End Corporate Rule wrote:
--quote
Amnesty Condemns U.S. for War on Terror Torture
Wed Oct 27, 2004 08:36 AM ET
By Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States has failed to guard
against torture and inhuman behavior since launching its
"war on terror" after Sept. 11, 2001, Amnesty International
said Wednesday in a report just days before the U.S.
election.
The rights group called on President Bush and his
Democratic challenger John Kerry to promise to take prompt
action to address the issue head on if elected on Nov. 2.
It condemned Bush's response to the 2001 attacks on U.S.
cities, saying it had resulted in an "iconography of
torture, cruelty and degradation."
Amnesty's report accused Washington of stepping onto a
"well-trodden path of violating basic rights in the name of
national security or 'military necessity'."
"The war mentality the government has adopted has not been
matched with a commitment to the laws of war and it has
discarded fundamental human rights principles along the
way," it said.
At best, Washington was guilty of setting conditions for
torture and cruel treatment by lowering safeguards and
failing to respond adequately to allegations of abuse, it
said.
At worst, it had authorized interrogation techniques which
flouted its international obligation to reject torture and
ill-treatment under any circumstances.
HAUNTING IMAGES
An army general acknowledged for the first time in August
that U.S. troops tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail in
Iraq.
Pentagon leaders and Bush's officials had previously
steered clear of describing the physical abuse and sexual
humiliation of Iraqi prisoners as torture.
Photographs published in April showed U.S. soldiers posing
and smiling as naked, male Iraqi prisoners were stacked in
a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts with one
another.
One prisoner was standing on a box with his head hooded and
wires attached to his hands. He had been told he would be
electrocuted if he fell off the box.
Amnesty said the U.S. and the world would be "haunted by
these and other images for years to come." They were "icons
of a government's failure to put human rights at its heart."
The report -- "Human dignity denied: Torture and
accountability in the 'war on terror"' -- urged Bush and
Kerry to commit to opening an independent inquiry into all
U.S. interrogation and detention policies.
"The core message of this report is that the prevention of
torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is
primarily a matter of political will," it said.
Amnesty also criticized a tendency in the U.S. to gloss
over aspects of war and violence -- referring to torture
and degrading treatment as "stress and duress" for example
-- which it said threatened to promote tolerance of them.
"The human rights violations which the U.S. government has
been so reluctant to call torture when committed by its own
agents are annually described as such by the State
Department when they occur in other countries," the report
said.
"Double standards have greatly undermined the credibility
of the U.S.'s global discourse on human rights," it said.
--end quote
The U.S. will see Abu Ghraib's angry harvest for decades to
come.
end corporate rule
