Torture and Detention
Frequently Asked Questions (scroll down for article archives and further resources)
"If anyone acts like they don't know their government is torturing people on a widespread and systematic scale, they are choosing NOT to know. We have to continue to lead people to act against this -- going out to people, into classes, to institutions, and on worldcantwait.org. Too many people have learned to accept this, there is not nearly enough opposition to the revelations about these top level torture meetings -- but this is something that can change quickly if a beginning core acts with moral clarity..." -Debra Sweet, Director of World Can't Wait
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Torture + Silence = Complicity!
Act Now to Stop Torture!
Has Obama put an end to torture, rendition, and indefinite detention? Facts you need to know:
1. Obama admits Bush officials tortured, but refuses to prosecute them.
Cheney has bragged about authorizing water boarding of detainees. In January 2009, Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, that he believed water boarding was torture. Torture is a violation of Geneva Conventions. The Obama administration is, therefore, not only morally, but legally, required to prosecute Bush Regime officials for torture.
2. Under Obama, the U.S. is still holding detainees without charges or trial.
During the campaign Obama declared habeas corpus to be “the foundation of Anglo-American law.”Habeas corpus is your right to challenge your detention. It is a 900-year- old right. Without habeas corpus there are no restraints on a government’s powers to detain and punish.
Contrary to his rhetoric, the Obama administration is continuing the Bush Regime’s policies of denying prisoners habeas corpus rights and has even adopted the same arguments made by Bush. In February 2009, the Obama administration declared in Federal Court that it would not grant habeas corpus rights to detainees in U.S. custody in Bagram, Afghanistan.
In March 2009 Obama’s Justice Department claimed that Guantanamo prisoners who were detained before June 2008 had no habeas corpus rights. On May 21, 2010 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the Obama administration, holding that three prisoners who are being held by the U. S. at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
3. Don’t be fooled just because Obama isn’t using the term “enemy combatant”
The Obama administration will no longer use the term “enemy combatant,” but it’s a change in name only: in the same court filing in which it made this announcement, Obama’s Justice Department made clear that it would continue to detain prisoners at Guantanamo without charge. As the NY Times put it:
“[T]he [Obama] Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”
Meanwhile, Obama’s executive orders do not ban indefinite detention. In addition, at his confirmation hearing, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder said: “There are possibly many other people who are not going to be able to be tried but who nevertheless are dangerous to this country… We’re going to have to try to figure out what we do with them.” Holder suggested prisoners could be detained for the length of their war of terror which, as we know, has no set end point.
4. Guantanamo is still open. The prison at Bagram is growing and torture is being committed.
According to Reuters, abuse of prisoners worsened shortly after the election of Obama:
“Abuses began to pick up in December 2008 after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike.”
Earlier this year Scott Horton reported in Harper’s Magazine on three murders of detainees in 2006 at Guantanamo that the military tried to cover up as suicides. More is coming out about torture at Bagram Detention Center in Afghanistan. Recently Andy Worthington reported on the detention and torture of three teenagers in his article, “Torture and the ‘Black’Prison,” or What Obama is Doing at Bagram (Part One).”
On June 7, 2010 Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque wrote that under the Bush Regime medical personnel experimented on detainees to prove that the techniques used did not constitute torture. The chilling history of Nazi medical experimentation on those in concentration camps lurks in this revelation. (http://chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/1976- echoes-of-mengele-medical-experiments-torture-and- continuity-in-the-american-gulag.html)
This is a violation of Geneva Conventions and there is evidence that these experiments are going on under Obama.
5. Obama is continuing rendition.
During his confirmation hearing, new CIA director Leon Panetta made it clear the Obama administration will continue rendition. Rendition is the practice of kidnapping somebody in one country and shipping them to another country for detention. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said “Rendition is a violation of sovereignty. It’s a kidnapping. It’s force and violence…Once you open the door to rendition, you’re opening the door, essentially, to a lawless world.”
Obama supporters have attempted to draw the distinction between this practice and “extraordinary rendition,” defined as the practice of transferring somebody to another country knowing that they will be tortured. During his confirmation hearing, Leon Panetta said that under the Bush administration, “There were efforts by the CIA to seek and to receive assurances that those individuals would not be mistreated.” So Panetta is embracing the practices of the Bush Regime by continuing rendition!
Panetta then added, “I will seek the same kind of assurances that those individuals will not be mistreated.” (emphasis added)
Articles on Torture and Detention:
How Obama's New Rules Keep Torture Intact: The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture
- Category: Torture and Detention
Don't Forget Guantanamo
- Category: Torture and Detention
By Andy Worthington
National Call-in Days to Release 17 Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo
- Category: Torture and Detention
World Can't Wait endorsed the 100 Days Campaign to Close Guantanamo.
We received this action alert from Witness Against Torture.
BACKGROUND
The Uighurs are members of an intensely persecuted minority in western China and were sold to U.S. forces by bounty hunters. Most of them were cleared by the military of any offense in 2003. In September 2008, the U.S. government formally acknowledged that none of them is an enemy combatant. At present, all three branches of the government have acknowledged that the Uighurs should be released. All 17 have been exonerated by both military and habeas courts, and members of Congress have called for their release to the only place they can go: the United States.
Holding that their continued imprisonment was unlawful, U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled in October 2008 that they should be present in his court for release into the United States with appropriate conditions. Detailed arrangements to welcome and support the seventeen men had by then been made by religious and refugee organizations. Further commitment of support has been provided by the Uighur community of well established U.S. citizens in the D.C. area.
Obama Lawyers Set to Defend Yoo
- Category: Torture and Detention
By Josh Gerstein
Next week, Justice Department lawyers are set to ask a San Francisco federal judge to throw out a lawsuit brought against Yoo by Jose Padilla, a New York man held without charges on suspicion of being an Al Qaeda operative plotting to set off a “dirty bomb.”
The suit contends that Yoo’s legal opinions authorized Bush to order Padilla’s detention in a Navy brig in South Carolina and encouraged military officials to subject Padilla to aggressive interrogation techniques, including death threats and long-term sensory deprivation.
Refuting Cheney’s Lies: The Stories of Six Prisoners Released from Guantánamo
- Category: Torture and Detention

Dangerous Executive Orders
- Category: Torture and Detention
By David Swanson
The Center for Constitutional Rights has expressed concern that President Obama's executive order banning torture may contain a loophole. But no president has any right to declare torture legal or illegal, with or without loopholes. And if we accept that presidents have such powers, even if our new president does good with them, then loopholes will be the least of our worries.
Binding U.S. Law Requires Prosecutions for Those who Authorize Torture
- Category: Torture and Detention
By Glen Greenwald
Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child
- Category: Torture and Detention
by Andy Worthington
Ex-Guardsman denounces Gitmo
- Category: Torture and Detention
By Ryan Loew / Lansing State Journal
Seven Years of Guantánamo, Seven Years of Torture and Lies
- Category: Torture and Detention
San Francisco Protest Against Torture on 7th Anniversary of Guantanamo
- Category: Torture and Detention
By Elizabeth Fernandez, San Francisco Chronicle
Donning orange jumpsuits and black hoods, dozens of demonstrators in San Francisco today urged the immediate closure of the American detention and interrogation camp at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay.
Joined by peace activist Cindy Sheehan, the protesters also called for an end to torture of detainees in U.S. custody.
"It's important that the U.S. not engage in acts of terror," said Joe McAleese of Pleasant Hill. "To me, it is immoral."