even human. They’re worse than mongrel dogs the way they treat their own women, and the torture they inflict on those considered their enemies. If this minor torture saves one American life, it’s justified. If they don’t want to be tortured, they should stay in their own country and work to make it better for all their people.
Sorry do you have any evidence for your words?
Which Muslims are you talking about? Saudi for example? They’re not muslim, they’re Wahhabi, you can search it, and Wahhabism is created by the US and the UK and has nothing to do with real Islam, they kill and do hate real Muslims, that ISIS had Wahhabi ideology not Islamic, non of these terrorist groups which “pretend” to be Muslim are really muslim, neither Al Qaeda, nor ISIS nor the hellish Taliban, they’re a bunch of liar.
The way that fucking Taliban treats women is not the opinion of Islam, I once asked one of them (Taliban guys) that if you pretend to be Muslim, which branch of Islam are you from? And the guy said quote “None of them”!! The guy was in the comment section of RT, that comment is still available if they hasn’t deleted that.
How do you attribute the guys who themselves agree that are “not” Muslim to Islam?
If that was true, why 90.5% of the Iranians (including women and men) are educated? If what you think was true the figure must have been 50%, only the men, ha?
Who the hell has ever said that Muslims want to set up an Islamic Caliphate in America? As far as I’m concerned the only one who wanted to set up a so-called Islamic Caliphate was ISIS (Israel’s Secret Intelligence Service) which was the US’s and Israel’s creature and puppet, and had nothing to do with Islam.
Have you ever read anything about Islam which is not written by the Zionists in your media? No, so your impression is totally manipulated.
I first thought there was a plane that crashed into the second tower, but the US’s airforce “advertently” wanted to turn a blind eye to that, but later it turned out that there was no plane at all and that’s all a fake cartoon (https://medium.com/@skeptical_for_truth/look-its-the-towers-they-re-falling-ef93699ebd82) the last video clearly shows that there was no plane, every one who has a few knowledge about a software like After Effects can actually create that footage of 9/11.
Real footages that are shot by ordinary people don’t show any plane, and it means that those Arabs weren’t even the patsy of the CIA, it had nothing to do with them…
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