Post by ck4829 on Feb 16, 2022 18:16:14 GMT
Goldberg: Twenty years on, here’s the legacy of American torture in the war on terror
Remember when the administration of former President George W. Bush began sweeping up suspected terrorists and whisking them off, hooded and shackled, to offshore CIA “black sites” around the world where they were tortured into confessing to all sorts of crimes?
So many moral crises have come and gone since then, it is beginning to feel like the distant past.
These days, Bush has retired into the comfortable role of elder statesman. John Yoo, who prepared the legal justification for the torture program, is a tenured law professor at UC Berkeley. Gina Haspel, who oversaw the agency’s black site in Thailand, was promoted to CIA director under President Donald Trump. No criminal charges were pursued against the torturers themselves.
But though some of the actors in the drama have moved on, others are still immersed in it. One is Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who, two decades later, remains incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay’s Camp 5 awaiting his day in court.
It is generally accepted that the CIA subjected Nashiri to some of the harshest torture of any suspected al-Qaida terrorist detained during the war on terrorism. Arrested in October 2002 — a year after the Sept. 11 attacks — and accused of helping plot the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, he was shuttled among half a dozen black sites. According to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he was was hooded, shackled, slammed against walls, denied sleep for days at a time and locked in a tiny, coffin-like “confinement box.” He was held without food, waterboarded, threatened with a pistol to his head at one point and with a cordless power drill at another.
When it was all over, one assessment concluded that Nashiri had provided “essentially no actionable information” to foil future terrorist plots. Videotapes of his interrogations were destroyed by the CIA.
www.lowellsun.com/2022/02/12/twenty-years-on-heres-the-legacy-of-american-torture-in-the-war-on-terror/
Remember when the administration of former President George W. Bush began sweeping up suspected terrorists and whisking them off, hooded and shackled, to offshore CIA “black sites” around the world where they were tortured into confessing to all sorts of crimes?
So many moral crises have come and gone since then, it is beginning to feel like the distant past.
These days, Bush has retired into the comfortable role of elder statesman. John Yoo, who prepared the legal justification for the torture program, is a tenured law professor at UC Berkeley. Gina Haspel, who oversaw the agency’s black site in Thailand, was promoted to CIA director under President Donald Trump. No criminal charges were pursued against the torturers themselves.
But though some of the actors in the drama have moved on, others are still immersed in it. One is Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who, two decades later, remains incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay’s Camp 5 awaiting his day in court.
It is generally accepted that the CIA subjected Nashiri to some of the harshest torture of any suspected al-Qaida terrorist detained during the war on terrorism. Arrested in October 2002 — a year after the Sept. 11 attacks — and accused of helping plot the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, he was shuttled among half a dozen black sites. According to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he was was hooded, shackled, slammed against walls, denied sleep for days at a time and locked in a tiny, coffin-like “confinement box.” He was held without food, waterboarded, threatened with a pistol to his head at one point and with a cordless power drill at another.
When it was all over, one assessment concluded that Nashiri had provided “essentially no actionable information” to foil future terrorist plots. Videotapes of his interrogations were destroyed by the CIA.
www.lowellsun.com/2022/02/12/twenty-years-on-heres-the-legacy-of-american-torture-in-the-war-on-terror/