Renounce torture and abuse

http://www.bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=136198

A childhood hero of mine has just been called up to report to Iraq. Michael is an idealist - creative and smart - he really listened to everyone, even 4-year-old me. He was exactly the sort of adult I hoped I'd be when I grew up. All of a sudden there is too little time to say everything I would like to say about what an influence he has played in my life. I'm deeply worried for his safety.

I'm also deeply worried about what he may be called upon to do while in Iraq. It has been two years since the brutal photographs of Abu Ghraib first shook our core beliefs in who we are and what we stand for. Since then, at the ACLU we've received almost monthly document shipments from the Pentagon and FBI - now over 100,000 pages in all - providing horrifying eye-witness accounts of widespread abuse of possibly innocent detainees.

One heavily redacted FBI report talks of "strangulations, beating and placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings," in Iraq. Department of Navy documents record incidents of abuse by US Marines in Iraq including "mock executions" of juveniles and electric shocks. In an internal June 2004 email, a senior officer in the Navy Criminal Investigation Service in Iraq described its abuse caseload as "exploding," with "high visibility cases" on the rise.

An investigative file records the account of a 73-year-old Iraqi woman seized from her home by U.S. forces. She describes how she was savagely beaten, sodomized with a stick, ridden like an animal and made to "swim" in water thrown on the ground. It's difficult not to picture my grandmother as I read that file and even more difficult to believe that this elderly woman was treated this way for intelligence purposes or because she was dangerous.

As these tens of thousands of official government documents show, torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo was not limited to a few bad apples as the Bush administration would have us believe. It was widespread and continuing despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of United States "war on terror" detainees held in Iraq were not deadly terrorists but innocent civilians.

It's a shame, but we'll be shamed into signing a global document asking us to do just this.

But our famous "Article 9-11" overrides everything.