How the Pentagon Turned an Interrogation Resistance Program into a Blueprint for Torture

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this week, answers about the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogations" finally came to light.

In August 2004, a Defense Dept. panel convened to investigate detainee abuse after the Abu Ghraib scandal issued its much-anticipated report. Interrogation techniques designed for use at Guantánamo Bay, which President George W. Bush had decreed outside the scope of the Geneva Conventions, had "migrated" to Iraq, which Bush recognized was under Geneva, concluded panel chairman James Schlesinger, a former defense secretary. Schlesinger's panel, however, did not explain which officials ordered the abusive techniques to transfer across continents -- or how and why they became Pentagon policy in the first place.

(On Wednesday) the Senate Armed Services Committee answered those questions. In a marathon hearing spanning eight hours and three separate panels, the committee revealed, in painstaking detail, how senior Pentagon officials transformed a program for Special Forces troops to resist torture -- known as Survival Evasion Resistance Escape, or SERE -- into a blueprint for torturing terrorism detainees.

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Guantánamo detainees have constitutional right to habeas corpus: Supreme Court Checks and Balances in Boumediene

After the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited opinion, upholding habeas corpus rights for the Guantánamo detainees, I was invited to appear on The O’Reilly Factor with guest host Laura Ingraham. Although she is a lawyer and former law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, Ingraham has no use for our judicial branch of government, noting that the justices are “unelected.” Indeed, she advocated that Bush break the law and disregard the Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush:

“Marjorie, I was trying to think to myself, look, if I were President Bush, and I had heard that this case had come down, and I’m out of office in a few months. My ratings, my popularity ratings are pretty low, I would have said at this point, that’s very interesting that the court decided this, but I’m not going to respect the decision of the court because my job is to keep this country safe.”

READ MORE HERE [ GlobalResearch.ca ]

Pentagon Wants Kill Switch for Planes

The Pentagon’s non-lethal weapons division is looking for technologies that could “disable” aircraft, before they can take off from a runway — or block the planes from flying over a given city of stretch of land.

In a request for proposals, issued earlier this week, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate announced that it would like arms-makers to come up with a way to “safely divert an aircraft in the air or stop and/or disable an aircraft on the ground.” And no, shooting the thing with a missile doesn’t count. The Directorate wants “reversible effects which allow the targeted aircraft to be quickly returned to an operational condition with minimal time to repair.”

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Al Qaeda Issues ‘Request For Proposals’

Frankly, it seems like Al Qaeda is becoming more like the Pentagon with each passing day. Women want equal rights to wage Jihad; the bureaucrats issue nasty memos and want to coordinate strategic communication; and now they’re putting out the equivalent of a “request for proposals” on how to cause madness and mayhem.

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Female Terrorists Want Equal Rights

It isn’t just the United States that has problems with strategic communications. Al Qaeda’s Ayman Al-Zawahri angered would-be female jidahists when he said that the place for women is in the home. CBS News reports on the reaction to the this recent decree:

In response to a female questioner, al Qaeda No. 2 leader Ayman Al-Zawahri said in April that the terrorist group does not have women. A woman’s role, he said on the Internet audio recording, is limited to caring for the homes and children of al Qaeda fighters.

His remarks have since prompted an outcry from fundamentalist women, who are fighting or pleading for the right to be terrorists. The statements have also created some confusion, because in fact suicide bombings by women seem to be on the rise, at least within the Iraq branch of al Qaeda.

 READ MORE HERE [ Source: Wired Danger Blog ]