- You see, here's the thing. When you hear about the sick,
twisted things that America's torturers have been doing, courtesy of President
George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember that
the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when it came
to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting average was pretty
lousy.
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- According to even the Pentagon's own reckoning, for example,
probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past eight
years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number--probably the majority--weren't
even fighting anyone when they were captured. I'm sure that the averages
at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the secret prison in Iraq are
no better. The military was offering bounties in Iraq and Afghanistan for
alleged terrorists, you see, and probably still is, but in both of those
lawless, tribal countries, many people have used the offer to settle old
feuds, turning in people they wanted to punish or dispose of, and many
others just turned in random people to get the reward money.
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- Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that
we are learning were used by our side--things that make waterboarding sound
like a walk in the park. We're now getting confirmation of things that
we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using blanks,
faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of the same
to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the cell next
to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the worst yet--the
threat to kill a captive's children. And of course there is the already
disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut with a razor, and
generous use of tasers in places on the body designed to cause maximum
pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped captives (including young
boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up of captives who were simply
killed during torture....
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- For the rest of this story, please go to:
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- http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
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