People involved with interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba were instructed by the Pentagon to destroy handwritten notes taken at interrogations. The reason given to destroy this evidence: The interrogators might be called upon to testify about whether prisoners at Guantanamo who would go on trial for their alleged crimes had been forced into confessions through abuse and coercion.
These instructions didn’t just come in the form of a memo, or an order from one officer to a subordinate. They were written into a Pentagon manual for interrogators. You can’t say this time that the problem is just a few bad apples.
Anyone who has a basic understanding of how things are supposed to work under American law know what’s wrong with this action. Maybe not everybody has a good understanding of the law, however, so for them, here’s a summary:
1) It’s a coverup of evidence, with the purpose of manipulating the result of a criminal trial.
2) It suggests that there is something to cover up – abusive and coercive interrogations of prisoners (pssst – it’s called torture)
3) Torture is a war crime
4) The torture violates guaranteed protections for anyone in the custody of the American government against cruel and unusual punishment, against the forced self-incrimination, and against unfair trial
This news exposes a thorough and profound criminal conspiracy, and a conspiracy within the military, and possibly all the way up to the White House, to subvert the Constitution of the United States of America. These are high, high crimes.
Will Congress DO anything about it?
My guess is that since the majority of the “players” in Washington work for the big business behind the war, nothing will get done to curb the military/industrial rape we’re experiencing until we elect someone at the top and a majority in both houses to work for US to CHANGE these bad decisions and policies.
Waiting in the wings for whomever gets elected is one giant bag of shit: enormous financial sector problem (which is being delayed by Wall Street and Bernanke), huge economic downturn with its resultant loss of jobs, continued rises in costs for energy, food, and most everything else (including medical care), a foreign policy in shambles, fractured relationships with allies and others, an ugly “bullying” image, and government agencies that don’t work for the citizenry and in some cases work FOR the corporate sector almost exclusively, not to mention the continuing debt load and trade imbalances.
i’m sure i missed a few things.
It’ll be “interesting.”