Must read article on torture from Rolling Stone

[JohnnyRingo]

Because every American should learn what the rest of the world already knows.



The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr
He was a child of jihad, a teenage soldier in bin Laden's army. Captured on the battlefield when he was only fifteen, he has been held at Guantanamo Bay for the past four years -- subjected to unspeakable abuse sanctioned by the president himself.
By Jeff Tietz

<excerpt of a lengthy and detailed report of atrocities carried out in your name>
At Ab Khail, a sergeant later said, every U.S. soldier who walked by Omar longed to put a bullet in his head. But an American medic, working near the corpse of Sgt. Speer, saved Omar's life, and he was taken to a hospital at Bagram Air Base with a bullet-split chest and serious shrapnel wounds to the head and eye. U.S. intelligence officers began interrogating him as soon as he regained consciousness. At that moment, Omar entered the extralegal archipelago of torture chambers and detention cells that the Bush administration has erected to prosecute its War on Terror. He has remained there ever since.
<snip>
A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo Bay, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. "Get up," the guard said. "You have a reservation." "Reservation" is the commonly used term at Gitmo for interrogation.

In the interrogation room, Omar's interviewer grew displeased with his level of cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained Omar tightly to an eye bolt in the center of the floor. Omar's hands and feet were shackled together; the eye bolt held him at the point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he was left alone for half an hour.

Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar's arms, pulled them behind his back and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this particular "stress position" can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of his chains and pushed him over on his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they'd successfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.....


<entire well written article>
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11128331/follow_omar_khadr_from_an_al_qaeda_childhood_to_a_gitmo_cell

[leftchick]

1. I read that last month

It will make any decent human being ill. Also worth reading is "America Gulag" in the Sept. issue of Harpers.

[mom cat]

2. Read it and weep!

[meldroc]

3. K&R

This sort of torture is coming to the U.S. Just wait...

[tblue]

4. They will burn in hell

[sproutster]

5. :(

I never thought I would cry over an admitted taliban fighter -

This was the life he was indoctrinated into. It's like me when I was a young girl, I was also "a good catholic." I believed feverently, it was black and white.

As you grow older, life experiences change your point of view. You meet gay people who are kind and loving. You learn that your body, is your choice. You find a world of grey and your perceptions change.

I kept thinking as I read this -- They could have taken this young boy, showed him kindness and compassion. They could have gained his trust, showed him a different world. ...

At the end of this story, I remember the innocent. They are still there. They still have names, and they are still human.

I also, remember the guilty, and believe they too are human, and MUST be treated with humanity. It doesn't have to be for "them" but for "us."

Am I the only one who now fears the phrase, "Do unto others?" We have truly lost our souls - may God have mercy on us.

[JohnnyRingo]

8. I wish in retrospect that I denounced the young terrorist

I've become so despondent over the face Buxh and his gang of sadists have put on the Country I love, that I forgot to point out that the boy killed a soldier.

Any sympathy I feel for him is in scale with the inhumanity at the hands of representitives of the United States, and by proxy...me.

While it's true that the kid may have been rehabilitated, the article mentions how most prisoners just "wished for a bullet" after a short time in Rumsfeld's playhouse.

I sadly think it may have been more humane to just execute the kid at the scene.
I read of the torture perpetrated in our name and imagine that if any decent American saw someone treating a dog in such fashion they would put an angry end to it.

Makes me wonder what kind of humans Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh are when I hear them cheer it on enthusiastcally. I feel sorry for their dogs too.

[chat_noir]

6. K&R

Bookmarking

[DoYouEverWonder]

7. These are some truly sick mother fuckers

Imagine what they are like when they go back to their wives and kids?

[StellaBlue]

9. ?!

"To protect the Cuban iguana, in accordance with the Endangered Species Act, the speed limit on the base is set at twenty-five miles an hour."

I am all out of words.

[LynnTheDem]

10. But Americans won't say a word when this is done to American soldiers.

After all, if it's good enough for America to do, it's good enough for the rest of the world to do. To us.

RIGHT, MFing rightwingnuts?

PS; When Ms. Clinton is the POTUS, you will LOVE how ONLY SHE gets to determine who is and who isn't an "enemy combatant" and NO Habeus Corpus for you! What goes around comes around. Forgot to consider that every time bush grabs more power not for himself, but for the POTUS...whomever that may be in future.

Rightwingnuts; ya truly are the stupidest MFers ever.

[Kurovski]

11. K&R(nt)