Posted by Tina
Not. For. Torture. – Abe Greenwald, Commentary
** Strong>Whats torture? Theres no sense in ignoring the slippery boarders between tough interrogations and practices that should not carry the imprimatur of the United States of America. But if weighing the legal, moral, and historical implications makes torture harder, not easier, to identify, there is, I believe, a clear way through the morass. Hows this? . **
After reading this article I had an interesting experience with my female cat. She can be a bit feisty, in fact at times, way over the top; I have the scars to prove it. This morning I bent to stroke her as she lay on the floor in one of her famously fetching poses. She rolled to her back and suddenly grabbed my arm, claws out, and started to bite. I quickly grabbed her front leg and held it firmly. She immediately released her grip and decided it was better to back off and cooperate with me. I realized she acted instinctively, she sensed I could break her leg. What she didnt know for sure is whether I would do it.
Waterboarding is a similar exercise in the use of power and humane control. The subject ils placed under emotional stress but never physically harmed. The procedure is uncomfortablr and frightening. it plays on the instinct for survival. To call this pricedure torture is to diminish truly monsterous practices that have been documented throughout history.
The remainder of this post contains material that may be too graphic for some peoplecontinue at your own risk.
Soccer Players Describe Torture by Hussein’s Son – Iraq Foundation
** This building was equipped with torture contraptions that included a sarcophagus, with long nails pointing inward from every surface, including the lid, so victims could be punctured and suffocated. *** Another device, witnesses said, was a metal framework designed to clamp over a prisoner’s body, with footrests at the bottom, rings at the shoulders and attachment points for power cables, so the victim could be hoisted and subjected to electric shocks. *** Some players endured long periods in a military prison, beaten on their backs with electric cables until blood flowed. Other punishments included “matches” kicking concrete balls around the prison yard in 130-degree heat, and 12-hour sessions of push-ups, sprints and other fitness drills, wearing heavy military fatigues and boots. **
The Meaning of Torture, by Jamie Glazov Frontpage Magazine
** During the Vietnam War, Fidel Castro ran a Cuban Program at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as the Zoo.” The main purpose of the program was to decipher how much agony could be inflicted on a human being. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban sadist nicknamed Fidel, the main torturer heading the project, perpetrated his own personal reign of terror. *** The horrifying ordeal of Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil, an Air Force F-105 pilot, reflected the tragic reality of the Nazi-like experiment. Fidel tortured Cobeil in slow agonizing stages, solely for the sake of torture, beating him without remission and, aside from myriad other vicious techniques, mercilessly whipping him with a fan belt without pause on all of his body. *** Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of former fellow POW Colonel Jack Bomar: The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The mans head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . .He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the mans face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the mans face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidels rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the mans face. . . . Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the mans face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . .His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs. *** Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil died as a result of Fidels torture. Fidels beating of another American POW, Jim Kasler, also tragically epitomized the Cuban torture of Americans at the Zoo: He [Fidel] deprived Kasler of water, wired his thumbs together, and flogged him until his buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds. During one barbaric stretch he turned Cedric [another torturer] loose for three days with a rubber whip. . . .the PW [POW] was in a semi-coma and bleeding profusely with a ruptured eardrum, fractured rib, his face swollen and teeth broken so that he could not open his mouth, and his leg re-injured from attackers repeatedly kicking it. *** Amnesty International never demanded that the Hanoi regime or Fidel Castro account for the Cuban Program or for Fidels treatment of American POWs there. The Left never demanded an investigation by anyone. The names of Earl Cobeil and Jim Kasler were never, even for a split second, part of the Lefts vocabulary — not then, not now. **
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Bud Day: Vietnam War POW Hero, by Richard C. Barrett – historynet.com
** Day was then moved north, to a camp near Hanoi that the POWs called Little Las Vegas. Denied medical treatment, he was barely able to care for himself. When he was later transferred to a prison called the Zoo, notorious for bad treatment, he found himself the senior-ranking POW there. Day eventually served time at several sites around Hanoi. He was beaten, starved and tortured continually for being a troublemaker. His body weight at one point fell below 100 pounds. Although he had been punished many times for real and alleged transgressions of his junior-ranking POWs, Day steadfastly refused to give information that would have endangered American aircrews or served as Communist propaganda. He spent more than half his 67-month imprisonment in solitary confinement. *** The POWs gave their torturers sardonic nicknames: Rabbit, Buzzard, Pig, Fidel (a Cuban adviser), Bug, Rodent, Goldie, Hack, Toad, Dum-Dum and Goat. Then there was Major Bai, who was in charge of the torture treatments. The captors beat, hung, twisted, smashed, slapped and punched Day, sometimes for more than 24 hours in a single session. *** The North Vietnamese moved the POWs from camp to camp, sometimes on an apparent whim and at other times to exhibit them to visiting Americans and others friendly to the North Vietnamese cause. A prisoner might freeze in winter and roast in the summer. Rats, insects and disease lurked in the corners of the prisoners cells. The food was low-calorie, scarce and of poor qualityexcept when a POW was set for early release or the North Vietnamese thought the war might end. Day recalled that after the 1968 Tet Offensive and during the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, the abuse slackened and the food quality improved. *** In his book Duty, Honor, Country, Day recalled one barbaric beating early in his capture. Accused of communicating, he was taken from his cell, marched at gunpoint to the interrogators office and asked to confess. Day refused, sending his torturer, Goldie, into a rage. Day was taken to a room flecked with brown stains, presumably blood from previous beatings. He was shackled by the feet and then ordered to drop his trousers. His wrists were then shackled. As Day recalled: The manacles began to cut and gouge my wrists immediately, causing scars that remained for several years. My hands began to swell and throb. *** The worst, however, was yet to come. He was ordered to lie face down on the filthy floor. As he did, Day nervously watched two guards, each holding a 30-inch length of fan belt, knotted so it would not slip from their hands. The guards charged in, screaming, the whips held above their heads. They struck the helpless POWs buttocks, back and upper legs, cutting his exposed body and drawing blood. Day pleaded for relief. *** Goldie stopped the beatings and demanded answers. Day refused and the beating resumed. The flesh swelled on the beaten portion of his body, and blood oozed its way from his buttocks to his legs, dripping slowly onto the floor. During a surrealistic interlude, the torturers broke for lunch, and Day was treated to a half-bowl of bland pumpkin soup along with half a loaf of equally tasteless bread. Beaten almost into incoherence, Day managed only to down some water. After an hour, Goldie returned with a fresh team of beaters. **
The Bataan Death March by Rick Peterson- bataansurvivor.com
** On the first day, I saw two things I will never forget. A Filipino man had been beheaded. His body lay on the ground with blood everywhere. His head was a short distance away. Also, there was a dead Filipino woman with her legs spread apart and her dress pulled up over her. She obviously had been raped and there was a bamboo stake in her private area. These are instances I would like to forget. *** What would you do if you had to go to the bathroom? * If anyone had to, they went right in their drawers as they walked. If you stopped or got off to the side, you would have been bayoneted or shot. I didn’t go to the bathroom because I had nothing to pass. Body fluid came out in sweat. I don’t recall going to the bathroom until we got up to Camp O’Donnell. The first time I urinated, I thought I was going to die. It burned like sin. *** You didn’t eat a thing for four days and you were already starved when you were captured. * That’s right. We weren’t given any water either. There was good water all around us. Artesian wells flowing everywhere! They would not let us go and get it. Men went stark raving mad! Soldiers broke ranks and ran towards the water. They went completely insane because they had to get it. They never got it! Of course, you know what happened to them. *** Did they ever cook food in front of you but not serve it?
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During the day, the Japs would tell us we would get rice balls when we got to our nighttime destination. When we got to the field where we were going to spend the night, you could see and smell food cooking across the road. They would give some excuse why we couldn’t have any. I don’t remember exactly what the excuses were. They usually had to do with some phony rule infraction on our part. Anyway, they would eat the food in front of us but we wouldn’t get any. I remember this happened two nights out of five on the march. *** Were you injured in any way on the march? * I don’t remember what day it was because things were kind of hazy on the trip. On the march out of Bataan, a Japanese cavalryman was standing in the middle of the road swinging a baseball bat. He didn’t care who he hit. He just kept swinging that bat! When I walked by, that bat caught me across my upper left leg. Boy, did it hurt! I kept going because I didn’t let that son-of-a-gun – I could use stronger language – know he had hurt me. That was the only bad thing that happened to me personally on the march. *** The Japanese showed no mercy to anyone did they? * No. If people would fall down and couldn’t go any further, the Japanese would either bayonet or shoot them. They also would bayonet prisoners who couldn’t keep up. Those who stepped out of line or had fallen out of ranks were beaten with clubs and/or rifle butts. Some American prisoners who couldn’t keep up were run over by Japanese vehicles. I saw the remains of an American soldier who had been run over by a tank. I didn’t see the actual event but the Japanese just left his remains in the middle of the road. We could see them as we walked by. *** What about wounded American soldiers? * They were expected to keep up like everyone else, regardless of their condition. But, some wounded prisoners just couldn’t go on. They were either bayoneted, beat with clubs, rifle butts, or shot. Some soldiers had diarrhea so bad that they couldn’t keep up and the Japanese shot them. *** One of the most horrifying aspects of this march was that some of our American soldiers were even buried alive? * Yes. They were buried alive in slit trenches, which we used for bathroom facilities. When the trenches were almost full, the Japanese would take a detail of prisoners to fill them up with dirt. On one occasion I saw a soldier who had diarrhea really bad and went to the bathroom. After he finished, he could barely get up. He slipped and fell backwards into the trench. The Japanese ordered the prisoner detail to cover him up right there, which they did. They had no choice!
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New Mexico State University Bataan (first person accounts)
** Ruben Flores – We had a burial routine. The same routine, burying POWS everyday, everyday. We would dig trenches with bulldozers, as wide as the bulldozer plate would go. And that day we would go with the bodies, the ones that died the day before. We’d throw them in. The Japanese were always with us. They wouldn’t let them place us. You get them from their feet, the other from their arms. Any way they’d fall. *** There were several days that we would bury 30, 40, 50. There was one time I remember that we buried over 75. At that time, the one time we buried the most, the hole wasn’t deep enough for all of them. But the Japanese wanted us to throw them all in there. They’d come with the bulldozers and throw the dirt over them. The next day – it was monsoon season, raining all the time. The next day, we’d go out there to bury others. The ones we buried yesterday or the day before some would have their feet sticking out, their hands gnawed by wild animals, and the water that would lay on top would be as red as can be from the blood from where the animals would eat their flesh. *** Our own doctors [at the POW camps], they didn’t have any medicine. For dysentery, you know what the doctors would give you? They would burn a log, or logs and then with a piece of glass off a broken bottle, you’d scrap off the black stuff, take that and scrap it out and [they’d] give it to us with a spoon. You know that would help for dysentery. **
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** Clifford Martinez – And we come up to this camp, now the three buddies of mine, Professor Lee, Shorty Jordan, and this other guy. We got in the truck. I was told later these guys, instead of turning to the camp they kept going. They picked them up about five miles down the road and they beat the hell out of them and they asked them what they were doing. Well, they said the war’s over we’re looking for a job. So they brought them back, tied them to posts in a standing squat position, beat the hell out of them, every time they turned around. They held them there for four or five days. Then they got the whole camp, like this, they dragged them down made them dig their own grave, which wasn’t very deep. You weren’t able to dig very deep. And they made them stand up and they shot them. So when they were filling the graves, the officer came down and coup-de-grace three of them. Well, that was the first killing that I’d seen, in prison camp. **
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** Ward Redshaw – One of my jobs was in the medical service. I was also chief anesthesiologist. What my job was, was to sit on people who were going to have a limb taken off, or anything painful. I would have my little piece of wood and keep it in his mouth and sit on his chest as they were taking off his leg or what not. **
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** Richard Gordon: I didn’t come down with a surrender group. They caught me actually two days after the surrender took place. First thing I did was receive a good beating. And everything I had in my wallet, in my pockets was taken from me. And as I was marched down that road, where they captured me, I passed my battalion commander, Major James Ivy, and he had been tied to a tree and he was stripped to the waist and he was just covered with bayonet holes. He was dead obviously. And he had bled profusely. He had been bayonetted by many, many bayonets. And that’s when I knew we had some troubles on our hands. We were in for deep trouble. And they brought us down into a staging area and put me in with the rest of the thousands that were assembled on the side of the road, and that’s where I spent my first night. **
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** Leon Beck: It depends on the guards you had over you. Some of the guards were not too abusive and some were very abusive. They would harass you, they would make you line up at daylight, get in a column of fours, usually 100 to 125 men, in a column of fours and keep you standing at attention until the sun came up and got real hot…. They would start you double-timing until the line got stretched out. The sick, lame and lazy, we called them, fell back. Then, they’d close you up again and they might keep you standing another hour in that hot sun…. There are ways you can rest one leg and shift your weight, it’s not too noticeable and you can slough off and rest a bit. But, if they caught you at it, it meant a butt stroke with a rifle or a beating over the head, and the people that fell down and didn’t get up, you’d hear a shot fired and you’d look back and there lays a body behind you. *** But they wouldn’t let you go back and take care of him, even at the artesian wells, when the prisoners would break and run for the water. They’d shoot indiscriminately into the crowd and some got shot and laid there. You couldn’t go take care of them *** …At night, they put us in barbed wire enclosures, just a single string of barbed wire around the trees and they’d herd you in there. There was no latrine facilities, you defecated right where you were and it got pretty bad and stinky come morning and you couldn’t walk around. You had to stay there. Because of the mess, everybody was sick with malaria and dysentery…. **
The above accounts do not adequately express the depth of inhumane treatment these men suffered. They are compelling but the telling cannot truly express the horror that their experiences contained. These too are images most of us would rather not entertain, images the survivor would rather not completely share or recall.
When we use our language casually in order to win at political games, or simply to discredit the opposition party, we diminish the real life experiences of people like these. When we use the word torture indiscriminately, we dishonor the memories of those who died or had to endure great pain and suffering at the hands of monsters.
“Anything to which Christopher Hitchens is willing to submit himself in pursuit of a Vanity Fair article is not torture. This covers, among other things, back-waxing, exercise class, and waterboarding.” Well done Mr. Greenwald!