The US Believes It’s Okay to Threaten Teenagers with Rape

/in , /by

Carol Rosenberg tweets:

Omar Khadr’s military judge just ruled that ALL of his confessions from Afghanistan to #Guantanamo will go to trial. None suppressed.

The Toronto-born captive’s defense had wanted his interrogations excluded on grounds they were not voluntary. Col. Patrick Parrish disagreed

#Khadr‘s war court judge also agreed to use at trial a homemade video of the 15-year-old allegedly building, planting mines in Afghanistan

So in spite of the fact that Joshua Claus threatened Omar Khadr with rape and potentially death, our military “justice” system does not believe that taints Khadr’s confession.

So nice to see our Kangaroo Court is living up to billing. It shames the US terribly in the process.

Update: it sounds like Khadr’s lawyer takes the same lesson from this I do:

Omar #Khadr‘s Canadian lawyer, Edney, calls Army judge “a disgrace” for admitting the Canadian’s admissions as a 15-year-old at trial.

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  1. BoxTurtle says:

    What a shock! Obviously, Col. Parrish has his orders.

    Once this gets in front of a real judge, that decision will be revisited.

    You would think America could be a better job of maintaining the appearence of fairness than this. He could have rejected the confessions, then introduced the evidence via hearsay from some heavily decorated soldiers and a CIA asset behind a curtain.

    Boxturtle (Can we please stop this farce and proceed directly to the hanging?)

    • BoxTurtle says:

      We haven’t gone any lower with this. We appear to have actually used rape in Abu G.

      All we’re doing here is covering it up, like a good housecat. Dig a (black) hole. Crap in it. Cover it up. Walk away and deny all knowledge ’cause all cats think their crap don’t stink. Wait for a human to come and clean it up.

      Boxturtle (ya know, the parallels are striking)

        • Jeff Kaye says:

          Maybe, but… from a Talk Left posting on Aug. 6, 2006:

          The LA Times today reports on newly released Pentagon documents showing atrocities committed by U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War were far greater in number and scope than previously acknowledged.

          The files are part of a once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known. The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre.

          ….The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.

          The Times article by Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson also notes:

          One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.

          Investigators determined that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These “founded” cases were referred to the soldiers’ superiors for action.

          Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed and just 23 convicted, the records show.

          More on prisoners (Richard Pyle at AP, 5/6/04):

          The last time [before Abu Ghraib] Pentagon officials were at such a loss to explain unsoldierly conduct involving prisoners was in 1969, when eight U.S. Special Forces members, including their commander in Vietnam, were accused of murdering a Vietnamese double agent by shooting him and dumping his chained corpse from a boat. The sensational “Green Beret Murder Case” ended before trial when then-Defense Secretary Melvin Laird dropped the charges.

          Another major uproar in Vietnam concerned the “tiger cages” at Con Son island prison, where political prisoners incarcerated by the U.S.-backed Saigon regime were confined and allegedly tortured. While there was no direct U.S. involvement in the reported abuse, the cages themselves had been built by RMK-BRJ, a Texas military contractor and antecedent to the Halliburton Co. subsidiary KBR.

          For the record, the article notes that 29 Americans, too, were subjected to “tiger cage” treatment by the North Vietnamese.

          As for the use of rape by the U.S. military, I find almost every quote worth mentioning too graphic and depressing to quote here, but interested readers can study, State Rape: Representations of Rape in Viet Nam, by Karen Stuhldreher, Political Science Department, University of Washington, Seattle

        • Jeff Kaye says:

          God, one could write an encyclopedia of the awful crimes the U.S. committed in Southeast Asia. I know the other side wasn’t always so humane either. But there was one outstanding difference… it was their country and we were the invaders!

          Same in Afghanistan. Same in Iraq.

  3. GregB says:

    Sadly, after reading about this type of conduct that is now the order of the day, I am starting to think that the U.S. deserves to have its roads dug up, it’s libraries closed and its light turned off.

  4. skdadl says:

    I’m sure the Lurking Mod would take out anything I could say right now about Col Parrish, except that this decision is monstrous and unspeakable.

  5. Jeff Kaye says:

    Torture Nation. Get used to it. This is the nation we live in. It will take a hell of a lot of social upheaval to change things at this point. I’m not very into the idea of instability, but I will welcome it and the sacrifices it will entail, because I wish my children and their children to have a better world.

    The only other compensatory thought about this future time of social struggle, that it might come soon enough that criminals like Claus, enablers like Parrish, and the politicians that sponsor them, will find themselves on the other side of the razor-lined fence someday.

  6. bmaz says:

    They have to rule that way; if they do anything else, the house of cards built upon torture crumbles not just with Khadr, but with every tribunal to come. And it is especially critical to ratify and normalize the conduct with Khadr because of his juvenile/child soldier status.

    It is who America is now.

    • timbo says:

      It’s sad, pathetic, and maddening, how low the Republic has fallen under the craven. These are not the folks who could have composed our Republic, let alone improved on it. There has not been a single significant proposal under the Obama administration that would drastically improve this country and its moral esteem in the eyes of the world, let alone the world itself.

  7. Jeff Kaye says:

    And while everyone’s in the mood, the Center for Justice and Accountability has told its supporters that the complaint against Major John Leso, one of the BSCT torturers at Guantanamo was turned down because supposedly the NY State Office of Professional Discipline lacked jurisdiction.

    The CJA complaint against Leso can be read here. The NY OPD dismissal is not online yet. In the tortured logic of the OPD, Leso’s conduct did not constitute the practice of psychology, which they only define as helping people. Hence, they have no jurisdiction over Leso’s behavior at Guantanamo as supposedly it was not the practice of psychology. The fact that the military demanded a psychology license as a prerequisite for the position — and Leso was a military psychologist, who worked at Walter Reed Hospital before transfer to Gitmo — is not evidence that “some or all of the activities performed for that employer constitute the practice of a profession.”

    Under these criteria, you could murder someone and not be held responsible for loss of license, as murder is not the practice of psychology, as defined in the NY state code.

    Quick action by the New York State Office of Professions, heh? The complaint was only filed about a month ago. The decision is signed by former district attorney and Democrat, Louis J. Catone.

    The outrages mount up.

  8. MrWhy says:

    Canada is complicit in this. The Harper government has fought tooth and claw to avoid repatriation of Khadr.

    • Jeff Kaye says:

      Yes, the Canadian government (though not all of it, and not every court) is doing its best to prove it’s a great junior partner to the Americans.

      Cui bono?

  9. perris says:

    you know, we were yelling and screaming for an impeachment when and because bush was doing this

    interesting how much more we put up with obama since he is on our “team”

  10. youmayberight says:

    Article 15 of the Convention Against Torture: “Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.”