[NYTr] Bush, the Great Torturer

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Agencia Cubana de Noticias (ACN) - Jan 7, 2008
http://ainch.ain.cu/mailman/listinfo/ingles


Bush, the Great Torturer

By Nestor Núñez
AIN Special Service

Yes, Like it or not, the George W. Bush government has won itself 
without a doubt the dirty name of torturer.

Bush and his closest allies, at the same time those with the least 
ethics, planned and ordered the violence against those detained in the 
so-called anti-terrorist crusade beyond acceptable norms. The scandal 
in the Iraqi and Afghanistan prisons and in the illegal US naval base 
in Guantanamo are still talked about and will echo in the heads of the 
representatives of the empire as a indicator of their lack of scruples 
and the shameful way in which they have lied to the nation, calling it 
"land of the free and with total rights."

But the stories are not only restricted to the cells of Baghdad or 
Kabul or in the cages erected on Cuban land taken by force by the US 
government.  Because the White House is also the promoter of other 
forms of torture called the "extraordinary rendition program" -- that
is to say the equivalent to kidnapping suspects in any part of the
world, and secretly sguttling them from border to border -- and the
application of all forms of physical and psychological means to force
them to "confess". 

Such the case of Yemen citizen Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah who,
together with another three victims, filed a recent lawsuit against the
US Jeppesen Dataplan Inc company, a subsidiary of the Boeing
Corporation, and in charge of what has been called "torture flights,"
that is to say, by orders of the CIA, the transfer of "enemy
combatants" from one geographic location to another. 

US journalist Amy Goodman interviewed Bahmilah, who was detained
in his home at the end of October, 2003 and was immediately tortured.
With the threat that his wife would be raped and his family attacked,
he accepted the false accusation of being an Al Qaeda member. He was
later transferred to another country which he believed was Afghanistan,
where CIA specialists once again applied violent measures against him
and he was informed that his case would be evaluated in Washington to
determine his future. 

Only on May 5th, 2005, after the torture sessions that were taped by
CIA agents and long negotiations by his family with the International
Red Cross and other institutions, was he returned to Yemen and later
released in 2006 without any charges against him or the least
explanation regarding his imprisonment. 

Bashmilah's case is not, of course, the only one or the last.  The
number of people who are in the same position, in the hands of the
terror machine led by the Bush government, is not known. Torture is,
meanwhile, another of the "horrors" in the file of the man that will
have to leave the White House at the end of the year, with an
unprecedented record of unpopularity and incompetence.