GOP ‘Torture Debate’ and Obama’s Failure to Prosecute

[JEB]

by
Nat Parry

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/14/gop-torture-debate-and-obamas-failure-prosecute

Troubling comments within the GOP presidential field over whether to reinstate torture and implement other war crimes have been drawing criticism lately, with the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain, even feeling compelled to weigh in last week by calling out the “loose talk” in the Republican primaries.

<snip>

Trump has even insinuated that Cruz is a “pussy” for hinting that he might show some degree of restraint in the use of torture. With this kind of talk, it’s clear that on the Republican side, the discussion has gone off the rails, leading several human rights groups to remind the U.S. of its moral and legal obligations not to engage in sadistic and cruel practices such as waterboarding.

<snip>

“It is now time to take action,” Emmerson said on Dec. 9, 2014. “The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes. The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the U.S. government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.”

<snip>

Of course, this report, like virtually all other calls for justice on the torture question over the past seven years, has been studiously ignored by official Washington. And with the Republicans now falling over each other to pledge their support for illegal policies of torture and brutality, we are seeing the fruits of Obama’s refusal to uphold the laws of the land.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Torture, the American way.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/14/gop-torture-debate-and-obamas-failure-prosecute

[snot]

1. K&R'd!

The failure to do justice sows more injustice.

We don't need to be vindictive about it; I'm open to "truth and reconciliation" procedures under the right circumstances.

But ignoring or glossing over crimes by torturers, bankers, or those who lie us into war invites more of the same.

[JEB]

7. Exactly correct. nt

[LuvLoogie]

2. Who should be arrested and charged?

[Octafish]

3. CIA Torture program reminds me of NAZI human experimentation.

Jose Padilla, the convicted dirty bomber in his mind, is another guy James Comey* may want to forget.



The government of the United States destroyed his mind.

*"We now know much of what Jose Padilla knows, and what we have learned confirms that the President made the right call and that that call saved lives." -- James Comey, Deputy Attorney General; press conference, when asked about Bush torture program.

What Cold War CIA Interrogators Learned from the Nazis

The Daily Beast
Feb. 11, 2014

At a secret black site in the years after the end of WWII, CIA and US intelligence operatives tested LSD and other interrogation techniques on captured Soviet spies—all with the help of former Nazi doctors. An excerpt from Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip, published this week.

It was 1946 and World War II had ended less than one year before. In Top Secret memos being circulated in the elite ‘E’ ring of the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing for ‘total war’ with the Soviets—to include atomic, chemical, and biological warfare. They even set an estimated start date of 1952. The Joint Chiefs believed that the U.S. could win this future war, but not for reasons that the general public knew about. Since war’s end, across the ruins of the Third Reich, U.S. military officers had been capturing and then hiring Hitler’s weapons makers, in a Top Secret program that would become known as Operation Paperclip. Soon, more than 1,600 of these men and their families would be living the American dream, right here in the United States. From these Nazi scientists, U.S. military and intelligence organizations culled knowledge of Hitler’s most menacing weapons including sarin gas and weaponized bubonic plague.

As the Cold War progressed, the program expanded and got stranger still. In 1948, Operation Paperclip’s Brigadier General Charles E. Loucks, Chief of U.S. Chemical Warfare Plans in Europe, was working with Hitler’s former chemists when one of the scientists, Nobel Prize winner Richard Kuhn, shared with General Loucks information about a drug with military potential being developed by Swiss chemists. This drug, a hallucinogen, had astounding potential properties if successfully weaponized. In documents recently discovered at the U.S. Army Heritage Center in Pennsylvania, Loucks quickly became enamored with the idea that this drug could be used on the battlefield to “incapacitate not kill.” The drug was Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

It did not take long for the CIA to become interested and involved. Perhaps LSD could also be used for off-the-battlefield purposes, a means through which human behavior could be manipulated and controlled. In an offshoot of Operation Paperclip, the CIA teamed up with Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence to run one of the most nefarious, classified, enhanced interrogation programs of the Cold War. The work took place inside a clandestine facility in the American zone of occupied Germany, called Camp King. The facility’s chief medical doctor was Operation Paperclip’s Dr. Walter Schreiber, the former Surgeon General of the Third Reich. When Dr. Schreiber was secretly brought to America—to work for the U.S. Air Force in Texas—his position was filled with another Paperclip asset, Dr. Kurt Blome, the former Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich and the man in charge of the Nazi’s program to weaponize bubonic plague. The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA.

Camp King was strategically located in the village of Oberursel, eleven miles northwest of the United States European Command (EUCOM) headquarters in Frankfurt. Officially the facility had three names: the U.S. Military Intelligence Service Center at Oberursel, the 7707th European Command Intelligence Center, and Camp King. In 1945, the place housed captured Nazis but by 1948 most of its prisoners were Soviet bloc spies. For more than a decade Camp King would function as a Cold War black site long before black sites were known as such—an ideal facility to develop enhanced interrogation techniques in part because it was “off-site” but mainly because of its access to Soviet prisoners.

It was an international crisis in June of 1948 that gave Operation Paperclip momentum at Camp King. Early on the morning of June 24, the Soviets cut off all land and rail access to the American zone in Berlin, an action that would become known as the Berlin Blockade. “The Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 clearly indicated that the wartime alliance [between the Soviets and the United States] had dissolved,” explained CIA deputy director for operations Jack Downing. “Germany then became a new battlefield between east and west.”

“In our conversation of 9 February 1951, I outlined to you the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc., and emphasized the defensive aspects as well as the offensive opportunities in this field of applied medical science,” wrote Dulles.
At this time, the CIA believed the Soviets were pursing mind control programs—supposedly a means of getting captured spies to talk—and the Agency wanted to know what it would be up against if the Russians got hold of its American spies. Since the end of the war, the various U.S. military branches had developed advanced air, land and sea rescue programs, based in part by research conducted by Nazi doctors during the war. But the Soviets had also made great advances in rescue programs and this presented a serious, new concern for the Pentagon and the CIA. If a downed U.S. pilot or soldier was rescued and captured by the Russians, that person would almost certainly be subjected to unconventional Soviet interrogation techniques. In an attempt to determine what kinds of Soviet techniques might be used, a research program was set up at Camp King. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that the U.S. developed its post-war enhanced interrogation techniques here at Camp King, under the CIA code name Operation Bluebird.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/what-cold-war-cia-interrogators-learned-from-the-nazis.html

Thank you for a most important OP and thread, JEB! Nat Parry is spot-on:

Of course, this report, like virtually all other calls for justice on the torture question over the past seven years, has been studiously ignored by official Washington. And with the Republicans now falling over each other to pledge their support for illegal policies of torture and brutality, we are seeing the fruits of Obama’s refusal to uphold the laws of the land.

[JEB]

6. Thanks for the post and links.

The CIA seems to be a government funded CRIME operation.

[Contrary1]

4. Trump's idiot son said that waterboarding

was no worse than college hazing. The moron genes are strong in that family.

[JEB]

5. Not investigating and prosecuting the CRIME of torture

legitimizes statements like that.