Torture by the Book , remember the CIA interrogation manuals?

www.soaw.org/new/

From Abu Ghraib to Latin America: Map of U.S. Pattern of Abuse Grows

Torture of Iraqi Soldiers Indicative of Ongoing Policy of Systematic and Illegal Abuse

Recent reports of the torture of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib military prison near Baghdad are part of a larger pattern of abuse and torture at the hands of U.S. soldiers, U.S.-trained soliders, “independent contractors” and intelligence agents around the world. In fact, U.S. Army intelligence manuals advocating torture techniques and how to circumvent laws on due process, arrest and detention were used for at least a decade to train Latin American soldiers at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, renamed in 2001 the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC.

“We see a consistent pattern of the Pentagon claiming to work for democracy,” says Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch, “while in their prisons and training centers, reports of torture and human rights abuses continue to surface.“

Over 64,000 Latin American soldiers have been trained in combat skills and psychological warfare at the SOA/WHINSEC. Graduates of the school are consistently involved in human rights abuses and atrocities in Latin America.

In September of 1996, the Pentagon, under intense public pressure, released the classified training manuals used at the SOA. The Washington Post reported that the manuals promoted executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion (“U.S. Instructed Latins on Executions, Torture,” 9/21/96). The manuals recommended the imprisonment of family members of those who support “union organizing or recruiting,” those who distribute “propaganda in favor of the interest of workers,” those who “sympathize with demonstrations or strikes,” and those who make “accusations that the government has failed to meet the basic needs of the people.” The training manuals are available: http://www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=98.

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http://www.soaw.org/new/newswire_detail.php?id=423

Torture by the Book Thursday, May 6th 2004

Vikram Dodd

from The Guardian

In Britain the debate about photographs depicting abuse of Iraqi prisoners has centred on their authenticity. In the US there are no doubts about the pictures showing what American soldiers did in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. But the photos raise a larger question. Did a gang of reservists from Virginia hit on ways of mistreating Muslim prisoners to maximise their humiliation all by themselves? President Bush says the photos disgust him. However, there is growing evidence that the abuses in Abu Ghraib were no aberrant act, but a warped product of US policy and the practices of its intelligence community.

In emails released by his family, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, a guard at Abu Ghraib, says military intelligence used dogs to intimidate prisoners, leading to "positive results and information". In one email he wrote: "We have had a very high rate with our style of getting them to break. They usually end up breaking within hours." Sgt Frederick said that he queried some of the abuses: "I questioned this and the answer I got was: this is how military intelligence wants it done." Another guard supports his claim that intelligence people controlled Abu Ghraib, as does the former head of US military prisons in Iraq, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski.

<snip>
Part of the interrogating team at Abu Ghraib was from the CIA. There are clues from that organisation's history that it has found ill-treating detainees to be useful in the past. Two CIA interrogation manuals surfaced in 1997 after the Baltimore Sun obtained them under freedom of information laws. Reading them in the context of the pictures from Iraq and accounts from Guantánamo suggests that the advice they contain is still being applied.

One, dating from 1983, was written for use in Honduras. Entitled "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual", it states: "The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy."

<snip>

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Thanks for posting this!

part of the torture story. The Iraqi torture didn't happen in a vacuum.


side note: Speaking of Latin America, It's outrageous that Negroponte is ambassador now.
:kick:

bastards

Bush chooses a man who helped cover up CIA human rights violations. No surprise. The Dems said nothing...........

especially Defense Intelligence Agency and US Army which was where Col. Michael Aquino honed his skills over the years. Col. Aquino was also a priest in the Church of Satan, which he replaced with his own cult/religion-the Temple of Set in 1975 while on active duty.

The dark alley that those folks play in includes just the kind of stuff being reported from around the world imho and life experiences as an American citizen.

I personally am aware of a murderer that has claimed government protection for his crimes since 1969 committed during Operation CHAOS (which Col. Aquino was part of) but "national security" has protected these criminals.

Most law enforcement knows about these cults and their influence on crime but have been unable to prosecute do to the interference of nameless people and agencies citing "national security" to cover horrific crimes right here in America. That's over.

Who has been sanctioning these crimes historically if not a cult?
For example, Col. Aquino's Temple of Set-the replacement of the Church of Satan from an officer in US military intelligence--the same outfit that ran Abu Ghraib
Temple of Set Statement for the US Armed Forces (see Temple of Set)
http://www.nightspell.dhs.org/

Temple of Set history
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/satanism/tempset.html

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id163/pg1/

Refutation of alleged Nazi/fascist ideology in Temple of Set
http://www.necronomi.com/magic/satanism/fascist.set.txt

PSYOPS: The "Temple of Set" and mob psychology
http://www.answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=205198
---and I'd question what "process" those Iraqis were being put through as these cults use certain code words as triggering mechanisms, just like the pics imho and life experiences.

NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9519057%5E401,00.html

THE torture tactics used to "soften up" Iraqi detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail began under orders from the highest level of the US defence administration, it was claimed yesterday.

The creation of torture units was the consequence of orders by the Defence Department – headed by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – to prise information out of prisoners.

Thanks to Congressman Jim McDermott for bringing this up.

And a big FUCK YOU to all the US media, who skipped over this.

thats why Bush said he was doing a superb job. I wouldn't be surprised if AWOL himself gave the order to Rumsfeld.

for another piece of the big picture

Thanks so much for posting this and to all who have added more info in the thread!!!!

:yourock:

http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/0419/turse.php

The Painful Lessons of Abu Ghraib
by Nicholas Turse

The Doctrine Of Atrocity
U.S. against "them"—a tradition of institutionalized brutality

May 11th, 2004 10:00 AM

"Kill one man, terrorize a thousand," reads a sign on the wall of the U.S. Marines' sniper school at Camp Pendleton in California. While the marines work their mayhem with M-40A3 bolt-action sniper rifles, most recently in Fallujah, a different kind of terror has been doled out in Iraq by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib prison, where, according to an army probe first reported by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" were the order of the day between October and December of 2003. One of the many questions arising from the Abu Ghraib scandal is how widespread is the brutality and inhumane treatment of Iraqis.

Just last month, the Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing a series of brutal war crimes committed by American troops during the Vietnam War. It took more than 35 years for the horrors committed by a "Tiger Force" unit to be fully exposed, but the Blade got more ink in the national press and TV for winning the Pulitzer than the stories themselves got when they were published last fall. The paper detailed the army's four-and-a-half-year investigation, starting in 1971, of a seven-month string of atrocities by an elite, volunteer, 45-man Tiger Force unit of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division that included the alleged torture of prisoners, rapes of civilian women, mutilations of bodies, and the killing of anywhere from nine to well over 100 unarmed civilians. The army's inquiry concluded that 18 U.S. soldiers committed crimes including murder and assault. However, not one of the soldiers, even those still on active duty at the time of the investigation, was ever court-martialed. Moreover, as the paper noted, six soldiers were allowed to resign from military service during the criminal investigations specifically to avoid prosecution. The secretary of defense at the time that decision was made, in the mid '70s, was Donald Rumsfeld.

But even the Blade's powerful stories didn't put the Tiger Force atrocities in context; the paper portrayed them largely as an isolated killing spree carried out by rogue troops. The Tiger Force atrocities were not the mere result of rogue G.I.'s but instead stem from what historian Christian Appy has termed a "doctrine of atrocity"—an institutionalized brutality built upon official U.S. dicta relating to body counts, free-fire zones, search-and-destroy tactics, and strategies of attrition, as well as unofficial tenets such as "shoot anything that moves," intoned during the Tiger Force atrocities and in countless other tales of brutality.

While the U.S. military has never been alone in the commission of atrocities, in Iraq or elsewhere, the illegal acts of others serve as no excuse for an American disregard for the laws of war. We are only now, more than three decades after the fact, beginning to grasp the true scope of American war crimes in Vietnam. Will it take us that long to know to what extent the doctrine of atrocity is being applied in Iraq?

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