Makes you feel good to be an American.
The suspect in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen said he was tortured into admitting responsibility for that attack and others, according to a hearing transcript the Pentagon released Friday.
Abd al Rahim Hussein Mohammed al Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian detainee held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, denied participating in the Cole attack.
Al Nashiri said he “was tortured into confession, and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped questioning him,” according to a statement read at his hearing. “Also, the detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get [it] to stop.”
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Defense Department would investigate al Nashiri’s torture allegation if the military was holding him at the time. If another agency was detaining him then, Whitman said that agency would be responsible for the investigation.
This, and all the other similar recent examples, is rather poignant in view of the skepticism greeting the sincerity of “confessions” by the UK sailors captured by Iran, who rolled without even having been tortured yet. Wussies.
One thing that I will never forgive the Bush administration for is making is so that, when I hear a claim like this, I can’t immediately dismiss it as propaganda, even if I believe the person claiming they’ve been tortured would happily lie about it.
Crap like this makes it damned hard to “support the troops.”
Don’t be so quick to crap on the troops — we might not have tortured him. Once upon a time it was easy to dismiss claims like that, because of course the US doesn’t do torture. Or at least, we didn’t, then.
Crap like this makes it damned hard to “support the troops.”
Add this to the requirement in the plea bargain for David Hicks that he not make any claims that he was mistreated while in American custody, and you have a strong suspicion that there was torture involved.
With respect to Hicks, if he really hadn’t been tortured and he made statements that he had been, he could have been sued for slander, so it wouldn’t have been necessary to include that provision in the plea bargain. The fact that it was one of the provisions of the deal suggests strongly that there was not just smoke, but fire.
And the United States no longer gets the benefit of the doubt on these matters, because of Bush and his insane, asinine policies. And Abu Gonzales, too, with his notion of the “quaint” Geneva Conventions. May they rot in hell, or in jail.