UK forces taught torture methods

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1212197,00.html

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

<more>

EDITED BY ADMIN FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS

Leave the torture and humiliation to trained professionals. AARRGGHH!!!

<<The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11". >>

Who made that linkage repeatedly and without shame?
Bring Bush to justics

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11". >>

the media didn't take him on.

second reason would be the search for WMD. Another Bush lie with ghastly consequences.

He goes back and forth from one speech to the next! He was asked point blank about an Al Quaeda/Saddam connection and he said it didn't exist!

Than he turns around and calls the Iraq war part of the war on terror!

Which one is it? Where is the media asking for clarification from the president?

So, yeah...it's the media's fucking fault! Do they need ME to come down there and set it straight for them?

Jesus!

Our tax dollars have been supporting the School of the Americas for many years. Just the name of this institution of human depravity should be enough to make any American's blood boil. We will probably find that some of the private contractors involved in detainee interrogations are graduates of this horrific place. Torture is standard procedure and to think otherwise is to believe that the lawyers working in the pentagon are acting in the interests of our nation when they draft legislation giving these "private contractors" legal protections for these very same offenses.

PartyPooper (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 10:04 PM
Response to Original message

1. This is outrageous and unbelievable! How much worse can it possibly get?


My head is exploding



Nancy Waterman (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 10:15 PM
Response to Reply #1

2. I am speechless!!!


This article puts the whole thing together, how it all happened. The whole thing just stinks beyond belief. This is what comes of all the lies and all the stupidity.



"The crucial difference from Iraq is that frontline soldiers who are made to experience R2I techniques themselves develop empathy. They realise the suffering they are causing. But people who haven't undergone this don't realise what they are doing to people. It's a shambles in Iraq".

The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11".


I think my head is exploding, too!!



0007 (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 11:24 PM
Response to Reply #2

10. R21 - Resistance to interrogation techniques.

Edited on Fri May-07-04 11:26 PM by 0007
Gee Whiz can 'ya believe this crap? I wonder what R-20 is compared to R-22? Fifty so-called techniques.

There is so much stuff out there, it is hard to digest it all. But this article should be read.



DulceDecorum (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 10:23 PM
Response to Original message

3. Wait till these boys come home


and indulge themselves in a little show and tell.

All hell is going to break loose then -- within those nice camps FEMA has all lined up for dissidents and liberals.

seemslikeadream (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 10:28 PM
Response to Original message

4. For Those in Abu Gharib, It Was Operation Enduring Torture


At Abu Gharib, orders went out to military police “to facilitate interrogation by setting conditions”. This meant a thorough beating.

The use of the word stress is interesting, because it appears in the testimony of a witness named Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, who said of one prisoner: “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put him in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately 24 hours.” The word stress once meant mental, emotional or physical strain. There was no sense that finality or termination would result from “stressing out”. Now we know differently.



The appearance of contractors is an important part of the story. The US military has been overstretched by the invasion of Iraq, and so relies on what is really a policy of outsourcing. Contractors carry out roles as disparate as the guarding of prisoners and filling in for special forces. On the ground they look no different from US Army personnel, but in reality they may have less training and are certainly less answerable for their actions.



The military complain that control is lacking, but what they don’t say is that having a group of people working at one remove from official forces benefits the war against terror.



That has certainly, until recently, been the policy of the CIA and Pentagon when debriefing terrorist suspects with the help of America’s more barbarous allies in the Middle East and North Africa. The point was that America could not be held directly responsible because no US citizen — certainly none that I could trace — was applying the electrodes to a suspect.

more
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_7361.shtml


FrustratedDemInNC (109 posts) Fri May-07-04 10:36 PM
Response to Original message

5. Well this sure explains it all!


I am just sick, there are no words.



"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." Albert Einstein



Nancy Waterman (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 10:46 PM
Response to Reply #5

6. Bump!


This one needs to be read!





seemslikeadream (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 10:49 PM
Response to Original message

7. Dust off the chairs







Voltaire99 (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 11:02 PM
Response to Reply #7

8. Yes. This is the proper place in which to try Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfie...


...as well as the individual torturers.

"Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them." -- Sartre





seemslikeadream (1000+ posts) Fri May-07-04 11:05 PM
Response to Reply #8

9. I wonder how the prayer thing is going for bush tonight?







Thankfully_in_Britain (1000+ posts) Sat May-08-04 03:05 AM
Response to Original message

11. Now where are those war supporters


who thought we would be bringing democracy and liberal values to iraq and that somehow justified the war?




Thankfully_in_Britain (1000+ posts) Sat May-08-04 03:16 AM
Response to Original message

12. 'I was beaten for three days by British soldiers'


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=519247

An Iraqi prisoner has described how he was allegedly subjected to vicious beatings by laughing British soldiers during interrogation sessions which left another man dead.

In a witness statement obtained by The Independent, Kifah Talah, 44, an engineer, claims he was hooded and beaten about the neck, chest and genitals by soldiers during three days before being made to dance in front of his tormentors.

Mr Talah said he was among seven men taken to an interrogation centre where they were tortured and humiliated by up to eight soldiers at a time.

Mr Talah, first interviewed by The Independent on Sunday, claims each of the detainees was given the name of a famous footballer, such as Marco Van Basten or Ruud Gullit, and they were beaten if they failed to remember it. One soldier allegedly told them to "dance like Michael Jackson". Basa Mousa, 26, a hotel receptionist, died of his injuries.




Tinoire (1000+ posts) Sat May-08-04 07:16 AM
Response to Original message

13. "The feeling among US soldiers ...is...that 'the gloves are off'


"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'.

Wow.





You know, the only thing I never got over in life is I took a young lady to a dance when I was in high school and she left with somebody else. And that's what the Democrats, some, have done to the black community.
We helped take you to the dance and you leave with right wingers, you leave with people that you say are swing voters, you leave with people that are antithetical to our history and antithetical to our interests. I am saying in 2004, if we take you to the party, you going home with us or we're not taking you to the party.
Al Sharpton, September 2003 Democratic Debates






seemslikeadream (1000+ posts) Sat May-08-04 08:41 AM
Response to Reply #13

14. Thanks Tinorie


for everything








Tinoire (1000+ posts) Sat May-08-04 10:39 AM
Response to Reply #14

15. Are you kidding? Thank YOU


for tirelessly posting all these stories and links and keeping on top of this stuff. We're all a team here, fighting to get the truth out & wake people up. The greatest danger for us right now is being uniformed.

Peace

It shows that the kinds of torture used at Abu Ghraib are routine techniques taught by the US and UK military for pre-interrogation treatment of prisoners.

they sought to get around Geneva conventions; they flouted international law and disregarded accepted norms. They set themselves above the law. They (and we) will reap the whirlwind. They must be held responsible because they ARE responsible.

There was an article by Joe Conason in Thursday's Salon, I believe that's the date, in which he interviewed the human rights chair of the NYC Bar Association. This lawyer said he was asked to review prisoner abuses by some top brass at the Pentagon and he discovered the practices in Abu Gharib were not an isolated incident, the abuses which occured in Afghanistan and Guantanamo were, in some cases, much worse than what was going on at Abu Gharib and the lawyer names Doug Feith as the person responsible for instituting the policy of lawlessness and eschewal of U.S. and international law. It was Doug Feith, after all, who called the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war a "law that supports terrorism"; he's the one that needs to be grilled re: where he got this policy from and how and why he came to implement it. However, there's been zip in the major media about this, who instead are busy pushing the "few bad apples" meme.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?hp

"Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

"In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation.

<snip>

"The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

"The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system."

with their kids. now try necrophilia and etc.
Restoring dignitude and honor, my eye.... and help is on the way for the military. And we have removed Saddams torture chambers.
If it it weren't a balls-up of monumental proportions it would be a farce.

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