Bush Team Torture Crony Charged with Wife-Strangulation

John Farren, former "W" White House Counsel, may not be a torture-legalizing headliner like John Yoo, but he had his hands in the jerry-rigging of White House legal policies to override such impediments to Cheney's torture agenda (aka "robust interrogation") as the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Army field manual. Now he's been arrested for the strangling and attempted murder of his wife Mary Farren - while his own children were in the home. Could it be that there's a link between draconian legal opinion and a propensity to cross the line oneself? Whether or not that's the case, it certainly is another black smudge on the already discredited Bush legal team.

And this was no run-of-the-mill wife-beating, where one hopes at some point the husband realizes what he's doing and leaves her bruised and battered. This was full-scale attempted murder, although it's not yet being charged exactly that way. Some details:

Farren tackled her in a bedroom at their New Canaan, Connecticut home and ripped out a clump of her hair. Then he beat her with a metal flashlight until Mary lost consciousness. When she woke up, he was still pounding away.

Mary Farren was beaten and strangled by her husband in front of their children at their Connecticut home
​He began to strangle her as she was again losing consciousness. Despite barely being able to see, she managed to trigger the home's alarm system.

Farren started beating her again and threatened to slit his wrists. He grabbed a large knife and went to the bathroom, coaxing his wife to follow. But Mary instead ran to her daughter's bedroom yelling "Daddy's trying to kill me!" according to a police report.

Mary managed to escape with her 7-year-old daughter and the couple's baby. She fled in a BMW before stopping at a home to call police.

Mary Farren also reported that she greatly feared her husband's violent anger, that her filing for divorce triggered this latest outburst, and that this was not the first incident in which he beat her. And to think he was writing policy for the President of the United States. So much for Republican family values...

Torture Is Cool: Legacy of Bush/Cheney Propaganda

"Torture Chic", subtitled " Why Is the Media Glorifying Inhumane, Sadistic Behavior?", a thought-provoking article by Maura Moynihan, really struck a chord with me. This is not exactly new, but it reminds one of the last days of Rome when throwing people to the lions (and other wild animals) was a spectator sport - entertainment for the Romans, and not just a elite class. Not so long ago, an LA Times editorial remarked (and the blogosphere expanded) that Americans were "blase about torture."

From such banal offerings as "Wrestling Entertainment" and its obsession with "bad guys" to the pro-military, get-the-Islamic-jerks propaganda spewed from all manner of sources, there has been a growing popular macho movement towards acceptability of torture, cruelty and sadistic behavior.

In their zeal to legalize torture and trounce the Bill of Rights, the Bush team crafted a media campaign to sell the "War on Terror" as a righteous quest retribution for 9/11, inciting fear of future carnage to justify violating the Geneva protocols and the U.S. Army Field Manual. While the Bush torture policy made stunning progress through the courts and the legislature, with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, there followed an increase in the normalization of torture images in popular culture, a growing acceptance of violence as effective, routine.

When photographs of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib appeared in 2004, Bush's approval ratings sank, yet torture themes multiplied in film and TV. From 2002 through 2005, the Parents Television Council counted 624 torture scenes in prime time, a six-fold increase. UCLA's Television Violence Monitoring Project reports "torture on TV shows is significantly higher than it was five years ago and the characters who torture have changed. It used to be that only villains on television tortured. Today, "good guy" and heroic American characters torture -- and this torture is depicted as necessary, effective and even patriotic".

So are these the "new American values"? And if so, what distinguishes us from, say, Al-Qaeda? How long before Americans could use techniques such as rape to coerce other Americans to do things they otherwise would not - in the Machiavellian "end-justifies-means" philosophy espoused by prominent neocons? Where is their moral high ground over al-Qaeda?

Human Rights First has just released a short film entitled "Primetime Torture" that examines how torture and interrogation scenes are portrayed in television programming. A retired military leader interviewed for the film says, "The portrayal of torture in popular culture is having a significant impact on how interrogations are conducted in the field. U.S. soldiers are imitating the techniques they have seen on television -- because they think such tactics work."

Lately it seems that three out of five offerings at the local Cineplex are tales of clever and nimble torturers and serial killers. This mass marketing of the murderer, sadist and child molester endows the deviant with a fictitious intelligence, the pretense of a rich and complex "inner life", a particularly annoying Hollywood buzzword. Such characters aren't presented as perverts, rather, they're complex geniuses, creative and tormented, ever misunderstood. It must come from the suits, who study box office returns for the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" franchise. Whereas actresses frequently complain that the only roles available are for killers or tarts, actors bemoan the dearth of "serious" movies amid piles of scripts about guys shooting off guns. They'll play the killer if they have to, it's work.

There is lots of evidence that so-called pop culture has a very heady influence on people's mindsets in general, especially people without a strong "counter-influence" such as family or cultural values that override these influences. And in the military, the military culture itself overrides, or can easily override, one's previous cultural values.

I know of several people in the military who have emerged deeply changed and affected by their experience, and not in good ways. They returned alienated from friends and family, introverted, depressed, moody, unstable, uncommunicative, obsessed with security or weapons, or even prone to addictions. Opening the door to torture added to the stress of fighting a confusing and unclear war in culturally alien territory where any value system seems not to apply... all this can lead to abuse. It's the absolute wrong way to go.

In the Bush years torture images migrated from Hollywood to fashion and advertising. ...In 2007 a fashion blog proclaimed; "Torture is the New Black", when John Galliano's 2007 runway show male models wore hoods, nooses, handcuffs, and had their bodies painted with gashes, cuts and cigarette burns. Then Italian Vogue ran 30 pages of color photographs by Steven Meisel, depicting models elegantly clad in Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and more, being interrogated and beaten by policemen with clubs, knives, guns and attack dogs. Many fashion writers embraced "Torture Chic". Joanna Bourke, a professor at Birkbeck College, observed that the images served "the interests of the politics of torture and abuse. There is a vicarious satisfaction in viewing these depictions of cruelty in the interests of national security.'

Interests of national security?? Vicarious satisfaction? What security is that, exactly? And what about when the tables are turned? Did anyone ever tell these people that the tables always are turned, sooner or later?

According to Human Rights First:

U.S. interrogators say that not only is torture illegal and immoral, it is also ineffective as an interrogation tactic – because it is unreliable. Moreover, evidence gained through torture is inadmissible in court – and therefore unusable for prosecuting alleged terrorists or criminals.

Torture, as it is performed by American characters on television, regularly produces reliable information – and quite quickly. When writing about interrogation, writers might consider creating scenes that more accurately mirror reality: showing that torture often incapacitates suspects (or kills them); that innocent people are often mistakenly tortured; or that victims of torture provide false information. On television today, torture has few consequences for the torturer and the tortured ... it would be difficult, if not impossible, for those who torture or are tortured to resume normal life quickly as they do on television.

So torture is not helpful to security, not helpful to law enforcement, achieves nothing militarily, does not do anything except destroy the image of America in the greater public around the world. It makes America look like the villain, the cruel taskmaster, the bad guy. And in effect, by engaging in torture, that may actually be the case. America is acting as a rogue nation in defying the Geneva Conventions it originally espoused.

Obama is absolutely right in opposing torture and undoing the unimaginable damage done by Bush and the Republican neocon right by allowing and encouraging it. Let's hope that popular culture will catch up with Obama in standing tall for reason, compassion, human rights, science, the Constitution, taking action to deal with challenges, and being upfront and direct to the American public, as well as working with diplomacy before guns.

Don't Like Gitmo, Torture, Child Soldiers as US Legacy? Here's Something You Can DO...

Mohammad Jawad was a child soldier in Afghanistan when he was detained by US forces there in the so-called War on Terror and taken to Guantanamo where he was subjected to various types of torture - recognized as torture, that is, except to the Bush Administration, who call it anything else.
You can sign this petition to help in his behalf here. Read more about him and the petition (at bottom) below:
He was featured last May in Salon:

The U.S. government claims that Mohammed Jawad is an unlawful enemy combatant who tried to murder two U.S. soldiers and their translator in Afghanistan by tossing a grenade into their vehicle in December 2002.

But Maj. David Frakt, his military-appointed attorney, argues that Jawad -- who was a teenager of 16 or 17 at the time of his alleged offense (Jawad doesn't know his birth date) -- is a victim. He says Jawad was a homeless teenager who was drugged and forced to fight with Afghan militia, then abused by the United States, which transported him halfway around the world and imprisoned him at Guantánamo for five years without charge and is now using him as a guinea pig to test a new system of military justice with no regard to his initial status as a juvenile.

When Frakt arrived at Guantánamo to meet Jawad, he said he found a profoundly disturbed young man who was reluctant to talk. "Jawad is in an extremely fragile mental state," Frakt said in an interview following the hearing. "He has been here for so long -- he has essentially grown up in Guantánamo. He has lost track of time, lost touch with reality, and suffers from severe depression. And he doesn't believe he can get justice from the military commissions."

The fact that he was a child soldier was deliberately ignored by the Bush Administration. The US bandies the words "freedom" and "justice" around as if they were purely propaganda tools. Care about freedom? So what about exposing a minor, whose transition to adulthood occurred in the worst of all possible conditions, to torture and human rights abuse? Is this the way the US fights for democracy and freedom?

The United States has acknowledged holding eight teenagers at Guantánamo, but although some of them were given special housing and educational opportunities and were eventually released, the U.S. has ignored Jawad's status as a juvenile.

But Donald Rumsfeld, talking the Cheney line, lied about this:

At a press conference in April 2003, when the “child prisoners” story first broke, Donald Rumsfeld pointedly described the juvenile detainees as “not children,” and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that they “may be juveniles, but they’re not on the Little League team anywhere. They’re on a major league team, and it’s a terrorist team, and they’re in Guantánamo for a very good reason –- for our safety, for your safety.”

Safety? When we're becoming a human rights-abusing, rogue nation? It's worth taking a brief look at Jawad's life story, which has been largely ignored:

Jawad is an illiterate Afghan from a poor Pashtun family with no ties to the Afghan government. According to Frakt, Jawad's father died during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. His mother remarried, and the family fled to Pakistan. Jawad spent his childhood years in a refugee camp and was educated at a local madrassa where all the teaching is conducted orally. He never learned to read or write.

Frakt says that when Jawad was 13, his family kicked him out and told him he needed to find a job. He spent much of those years hanging around a mosque looking for work. Sometime in 2002, Jawad was told he could have a job helping eradicate land mines in Afghanistan, so he returned to his native country. Once he arrived, however, Frakt says he was recruited by the local militia, drugged and forced into combat. Soon after, he was arrested by the Afghan police and handed over to the Americans.
Unlike most of the detainees at Guantánamo, Jawad was never provided a "habeas counsel," that is, a civilian lawyer to file a petition of habeas corpus on his behalf. Until he was charged this year, he was virtually unknown to the world.

Frakt said that his meetings with Jawad have been difficult, in part because Jawad doesn't understand the legal process, and in part because Jawad doesn't trust anyone in a U.S. military uniform, which Frakt is obligated to wear when he visits his client. "It is difficult to establish a trusting relationship with a detainee who has suffered so much and been detained by the U.S. military for five years," Frakt said. "He has a natural distrust of me, and he is not sure that I am here to help him."
...
From the government's point of view, Jawad's is a seemingly straightforward case. The prosecution has located eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the Afghan teenager throw the grenade. In addition, it says it has a signed confession from Jawad.

But Frakt says the case isn't nearly as straightforward as the government alleges. He says that the prosecution chose to prosecute Jawad because it viewed his as a "sexy" case -- Jawad is a defendant with "blood on his hands," in the government's view, which is something the American public understands better than something more abstract, like charges of material support for terrorism.

In other words, this is a show prosecution, politically motivated. Its purpose is not the administration of justice - not at all! - but a tool to be used to convince the American public that Bush's policies are justified, that we are bringing "terrorists" to "justice" and hence "securing America". While in fact, what we are doing is the diametrical opposite: undermining the very fabric of our justice system, democracy, and the rule of law, especially as it is applied internationally.

While Frakt acknowledges that the prosecution has witnesses who saw his client throw the grenade, he says the defense has also located witnesses who say the teenager appeared to be drugged at the time. As for the confession, Frakt says it is in Farsi -- a language Jawad does not speak. And the "signature" on it is in the form of a thumbprint, because Jawad does not read or write.

Frakt hopes to be able to make these arguments on Jawad's behalf if or when the case goes to trial. In the meantime, Frakt says has serious reservations about Jawad's ability to aid in his defense because of his fragile mental state -- something that was evident when Jawad himself addressed the court this month.

When the judge asked Jawad if he would like to make a statement, the young man spoke for about 20 minutes, saying that he didn't understand why he was at Guantánamo and why he was being punished. As he described his ordeal -- of being flown from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, locked in a steel cage, moved from cell to cell in the middle of the night, and sometimes being kept in a cell that had bright lights on 24 hours a day -- he said he had lost track of time and couldn't remember when or for how long he was held in each camp. Sometimes he stopped to rub his head and seemed to forget what he was saying in mid-sentence.

When Jawad finished his statement, Frakt requested that his client be taken out of the maximum security facility where he is currently housed -- where he is confined to a windowless cell at least 22 hours a day -- and moved to a "quiet, restful place where he can rehabilitate." He also requested that Jawad be examined by a mental health professional.

The judge told Frakt to put the request in writing and said that he would consider it. But it remains unclear whether the judge at the military commissions has the authority to order military officials at the detention facility at Guantánamo to do anything.

Now, finally, there is something we can do about it.

Valtin has put up this letter and petition to sign as well as this article explaining what the petition is about and what it can accomplish:

Last week I publicized the extraordinary appeal campaign for Guantanamo detainee Mohammad Jawad initiated by his military attorneys. Jawad, who was arrested as a teenager in Afghanistan in December 2002, is the first child soldier to be tried as a "war criminal" in modern times. In U.S. custody, he has suffered beatings, threats, physical isolation, sleep deprivation, been subjected to 24-hour bright lights, and more. His attorneys have called for letters to be written to the Convening Authority at Guanatanamo, asking them to withdraw and dismiss the charges against Jawad.

Now, his attorneys have initiated an online petition campaign in his behalf. You can follow this link to go straight to the petition. Please sign it and pass the info on to whomever you can.

Please click the link above and sign the petition. It's a small thing we can do to try and unbuild the system of atrocities Bush/Cheney have put in place. It's a way we can try to save the life of a forgotten victim of that system, a system that puts America to shame.

US Holds Terror Subjects on Prison Ships!!

Actually, this came out around June 1st (it was reported by ask on dkos), and I just found out about it. It falls right in line with the horrors of the Bush Administration: Guantanamo, torture, secret renditions to outsource torture to other countries like Syria, Abu Ghraib and a thousand similar incidents as yet minimally reported or unreported, bold outright lies to con the American public to go to war for his personal/cronies' profit in oil, manipulation of the justice system, building up huge "security" prisons in America and housing entire families including infants in their prison walls... etcetera...


And now... prison ships!

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested
in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has
been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.
Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in
countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention
without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was
yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those
detained.
Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through
a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of
Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

You can thank Reprieve for this investigation, which sounds almost out of another era, or a horror film. They also revealed:

there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when
President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.
According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many
as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard
the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is
claimed.
Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.
Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.
At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were "disappeared" to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Remember the South American dictators and the "disappeared" and the "mothers of the disappeared"? Now we have Muslim mothers worldwide whose sons have suddenly and unexplicably "disappeared" into the evil vortex of the so-called "War on Terror" in a supposed effort to maintain Americans' alleged "security". In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, of course.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo
Bay, who described a fellow inmate's story of detention on an amphibious assault
ship. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship
with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo ... he was in the cage next to
me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all
closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was
like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more
severely than in Guantánamo."
Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights."

We hope this ugly history will unravel when Bush and his cronies-in-crime leave office.
CIA "black sites" are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.
In addition, numerous prisoners have been "extraordinarily rendered" to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.

As Reprieve's Director Clive Smith said:

“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least
26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to
80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these
people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”

British Court "Forces Government" to Hand Over Torture Docs in Gitmo Case

Here it is, from the Guardian's mouth:

(below is the article in its entirety, with my emphasis)

A British resident facing a life sentence at Guantánamo Bay has won a battle in a British court to force the government to hand over documents showing he was tortured into confessing he was a terrorist.
Binyam Mohamed, once a cleaner in Kensington, west London, is accused by the US of being an al-Qaida terrorist intent on the mass murder of civilians.
Yesterday it emerged that the high court had rejected a British government attempt to avoid a court hearing which would decide whether it should reveal evidence showing Mohamed was tortured by the US.
Mohamed, through his lawyers, who have visited him in Guantánamo, alleges he was "rendered" to Morocco, where his torture included his genitals being slashed.
The high court found the UK government supplied America with information to interrogate Mohamed and said the hearing should be held as soon as possible.

Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, said: "I have seen not one shred of evidence against him that was not tortured out of him. We know the British talked to Binyam in Pakistan, told him he was to be rendered and gave information to the US that was used in his torture in Morocco."

Torture Memo Turned Over to Judge: Let's Hope It Hits the Fan

Just in from NYT: "Judge Orders CIA to Turn Over "Torture" Memo: ACLU"

The American Civil Liberties Union said the memo was written by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel and sent to the CIA in August 2002. The ACLU described the memo as "one of the most important torture documents still being withheld by the Bush administration."
In a copy of the order posted on the ACLU's Web site, Judge Alvin Hellerstein told the government to produce the memo so he can determine whether it should be made public as part of a lawsuit the ACLU and other organizations filed in June 2004 requesting records concerning the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad.
Hellerstein has scheduled a review of the document for Monday.
"This memo authorized the CIA to use specific torture techniques --
including waterboarding," Jameel Jaffer, ACLU's national security project
director, said in a statement.

"CIA agents waterboarded prisoners because this memo told them that they
could," he said. "The memo is being withheld not for legitimate security
reasons, but in order to protect government officials from accountability for
their decisions."

Let's hope it causes a public outcry. After getting away with a war based on lies and defiance of the Geneva Conventions, it's a shame and a mockery of justice that Cheney-Bush were never impeached. Are these not "high crimes and misdemeanors"?