Friday, April 24, 2009

The Torture was Ordered by Whitehouse , Not Just "Bad Apples", Were People Tortured At Abu Gahrib and Gitmo to Justify Iraq ?

(WARNING: graphic images and information originally posted 10 am 4.22.09 photos below are disturbing and concerning, part of the Bush legacy. My apologies that this happened in our name- but the Truth must be shown and told, please do click ALL the links at the end of the post and DO read the Comments where More Information was obtained about Abu Gahariab and the corpse photos.)







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About THE Photos, these are from Abu Gahrib, and note the One Girl, one reports says she was a "Medic" ,another says she was a "Specialist" in the Reserve, she posed with Corpses, We need to ask HOW these people died, and why they are on Ice ? and Bloody ? And then note the one where she is stitching a Dog Bite ( she is medically trained, medical personnel were used in the Torture that went on).I found photos of her posing with EIGHT DIFFERENT CORPSES ?? !!! Her name is Sabrina Harmon, it is odd that so much focus was on Lyndie England and yet there was never ever any mention of Sabrina posing with the Corpses. General Karpinski on Countdown 4.22.09 admitted that the Contractors ORDERED the Mistreatment and torture of Prisoners at Abu Gahrib. The photo of the bloody floor is Abu Gharib, THIS is not permitted by the Geneva Conventions. The Bush Regime tried to defend this as Bad Apples in War Time, this is a LIE, this Was Ordered Torture, and in Dr. Mengale Fashion they used Medical personel to carry out Orders.
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This Post has details about the Corpses and What Happened.
These Photos are even worse, and clearly show the Abuse and Torture , and there should have been prosecutions on 2004 when these first became Public.
The Abu Ghahrib story broke May 2nd 2004, Rummy went to the Prison even....
The Haynes Memo details What was to be Done to Detainees....
History of Abu Ghahrib
This Report explains Some of the photos and WHO did what, and why one body was on Ice.
New Yorker Report has more on Sabrina Harmon and her "work" .

*** Jay Garner the First Director of Prisons in Iraq should also be called for Questioning What Happened on His Watch there first...He was replaced with Karpinski. He was hired by the Bush Regime our of Retirement THE SUMMER OF 2002 to go to Iraq,
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Do Watch Bush the President that Ordered this in the Videos below, and do read the Comments in this Post they contain Much More Information that I obtained about These Photos.

14 comments:

Fran said...

Remember Rumsfeld demanded not ALL thepictures from Abu Ghraib torture be released because It would put US soldiers at greater danger.

The photos were too gruesome to show?

I never believed the torture stopped-- they were just more strict about cameras in the facilities.

enigma4ever said...

you can find them still- just need to know where to look..

they are still out there..and more will pop up now....

click the links...

Human said...

The photos not circulated were of child rape. This was done in front of the parents to "get them to talk". The man on ice, if I remember correctly was a General in the Iaraqi Army. His son was kidnapped so as to force him to turn himself in. He did so. He was on ice so they could claim he died later, "when he came in".
Peace.

Travelingman Rick said...

The photos are disturbing, as is the one that I posted regarding torture. I cannot help but feel that we are at a defining moment in our history where we have to accept ownership for the maltreatment of these POW's.

This was often carried out by contractors, there is a great OP-Ed in todays NYTimes that you should read about this. I may post about it this morning if I get time.

Looking at these images makes me ashamed to be an American, we are supposed to be better than our enemies and in the end we were no better.

enigma4ever said...

Information on one corpse photo above, and yes the photos were taken with HER camera- her name is Sabrina Harmon.

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( Note the numbers of names in this report and HOW many knew about the Shower Room):::
These photos were taken using cameras owned by Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II and Spc. Sabrina Harman. They depict a dead Iraqi detainee, Manadel al-Jamadi, whose body had been stored by CIA personnel overnight in a shower room at Abu Ghraib. Two of the photos show Graner and Harman posing with al-Jamadi's corpse.

On the night of Nov. 4, 2003, someone in the military intelligence wing at Abu Ghraib wrote an entry in the military police logbook: "Shift change normal relief 1 OGA in 1B shower not to be used until OGA is moved out."

In military lingo, OGA stands for "other government agency" and denotes clandestine operations conducted independent of the military chain of command. At Abu Ghraib, OGA referred "almost exclusively" to the Central Intelligence Agency, according to the investigation by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay. According to logbook entries, OGA detainees sometimes accounted for roughly one-fifth of the 30 to 50 inmates included in the daily head count in the military intelligence wing.

Military police told investigators that they believed CIA personnel followed their own rule book. "You know these guys can kill people," Graner said in an April 2005 statement to the Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID). "The OGA guys do whatever they want. They don't exist."

Several Army and Department of Defense investigations found that the CIA presence may have contributed to the abuse committed by military police. "There was at least the perception, and perhaps the reality, that non-DOD agencies had different rules regarding interrogation and detention operations," an investigation report by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones concluded. "Such a perception encouraged soldiers to deviate from prescribed techniques."

A subsequent CID investigation showed that the OGA detainee entered into the logbook was Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi man who had been detained by the CIA. According to the investigation, al-Jamadi had been captured by a Navy SEAL team, which suspected him of involvement in an attack against the Red Cross. "He was reportedly resisting arrest, and a SEAL Team member butt-stroked him on the side of the head to suppress the threat he posed," the Fay report found. Two CIA operatives brought al-Jamadi to Abu Ghraib shortly after 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 4.

On April 7, 2004, Sgt. Walter A. Diaz, a military police soldier on shift at the time al-Jamadi arrived, gave a statement to the CIA Office of Inspector General (OIG), which was later obtained by Salon. He described al-Jamadi walking into the prison under his own power. Diaz said that al-Jamadi was wearing a shirt, but no pants, and appeared to be shivering from the cold. Diaz said he had helped to shackle al-Jamadi, at the direction of the OGA, to a window in the shower room in preparation for interrogation.

"They used two pairs of handcuffs and secured Al-Jamaidi [sic] in a standing position with his arms over and behind his head," the CIA OIG reported. Some time later, Diaz said the OGA agents asked him to return to the shower room to reposition al-Jamadi higher on the window. Diaz said he remembers the OGA interrogator telling him, "This guy doesn't want to cooperate." Diaz reported that at this point, the detainee's face was swollen and deformed, and he was bleeding from the mouth. Diaz said he also realized that al-Jamadi no longer had a pulse.

The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology later ruled al-Jamadi's death a homicide, caused by "blunt force injuries to the torso complicated by compromised respiration." According to the report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, al-Jamadi's death occurred less than an hour after his arrival at the prison.

Military police Capt. Christopher R. Brinson also gave a statement, on April 5, 2004, to the CIA OIG, which was obtained by Salon. He said he reported to the shower area on the morning of Nov. 4, 2003, where a CIA interrogator and a translator were waiting next to al-Jamadi's body. According to the interview with the CIA inspector general, Brinson told investigators that "the interrogator seemed shaken up and had said something like, 'The guy just died on us.'" At that point, according to Brinson, al-Jamadi was lying on the ground face up. One of his eyes was bloody, and there was a smudge of blood on the floor about the size of a man's palm. Brinson said there were ligature marks on al-Jamadi's wrists consistent with the handcuffs used during interrogation.

At the direction of an OGA official, Brinson said, he ordered the military police to put al-Jamadi's body in a bag and pack it with ice. The body was left in the shower room overnight, and a notation was made in the military logbook.

According to Graner's April 2005 testimony to CID investigators, shortly after he and Harman came on the night shift, he remembered noticing that an odd fluid was leaking out of the 1B shower into his office. He said he pulled a spare key he had to the shower room and opened the door. Graner said that there, on the far side of the room, he and Harman saw a sealed body bag leaking fluid across the floor. "We opened it up and looked at it," Graner said. "No one told us not to go into the shower."

Graner and Harman decided to pose for pictures with the body. At one point, Harman gave a thumbs-up sign above the Iraqi's mutilated face. A close-up shot was taken with Harman's camera of the dead man's thumb, which had bruising that Graner said he found "out of the ordinary." Graner said he cleaned up the leaking fluid with cleaning crystals and chlorine.

The next morning the CIA directed the removal of al-Jamadi from the prison by placing him on a stretcher and placing an I.V. in his arm, according to Brinson's statement. The goal, according to the Fay report, was to make it appear as if al-Jamadi "was only ill, thereby not drawing the attention of Iraqi guards and detainees."

Both Fay and Jones concluded that this working relationship between OGA and military personnel, without any formal written arrangement, directly put Army soldiers at risk of breaking the law. "It is clear that the interrogation practices of other government agencies led to a loss of accountability at Abu Ghraib," concluded Fay and Jones in a joint introduction to their reports. "Soldiers/Sailors/Airmen/Marines should never be put in a position that potentially puts them at risk for non-compliance with the Geneva Convention or Laws of Land Warfare."

The Department of Defense review of detainee operations led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger noted that the CIA conducted interrogations at a number of Department of Defense facilities. "In some facilities these interrogations were conducted in conjunction with military personnel, but at Abu Ghraib the CIA was allowed to conduct interrogations separately," the report found. The Fay report blamed part of this variation on Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the director of the Joint Interrogation Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib.

"LTC Jordan became fascinated with the 'Other Government Agencies,'" the Fay report said. "LTC Jordan allowed OGA to do interrogations without the presence of Army personnel." As a result, Fay concluded, Jordan "did not help the situation," contributing to a sense among soldiers and civilians that they did not need to follow Army rules.

On Feb. 24, 2004, Jordan gave a statement to Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba about the al-Jamadi death. Jordan said he had been instructed to work with OGA by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the head of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, because of Jordan's "clearance level back at Langley" -- a reference to CIA headquarters in Virginia. Jordan's military records show he is a specialist in tactical and strategic intelligence.

After al-Jamadi's death, Jordan told Taguba that he remembered Pappas saying, "Well if I go down, I'm not going down alone. The guys from Langley are going with me." To date, no criminal charges have been filed against any CIA personnel for the death of al-Jamadi.

Annette said...

I will repost my original about this in the morning.. I have a lot on this group that I did when I first blogged.. about how Charles is still in prison and all.. Salon had a lot of stuff on it.

enigma4ever said...

thanks...
yeah...
and there is stuff that we need to watch...and follow...
and blog...

keep up the good work...

enigma4ever said...

More on Iced Bodies:

Abu Ghraib.. the prison reminded him of something out of a “Mad Max” movie, explaining, “The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost.”

Muslim prisoners held in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were submerged in water-filled garbage cans with ice or put naked under cold showers in near-freezing rooms until they went into shock, Sgt. Javal Davis, who served with the 372nd Military Police Company there, has told a national magazine.

Davis, from the Roselle, N.J., area, said while stationed at the prison he also saw an incinerator with “bones in it” that he believed to be a crematorium and said some prisoners were starved prior to their interrogation.

Another soldier that had been stationed at Abu Ghraib, M.P. Sabrina Harman—who gained dubious fame for making a thumbs-up sign posing over the body of a prisoner she believed tortured to death—said the U.S. had imprisoned “women and children” on Tier 1B, including one child was as young as ten.

“Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father,” write co-authors Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris in the March 24th issue of The New Yorker magazine, which describes Abu Ghraib in a 14-page article titled “Exposure.”


They assert “the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration.”They add that the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented in the prison “were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.” (President Bush has insisted “We do not torture,” The Associated Press reported on November 7, 2005.)

Imprisoning suspects in a war zone, torturing and/or murdering them, and holding their wives and children as hostages, are all banned practices under international law. Some prisoners died from rocket attacks on the compound.

Harman said she didn’t like taking away naked prisoners’ blankets when it was really cold. “Because if I’m freezing and I’m wearing a jacket and a hat and gloves, and these people don’t have anything on and no blanket, no mattress, that’s kind of hard to see and do to somebody—even if they are a terrorist.” (Note: the prisoners were suspects, not terrorists, being held without due process on charges of which they were often ignorant and without legal representation.)

Harman said the corpse she posed with likely was murdered during interrogation although a platoon commander said he had died of a heart attack. Harman and another soldier, Corporal Charles Graner unzipped his body bag and took photos of him and “kind of realized right away that there was no way he died of a heart attack because of all the cuts and blood coming out of his nose.” Harman added, “His knees were bruised, his thighs were bruised by his genitals. He had restraint marks on his wrists. “

Asked why she posed making a “thumbs up” gesture over the corpse, Harman said she thought, “Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person. I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at them (the photos) I go, ‘Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.’”


The corpse, said to have died under interrogation by a CIA agent, was identified as that of Manadel al-Jamadi. An autopsy found he had succumbed to “blunt force injuries” and “compromised respiration” and his death was classified as a homicide, The New Yorker article said. The dead man was removed from the tier disguised as a sick prisoner, his arm taped to an IV, and rolled away on a gurney, apparently as authorities “didn’t want any of the prisoners thinking we were in there killing folks,” Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, Harman’s team leader, told the magazine.

Harman said she saw one naked prisoner with his hands bound behind his back raised higher than his shoulders. This forced him to bend forward with his head bowed and his weight suspended from his wrists and is known as a “Palestinian hanging” as it is said to be used in Israeli prisons, Gourevitch and Morris write.


In a letter to a friend Harman described “sleep deprivation” used on the prisoners: “They sleep one hour then we yell and wake them—make them stay up for one hour, then sleep one hour—then up etc. This goes on for 72 hours while we fuck with them. Most have been so scared they piss on themselves. Its sad.” On one occasion, she wrote, sandbags soaked in hot sauce were put over the prisoners’ heads.

The CIA agent that interrogated al-Jamadi at the time of his “heart attack” was never charged with a crime but Harman was convicted by court-martial in May, 2005, of conspiracy to maltreat prisoners, dereliction of duty and sentenced to six months in prison, reduced in rank, and given a bad-conduct discharge.

Five other soldiers involved in taking pictures were sentenced to terms of up to ten years in prison. Gourevitch and Morris write, “The only person ranked above staff sergeant to face a court-martial was cleared of criminal wrongdoing.”

Sergeant Javal Davis, describing Abu Ghraib generally, said the prison reminded him of something out of a “Mad Max” movie, explaining, “The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost.” The inside, he said, is “nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable: urine, feces, body rot. Their (prisoners’) rest rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn’t want to touch anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it — the place you would never ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy.”

When a delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross visited the prison in October, 2003, they were denied full access (contrary to international law) and, The New Yorker said, “what they were permitted to see and hear did not please them: men held naked in bare, lightless cells, paraded naked down the hallways, verbally and physically threatened, and so forth.”
The ICRC reported the prison was plagued by gross and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions, including physical abuses that left prisoners suffering from “incoherent speech, acute anxiety reactions…suicidal ideas.”

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based journalist and veteran public relations consultant who suspects the Bush regime may be bad for the image of the United States. He is founder of the Anti-War News Service. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)

Source

Frances11 said...

That is VERY disgust. Bush,Cheney,Rumsfeld and Rove are VERY shamefully. I really hate Republican,Rush,Hannity, and Fox News. I really sorry about people suffer in IRAQ. Look, USA are very brat and ego. Yes, I was VERY embarrass about USA and Bush and Cheney. I hopefully Bush and Cheney will get in jail but not know. I really do not like Bush and Cheney are VERY power. Wow.
I am Deaf. My wife is hearing My wife and I always interest about politics. We voted for Obama.

Thanks for sharing,
Roberto Lopez...

enigma4ever said...

Roberto,
to you and your wife, Please know that if we all write and call and let DC KNOW that this is NOT what we are as a Country- a People....that this must never ever happen again, that Bush and Cheney are Criminals and their Team must face Justice- if not here- the International Courts.

It is good that Obama has taken us as a Country in a New Direction....but Change will mean facing the Truth of what happened. We all will have to be strong and support Obama.

thank you again...

enigma4ever said...

From the Comments Section of Bloggers Against Torture Blogspot- which is not up anymore- a Comment from 2 years ago- read it carefully::::

"If you have read Alfred McCoy, A QUESTION OF TORTURE: CIA METHODS OF INTERROGATION FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE WAR ON TERROR, and Colin Ross, MD, THE CIA DOCTORS, you will know that the CIA has been perfecting methods of torture for some sixty years, methods which have "metastasized" to all agencies of our government and the military. These methods-- which produce amnesia, delusions, hallucinations and psychosis-- are clearly not aimed at the acquisition of intelligence in order to save lives but at the creation of what used to be called "Manchurian candidates"-- that is to say, they aim at implanting false memories and false identities in the subject's mind, making it possible for him confess to crimes he did not commit. The subject is first reduced through torture to a state of infantile dependence and then drugs and hypnosis are used to introduce the false memory. There is some evidence that the one member of the Guantánamo Six who has been allowed civilian lawyers (from the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR), Mohammed Al Qahtani, has been subjected to this process. CCR's fact sheet speaks among other things of him being forced to endure "repeated IVs at the hands of medical personnel during interrogation". Since being poked repeatedly with a hypodermic needle, though unpleasant, would hardly be an unbearable torture for grown man, one must wonder what was in those needles. From reading Ross' book, I am sure that it was a drug facilitating hypnosis, which is essential to the creation of false memories. Al Qahtani may have no recollection of this, for amnesia is introduced along with the false memory, and he will confess at the trial but his confession will be meaningless.
I think it is time for opponents of torture to stop arguing against it by saying that it "doesn't work". That argument gives too much credit to our opponents in assuming that they are torturing in order to obtain intelligence which could save lives. In fact, as was proven during the Cold War, in the CIA's experimental programs such as MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD, torture works very well for the evil purpose of reducing people to a state in which they will confess to anything, and that is the purpose for which it is being used in the so-called "War on Terror". We must be absolutely clear in our own minds on this fact above all: the worst terrorists in the world are the people in our own government who utilize such methods for such evil purposes, and we have far more to fear from them than from Al Qaeda. If we let this trial take place, the next victims will be ourselves."

Unknown said...

Wow, Enigma. I am just speechless, seeing all this evidence together. How the hell did the bush madministration think they could do this and get away with it?

OMG. I am completely horrified. I knew this went on (obviously) but I did NOT know about the children. That makes me feel like throwing up.

I can't even tell you the level of disgust and hatred I have at this moment for those fucking assholes involved. It's too much. Just too damn much.

Thank you for all your work, and resources. You are so SO wonderful to tackle this.

Frances11 said...

Saw Gen. Karpinski's interview with Keith Olberman. She was great. I agree that the higher-ups should be held responsible. But I think with the awful torture going on, some of the torturers need to be accountable. I don't understand Obama's hands-off attitude. I hope he comes around on this issue.
I sent email to my senators last week about the new credit card legislation asking them not to block it (I live in a red state-yuck!) so I've got 2 republicans here. Will send emails on this issue.
Thanks for the info,
Roberto Lopez

enigma4ever said...

Roberto::
my sense is that over the next month we will learn alot more- my sense is that we do not know enough....

thank you so much or being proactive and communicating with your elected officials.....keep it up...so sorry you live in a red state...have hope- alot of those states are turning blue....( ours did )