BOVARD

Obama’s Torture Regime?

4:09 pm | Afghanistan | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bush | Lying | Obama | Rule of Law | Torture | War crimes

Spencer Ackerman of Wired has an excellent piece today on the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command’s secret jails in Afghanistan. Ackerman notes:

Human rights groups have been sounding the alarm about these detention centers since 2009. Detainees who claim to have gone through the sites have told them about abuses inside the so-called “Black Jails” ranging from sleep deprivation to punching. Human Rights First’s Daphne Eviatar (disclosure: a former colleague of mine at the Washington Independent) tells Dozier that inmates at the JSOC sites are “forced to strip naked, then kept in solitary confinement in windowless, often cold cells with lights on 24 hours a day.” All of that is supposed to be banned under Obama’s January 2009 executive order on interrogations.

Ackerman notes that “JSOC units have run torture chambers before. In Iraq, JSOC ran the infamous Camp Nama, whose motto was ‘No Blood, No Foul.’” Unfortunately, the Democratic controlled Senate has a “see-no-evil approach to torture now that a Democratic president runs the show,” according to Ackerman. His article draws for a penetrating expose by the Associated Press’s Kimberly Dozier.

I assume that these articles will get little attention in Washington. Obama supporters are too busy hyping the president’s idealism to stoop to notice a few technicalities about interrogation methods.