Did President G.W. Bush "authorize torture"? Perhaps not, but the assertion by Karl Rove that Bush didn't reminds me of the famous Clinton statement "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." I don't think Rove is precisely lying in his sentence. Not precisely, anyway.
"[T]he president never authorized torture. He did just the opposite by making sure the EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques on high-value terrorist detainees] did not cross the legal line into torture."
Of course, this immediately reminded me of Bill Clinton's famous line:
Israeli Unaccountability and Denial: Suppressing the Practice of Torture - by Stephen Lendman
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PACTI - stoptorture.org) "believes that torture and ill-treatment of any kind and under all circumstances is incompatible with the moral values of democracy and the rule of law." Yet it's systematically practiced by the Israeli Police, General Security Service (GSS), Israeli Prison Service (IPS), and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
In December 2009, PACTI published its latest report titled, "Accountability Denied: The Absence of Investigation and Punishment of Torture in Israel," explaining "the many layers of immunity that protect" the guilty, specifically the GSS, the focus of this report.
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James Ridgeway (solitarywatch.wordpress.com) | 01.07.2010
Below is an article written today by Mother Jones writer James Ridgeway that is featured at a brand new website focusing on the issue of solitary confinement in prisons. The Solitary Watch News site (www.solitarywatch.wordpress.com) is part of an emerging project called Solitary Watch, an innovative public web site aimed at bringing this issue out of the shadows and into the light of the public square. The mission of Solitary Watch is to provide the public—as well as practicing attorneys, legal scholars, law enforcement and corrections officers, policymakers, educators, advocates, and prisoners–with the first comprehensive source of information on solitary confinement in the United States.
Israeli Use of Painful Shackling As A Form of Torture - by Stephen Lendman
Founded in 1990 to highlight a growing problem, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PACTI - stoptorture.org) "believes that torture and ill treatment of any kind and under all circumstances is incompatible with the moral values of democracy and the rule of law. (It) advocates for all persons - Israelis, Palestinians, labor immigrants and other foreigners in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) - in order to protect them from torture and ill treatment by the Israeli interrogation and law enforcement authorities."
This new video interview conducted in November, 2009 in San Francisco, is based on a recent article by Nyasha, entitled “America's Supermax Prisons Do Torture.”
Video Interview With Kiilu Nyasha: America’s Supermax Prisons Do Torture
Former Fox 29 TV and Philadelphia Bulletin business reporter Victor Livingston uncovers what he describes as a nationwide torture matrix employing cell towers, satellites and portable weaponry capable of inducing fatigue, exhaustion, confusion, neurological impairment, injury, illnesses ranging from cataracts to cancer, and "slow kill" death -- and says he is among thousands of "innocent but targeted" victims of an American genocide hiding in plain sight.
• Thousands of Americans, deemed to be "dissidents" or undesirables, targeted by Bush legacy program for debilitating microwave/laser assault, held hostage in their own homes to fed-supported vigilante "community policing" stalking units, equipped with warrantless GPS devices, who vandalize and terrorize as local police look the other way.
• "Directed energy weapons," portable units and a nationwide installation employing cell towers and satellites, induce weakness, exhaustion, head and body aches, physical and neurological impairment, strokes, aneurysms, cancer -- and many victims do not realize what is making them sick.
Victoria Law is a longtime prison activist and the author of the new book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press). In this interview, Law talks specifically about how women are affected by solitary confinement and other forms of torture in US prisons, and what women are doing to fight back. Exposing solitary confinement as torture has been the focus of recent campaigns in Maine, Pennsylvania, and around the US.
Does the "a few bad apples" defense apply to ACORN? One of the problems in using that defense is that it's been very badly overused over the past decade.
37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6x9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
From the very beginning, back in the '70's -- several of the men were brutally tortured by police in Louisiana to elicit false confessions (thus we see that Abu Ghraib really was nothing new). The cases were dismissed decades ago -- on that basis alone. That the prosecutions were reinstated at all is due more to the politicized Justice Department under John Ashcroft and George Bush -- where torture was a tool of state --than anything else. Also implicated? The political ambitions of California Attorney General Jerry Brown, seeking the governorship.
The San Francisco 8 -- No More!
[col. writ. 7/15/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal
It's been 2 1/2 years since the San Francisco 8 -- eight former members of the Black Panther Party -- were cast into California jails and threatened with life sentences stemming from the 1971 shooting of a cop.
Perhaps the State figured the post - 9//11 paranoia and mania would make this an easy case. Perhaps the government thought that because many of the accused were men of advancing age, decades away from their prime organizing and activist days, it would be a cake walk.
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