Obama will use foreigners to carry out torture.

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The distinguished author Allan Nairn , on 25 January 2009, explained about The torture ban that doesn’t ban torture

Among the points made:

1. When Obama declared that 'the United States will not torture', he was not telling the full story.

2. Obama’s Executive Order only bans some, not all, US officials from torturing.

3. The US government can continue to arrange for people to be tortured overseas.

4. The US has been in the habit of using foreigners to carry out most of its acts of torture.

These foreigners, from Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Nigeria, the Philippines etc., work with US intelligence agencies.

El Salvador 1981 www.tomgrossmedia.com/NewYorkTimes.htm


5. Obama's Executive Order merely relates to treatment of "an individual in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government, or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States, in any armed conflict…"

This means that it does not prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of "armed conflict," which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren’t in armed conflict.

6. The USA can still pay, train, equip and guide foreign torturers, and see to it that they, and their US patrons, don’t face local or international justice.

7. This is a return to the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more torture than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.

8. In Guatemala under Bush Sr. and Clinton, the US backed the army’s G-2 death squad which kept comprehensive files on dissidents and then electroshocked them or cut off their hands.

9. It was a similar story in Bush Sr. and Clinton’s Haiti where the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) helped launch the terrorist group FRAPH, the CIA paid its leader, and FRAPH itsef laid the machetes on Haitian civilians, torturing and killing as US proxies.

10. In today’s Thailand, special police and militaries get US gear and training for things like “target selection” and then go out and torture Thai Malay Muslims in the rebel deep south, and also sometimes (mainly Buddhist) Burmese refugees and exploited northern and west coast workers.

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