The US does not torture

New rules to misrule

I would not know, but I would leave this to the great legal minds and dons that visit my blog, suppose that is a branch of legal jurisprudence that is called military law.

This is because outlawed outpost of Guantanamo Bay has presented a Military Commissions manual to be used for trying detainees in Camp Delta, the contents of which appear to satisfy elements of civil law and in others indicate a departure from standard and accepted legal practices where the threshold of evidence is as low as hear-say.

The evidence is awash with classified monikers that the patchwork of evidence the defence would have to work with would leave enough holds to make every trial unacceptably loaded against the accused bringing to close to just better than a kangaroo court.

Now, I am no legal expert, the views might differ, no so much by the letter of the law but by political persuasion where the right would contend that these provisions are the best that can be offered with regards to the sensitivity of the issues at hand and the left would contend that premise of innocence until tried and proven guilty is lost.

Some military lawyers already have misgivings about this manual which in the circumstances might have its progeny with the military junta of Myanmar, OK! That was a bit given to histrionics, my point is, and justice should not only be done, it should verifiably be seen to be done properly.

US does not torture

The other part of the evidence that would be most interesting to every civil and human rights activist is the implication that.

+ Some evidence might have been obtained under torture

+ Some evidence was obtained by coercion and is admissible as long as it was obtained before December 2005

The question then is, have these prisoners been tortured? They most certainly have, the spectacle of Abu Ghraib was an excerpt of the “Practical Guide to Obtaining Information” introduced by the commandant of Guantanamo Bay.

As for coercion, we can presume dunking which is the deliberate deprivation of air by pushing the full face into a liquid was not torture till at least December 2005 – avoiding gruesome detail – an activity that gets a full thumbs-up from vice-President Cheney, sorry, the less aggressive word is “water-boarding”, you would be forgiven for thinking it was as hip as skate-boarding.

Yes, “water-boarding” is a variant of dunking where rather than push the face into a liquid, facing upward and the body inclined with the head at the lower point, the gardener simulates a torrent of rain over the face that the gag-reflex creates a drowning sensation as the person almost enters the delirium of death.

However, we must hear the President out, “We do not torture”, he protests, they only use vital tools of elevated persuasion – I will not be good for politics, not with my mastery of semantics.

It would appear my concept of torture is hardly coercion in the eyes of those at the forefront of the war on terror in America. Judge for yourself, as we have been told, the US does not torture.