Forgetting His Vote To Allow Waterboarding, McCain (R-Idiot) Says ‘We Could Never Torture Anyone’

(BuzzFlash.net) - In February, Sen. John McCain (R-Idiot) voted against a bill banning the CIA from waterboarding and using other torture tactics in their interrogations. When the bill passed, McCain urged Bush to veto it, which he did. In an interview with Newsweek published this week, McCain defended his position, insisting that the CIA plays “a special role” in defending the U.S. and thus should be allowed to use harsh interrogation tactics such as waterboarding, but also said "We could never torture anyone". McCain’s vote against the waterboarding ban did make one thing clear: that he condones torture.

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Police ‘torture’ videos cause uproar in Mexico

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) – Videos showing Leon police practicing torture techniques on a fellow officer and dragging another through vomit at the instruction of a U.S. adviser created an uproar Tuesday in Mexico, which has struggled to eliminate torture in law enforcement.

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In the Cause of Fear and Ignorance

The British lawyer Gareth Peirce, celebrated for her defense of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: “Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ’shoot to kill’, the use of torture . . . brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant.” Referring to the conflict in Northern Ireland, she was drawing a comparison with “our new suspect community”, people of Muslim faith, against whom a vicious, sectarian and mostly unreported war is well under way.

As Peirce points out, “internment, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland”, now allows, not 42 days, but the “indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him”. Those snatched from their homes in Britain following 11 September 2001 have all but vanished into an Anglo-American gulag, which in this country joins Belmarsh Prison, where people are consigned to oblivion, with Broadmoor psychiatric prison, where they are sent as they go mad, and with Kafkaesque versions of “home” where others are interred under “control orders”. One such home prisoner, wrote Peirce, “a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offence, subject to a curfew and allowed no visits unless approved in advance by the Home Office”. Going into the garden, arranging a plumber, speaking to a child’s teacher, all require permission. The families go mad, too.

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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 ]