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Bush: Now Using The Same Tactics As Japanese War Criminals
Posted by Kevin

What Bush approved:

The CIA on three occasions shortly after the September 11 attacks used a widely condemned interrogation technique known as waterboarding, CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress on Tuesday.*

“Waterboarding has been used on only three detainees,” Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly specifying the number of subjects and naming them for the first time, as Congress considers banning the technique.

Those subjected to waterboarding were al Qaeda suspects Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Hayden said. [The CIA’s destroyed torture tapes, remember, documented the interrogations of Zubaydah and Nashiri.]

He said waterboarding has not been used in five years, but it was used then because of concerns of imminent catastrophic attacks on the United States and because authorities had limited knowledge of al Qaeda.

“The circumstances are different than they were in late 2001, early 2002,” Hayden said.

What we did to a Japanese officer who waterboarded Americans:

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II,” he said.

George Bush is losing the war on terrorism. Not only did he take his eye off the ball and go after a contained secular dictator instead of the religious stateless actors that are the real threat, he has pissed away every bit of goodwill and good reputation the United states has built up over its history. Bush’s childish embrace of torture and idiotic insistence that the procedures at Gitmo be reduced to kangaroo courts tells the Muslim world that Al-Qaeda is right: the US has no interest in seeing them as human beings. It has one set of rules for itself and no rules or restraints when it comes to them. There is no doubt that if Iraqi insurgents captured an American pilot who they believed knew when the next air strike would take place — air strikes that can and have killed civilians — and waterboarded him to find out when it was coming under the justification that they were protecting civilian life, the Bush Administration would — rightly — condemn that act as torture. And there is absolutely no doubt that if Al Qaeda captured and tortured a general becasue they “had limited knowledge of ” American military procedures that such activity would be — rightly — condemned. Yet the Bush Administration admits to torturing Muslims under just those justifications.

Bush is proving Al Qaeda’s propaganda — that he is engaged in a war against Muslims, not a war against them — correct. After all, would a country that is actually concerned about making sure they don’t punish the innocent use torture to get information and then allow evidence obtained under torture to be used in what is supposed to be a trial? The fact that the Bush Administration has argued for just make sit incredibly easy for terrorists to convince Muslims that Bush is waging a crusade against Muslims in general, not the terrorist group in specific. After all, who would believe the monster that says there is one law for him and no law for you?

But more than all of that, there is a reason we punished Japaense officers who waterboarded. Waterboarding is torture and torture is the complete antithesis of civilized behavior. It destroys the minds and bodies of people for no useful purpose. There is a reason it has been the tool of dictators, thugs and cowards throughout history — becasue it is oly good for mentally destroying tis victims and for getting them to tell you what you want them to tell you. it is wrong and more than wrong: it is evil. And Bush has made it the official policy of the United States of America. Thank God someone restored honor and dignity to the White House.

February 7th, 2008 Torture | 5 comments