Money – Songs and Poems Selection

Eric Holder opens CIA detainee death inquiry

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13984912

01 Jul 2011

The US is to open criminal inquiries into the deaths of two CIA detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003. Gul Rahman died in November 2002 at a CIA prison in Afghanistan and Manadel al-Jamadi died at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. Al-Jamadi is said to have died at Abu Ghraib prison, where he arrived wounded after a fight with US Special Forces in 2003.

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

In November 2003 an Iraqi detainee by the name of Manadel al-Jamadi was brought to the prison by Navy Seals and interrogated by a CIA agent. Jamadi was “tortured to death.” But the cause of his death was concealed in a most unusual way.

Al-Jamadi was a so-called high-value target for interrogation because he allegedly supplied explosives to insurgents. A team of Navy SEALS captured him at his home outside Baghdad on November 4, 2003, at 2AM. He ended up with a black eye, a cut on his face, and perhaps half a dozen fractured ribs following a violent struggle. The SEALs turned al-Jamadi over to CIA custody at Abu Ghraib for interrogation, led by Mark Swanner. This CIA operative, accompanied by a translator, took al-Jamadi into a holding cell in the prison, stripped him naked, and began yelling at him to tell where the weapons were.

Swanner told the MPs to take the prisoner to Tier 1 Alpha, into the shower room for interrogation. Two of the MPs were ordered to shackle the prisoner to the wall, even though he was now totally passive. They were told to hang him from his arms in a torture position known as “Palestine Hanging.” [First practiced during the Spanish Inquisition, when it was known as strappado.] After they left the room, one MP recalled, “we heard a lot of screaming.” Less than an hour later, al-Jamadi was dead. When the MPs were told by Swanner to take the dead man down from the wall, “blood came gushing out of his nose and mouth, as if a faucet had been turned on.”

Now the problem for the CIA was what to do with the victim’s body. Captain Donald Reese, the MP commander, and Colonel Thomas Pappas, the MI commander, were alerted to this “unfortunate incident” on their shift. Al-Jamadi was kept in the shower room until next morning, packed in ice and bound with an IV into the “Ice Man’s” arm and had him carried out of the prison on a stretcher as if he had had a heart attack. All evidence was destroyed, and there was no paper trail because al-Jamadi had never officially been registered.

On Killing Series

On Killing by LtCol Dave Grossman, 2009, Excerpts

The ultimate fear and horror in most modern lives is to be raped or beaten, to be physically degraded in front of our loved ones, to have our family harmed and the sanctity of our homes invaded by aggressive and hateful intruders. In rape the psychological harm usually far exceeds the physical injury. The trauma of rape involves minimal fear of death or injury; far more damaging is the impotence, shock, and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being.

Throughout history women have been the greatest single group of victims of this environment process. Women have been defiled, debased, and dehumanized for the aggrandizement of others. Rape is a very important part of the process of dominating and dehumanizing an enemy; and this process of mutual empowering and bonding at the expense of others is exactly what occurs during gang rapes. In war, empowerment and bonding through such gang rapes often occur on a national level.

Gang rapes and gang or cult killings in times or peace and war are not “senseless violence.” They are instead powerful acts of group bonding and criminal enabling that, quite often, have a hidden purpose of promoting the wealth, power, or vanity of a specific leader or cause at the expense of the innocent.