Tag Archives: Felix Rodriguez

US use of torture on POWs should stop

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The U.S. has a long history of torturing its POWs. Torture of POWs is used by many other countries. However its use is denied by many U.S. authorities or government officials. The definition of torture put simply is to cause pain, emotionally, physically, or psychologically. Torture is used to terrify enemies, and hardly ever gains information.

Some examples of the U.S. A. military use of torture on P.O.W.s

Che Guevara
Che Guevara was murdered on October 9, 1967 in Bolivia. He was tortured and killed by Bolivian soldiers trained and equipped by CIA operatives. Che was told he was going to be killed by Felix Rodriguez. He was shot in the legs several times, and put into a dirty schoolhouse. His arms and feet were tied while he lay in the dirt. He lay by the bodies of his dead Guerrilla fighters. The USA tried to cover up his deliberate murder by shooting him in the legs to make it look like he died in battle. He was never given a trial. He was shot nine times.

Philippines war
The Philippine war was a war fought by Filipino revolutionaries and the USA. Waterboarding was one of the main techniques used by the CIA. It was used on Extra Judiciar prisoners.The department of Justice authorized this. Sleep Deprivation and de-sensorizing among other things was used. The use of solitary confinement and confusion is used frequently, prisoners are made to wear blindfolds to cause confusion and panic. Medical treatment is also refused. Bribery, and threats are used to force a confession.

Korean War
The Korean war was fought between South and North Korea. The US occupied the south, while the soviet troops occupied the North.

Vietnam War
Prisoners were put in Tiger cages. Lime was dumped on them, and water was dumped on them after.

Central America
In Nicaragua Somoza tortured people by putting them in cages with lions. Somoza was a dictator backed up by the US military. In Argentina children of communist parents were stolen, while their parents were tortured and killed.

School of The Americas
The CIA distributes an interrogation manual which shows torture techniques to use during interrogations. The manual was used by the CIA to train US-supported Latin American militaries at this school.

Abu Ghraib Prison
Torture has been recently used in Abu Ghraib prison, located in Iraq. Some of the main forms of torture used here are rape, sodomy, water boarding among many others. Military Intelligence has been present during these procedures, and highly encourages it. A prison guard said prisoners receive snake bites for minimum mis-behavior. In the AD. seg units prisoners are dumped into poop and pee.

Afghanistan war
The US invaded, tortured and suffocated thousands of POWs to death.

Officials claim that Torture must be used to gain information. During the presidency of George W. Bush some U.S government officials said that they believed water boarding was not a form of torture. In 2002 the Office of Legal Counsel stated that water boarding wasn’t a form of torture. The OLC said that the reason water boarding was not thought of as a torture was that “In order for pain or suffering to rise to the level of torture, that statute requires it to be severe & water boarding did not cause severe pain or suffering either physically or mentally.” Even though water boarding causes the victim to believe he/she is being drowned.

Torture hardly ever gains information but instead is used to terrorize people so they don’t resist, or to force a confession. Torture is used in interrogations by cops, being put in handcuffs that are to tight is also a less painful form of torture. During the st. Patrick Parade a couple of years ago the police stopped the parade and threw older people on the ground, an old lady was dragged across the pavement and put into handcuffs. She died a couple of months later.

People say that the US doesn’t torture people, because supposedly it is better than that.The fact of the matter is that the USA is the biggest user of torture in the world. It has and will continue to torture its POWs while everyone here says the USA government and military does not torture and has never tortures POWs.

Colo. College guest Donald Gregg: the man who hired the man who killed Che

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He administered OPERATION PHOENIX during the Vietnam War, the CIA counterinsurgency operation which sought to pacify Vietnam with the targeted assassination of thousands of potential insurgents. For Vice President George H. W. Bush’s office, he coordinated the funding of the illegal US covert war against Central America, aka, the IRAN-CONTRA scandal. Yes, he supervised both Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, each of CIA-state-sponsored-terrorism fame. But Colorado College introduced Donald P. Gregg only as former national security adviser and ambassador to Korea. And CC gave Gregg an honorary degree — with not a peep from the know-nothings they laud as their exemplary students.

I attended because I was insulted by the lecture’s title: “What do Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jung Il have in common?” the speaker further slandered the father of modern Vietnam by indulging to associate another villain to the list, that of Muammar al-Gaddafi. But gracefully Gregg acquitted himself by explaining that Ho Chi Minh had been misjudged, and thus perhaps there is call to engage even our most despicable adversaries in dialog, lest we repeat our mistaken policies, as Gregg believes we are doing in Afghanistan.

Not much objectionable with that. Actually, you can read Gregg’s address, it’s virtually word for word the introduction he wrote for a 2009 study of the CIA’s unheralded successes in Vietnam. To his credit, Gregg does not echo the ongoing theme that Vietnam was winnable.

Relating his more recent expertise about Korea, Gregg offers that Kim Jong Il is more than your common loon. Rather, Il is of unusually high intelligence, underrated by the US, driven despotic by his isolation.

Or driven mad by our offense, I’d add. I’m surprised Kim Jong Il tolerates that we name our ambassador in Seoul as the Ambassador to Korea, rather than to South Korea. How dare US-occupied Korea assert to represent the national identity of Korea? As in Vietnam, it’s the north doing the heavy lifting toward inevitable unification.

Gregg nearly had me convinced he was reformed until he added a forth bogeyman for comparison, Iran.

Iran mustn’t get nukes, etc, etc, Ahmadinejad unpredictable, can’t be trusted, etc.

Ho Chi Minh had been demonized Gregg said, based on a wrong-headed anti-Communist domino-theory mindset, yet Gregg is perfectly willing to be stuck to Capitalism’s current mindset against Islam.

Gregg made such winning arguments for tolerance, respect, diplomacy, and the integrity of the best intelligence officers, but isn’t that precisely the neo-liberal spiel? The CC audience lapped it up.

Here was the closest most of us will ever get to someone connected to the murder of Che Fucking Guevara, icon of the world struggle against Western oppression. That’s explaining the obvious, but I’d add, Che’s heroic stature is no more diminished even if only known as a t-shirt image to this crowd.

School-of-the-Americas-trained Rodriguez knew the stature of the hero he was cutting down, to this day he brags about wearing Che’s watch as a keepsake. Rodriguez returned from this assignment with a piece of notebook paper wrapped around the tobacco left in Guevara’s pipe.

Donald Gregg didn’t kill Guevara, but we might have asked him how many youthful Viet Cong he killed or had tortured, etc, how many aspiring Nicaraguan freedom fighters, or Burmese victims, or boys and girls of yet to be named regions, of the CIA’s yet unrevealed adventures in extrajudicial preemptive death-dealings.

All of this may be blood under the bridge, except that the undercurrent of this elder statesman’s lecture tour is beating the drum for confrontation with Iran.