Poisoned Fruit
I’ve said before, you can’t trust any information provided as a result of torture. That reality is embedded in US law. People continue to promote torture because they are sadistic bastards: it doesn’t provide useful information, so QED they are sadistic bastards. Courts also refuse to recognize any agreement that results from coercion, a polite name for torture. The whole reason for coercion is to force people to do something they wouldn’t do if given the choice.
Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch, JAG USMC, understands this. Pierre of Candide’s Notebooks tells the story of the colonel in The Conscience of the Colonel. The colonel has every reason, including the death of a friend to want to see al Qaeda pursued and destroyed, but he knows at a gut level if someone was coerced, you can’t be sure anything he said was true.
After all these years we are still hearing stories like, UK man released from Guantanamo: “Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi national, was held at the US detention camp in Cuba on suspicion of links to terrorism while on a trip to Gambia in 2002.” The man and a business associate are picked up in Africa, declared terrorists, and sent to Guantanamo. After four years he is released because there is no real evidence that he did anything wrong.
Then there’s Gitmo Australian Gets 9 Months, the story of David Hicks:
A U.S. military judge accepted an Australian’s guilty plea to supporting terrorism in a deal that will send the Guantanamo detainee to jail at home for less than a year, but requires silence about any alleged abuse while in custody.
Mustang Bobby says” *phhft*. At Nitpicker Terry’s 13-year-old son figured it out from a brief radio report. Tom Hilton at No More Mister Nice Blog agrees, as does Bud Crimmins via Susie at Suburban Guerrilla.
A hint for the Gitmo show trials: when you require silence about abuse as part of a plea deal, you are admitting the abuse. If there was no abuse, it wouldn’t be mentioned in the sentencing. This is coercion, and illegal.
The people involved in these show trials had better consider that the Shrubbery is a short-timer. There is going to be a reckoning, and what you are doing violates the UCMJ and US law. You are risking your rights, benefits, and freedom participating in these shams. You might consider reading up on The United States of America vs. Josef Altstötter, et. al., AKA The Judges’ Trial, one of the series of trials conducted at Nuremberg. It is the basis for the movie Judgment at Nuremberg, in a fictionalized version. It covers the actions of courts under Nazi control, and is very relevant to what will face those that participate in these show trials.
5 comments
Ahhhh, but dahlink, do not forget — they passed legislation, at the end of the year, I believe, that RETROACTIVELY forgives all crimes against humanity, against this and all other countries, and against any other imaginable entity in the cosmos, into the future ad infinitum, to cover ALLLLLLLLLL republicunt asses, from Rummy to Rove to Cheney to Dumbya to Poppy & Bar Bush, etc.
And they are arrogant enough to think that this will spare them when their backs are against that brick wall. And no, we won’t give them so much as a cigarette.
Why in the fuck haven’t any of these animals been called before the Hague yet??!?!!?!?
Bryan,
I bought this issue of the WSJ from the newsstand just for the article on Couch.
Reading about him may be the most uplifting event of the year for me. Despite the insanities (and inanities) of Bushco, there are still many, many, honorable men and women from our armed forces. LTC Couch has earned our undying gratitude and respect.
To paraphrase:
Greater love hath no one for their nation than those who continue to serve it faithfully despite having G. W. Bush as their Commander in Chief.
Thank you for the link to the text of the story. I was debating typing large chunks in by hand for a post at Nitpicker.
This one needs to be spread far and wide.
Annti, that law is on its way out. There has been too much leeway handed out earlier and the brakes are about to be applied. It doesn’t affect the military, in any case, and the people who are going first will be the officers who went along.
Jim, my family has been tied to the military since the French and Indian War. My Dad was retired military. I live surrounded by the US’s and possibly the world’s largest Air Force base. There are a lot of very good ethical people in the military who are very worried about what has been going on. All they need is an opportunity to express their frustration, and some leaders to show them how.
The Judge Advocate Generals, the military’s legal arm, have been expressing opposition to many of the things that have happened since the beginning. This garbage is corrosive, and the professional military knows it. The one thing the military never wants to occur is a break with the civilian leadership, that is the ultimate disaster.
You are going to see a lot of good people resign if Bush orders an attack on Iran.
With Kissinger behind it all (even if he is yelping like a bitch-dog in heat to CNN — now, of course, not when he helped START this shit), you’re going to see worse than a schism betwixt the civvies and the military. That evil motherfucker is damned and determined to drive this country into the abyss.
Think about that for a minute, Annti, the man who was the role model for Dr. Strangelove doesn’t think it will work. How incompetent does a war have to be, to be opposed by Herr Doktor Kissinger?
Unless they have absolutely lost their minds, nothing can happen while there’s a carrier inside the Persian Gulf. The carrier has to be withdrawn south of the Straits of Hormuz so that it has the room and water depth to maneuver. A carrier only serves as a target inside the Gulf, and there are anti-ship missiles all along the Iranian coast.