Senator accuses general of misleading Congress over torture
Published: June 17, 2009
Updated 5 months ago
Although General Stanley McChrystal was unanimously confirmed by the Senate last week as commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI) expressed serious reservations.
According to the Blotter at ABC News, “Obama’s new pick to oversee U.S. forces in Afghanistan misled Congress about his role in the use of so-called ‘enhanced interrogation’ by U.S. Special Operations forces in 2003 and 2004, a senior Democratic senator has charged.”
Feingold (D-WI) formally stated on June 11, “I oppose the nomination of LTG Stanley McChrystal to command U.S. forces in Afghanistan for two reasons. The first relates to a classified matter about which I have serious concerns. I have conveyed those concerns in a letter to the President. The second issue is interrogation. At his public confirmation hearing, General McChrystal responded to a question from Chairman Levin regarding interrogation policies that ‘included stress positions, the use of dogs and nudity’ by stating that ‘[s]ome of them were in use when I took over, sir, and then, as we immediately began to reduce that.’”
Feingold notes that the use of all interrogation techniques not listed in the Army Field Manual was ordered suspended on May 6, 2004. Three weeks later, however, McChrystal submitted a request to continue using sleep deprivation, stress positions, and extreme heat and cold. When asked by Chairman Levin to reconcile this record with his public testimony, McChrystal responded only that he had reduced the use of these techniques by requiring high-level approval and had attempted to make the interrogation process in general “more humane.”
“While I have no reason to believe that General McChrystal would not adhere to current law and policy,” Feingold states, “I am troubled by his failure to express any regret for his previous positions.”
Raw Story reported last month that between September 2003 and August 2008 McChrystal was head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which oversees such elite units as the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy SEALs. As head of JSOC, McChrystal had responsibility for a secret camp in Iraq run by a special ops team known as Task Force 121. An Esquire article in 2006 revealed the use of torture at Camp Nama and cited McChrystal as the source of an order to deny the Red Cross access to the camp.
JSOC was also described by Newsweek in a 2006 article on McChrystal as “part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to ‘work the dark side’ after 9/11.” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently identified JSOC as an “executive assassination wing” that answered for many years to Cheney’s office.
According to ABC News, the Senate Armed Services Committee looked into the reports of prisoner abuse at Camp Nama a year ago, before confirming McChrystal for his present possition. It also held an “executive session” with McChrystal to resolve unspecified questions before deciding to support his new appointment. However, last week’s hearings represented the first time that McChrystal had been required to testify publicly on the issue.
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Just one of the reasons I stopped cheering the Obama administration and started holding my breath …..I’m beginning think we have a Bush lite in Obama
I’m beginning think we have a Bush lite in Obama
—————————————————-
You’re BEGINNING to think that? It’s taken you this long?
And remove the word “lite.”
War Criminal Obushma is taking his orders from Cheney/Bush. We have a continuation of the Bush regime as some of us Nader and McKinney voters suspected would be the case. War Criminal Obama gives the predictable “window dressing” stuff on occasion. One example: Stem cell. But did you know that he REVERSED himself 2 days later which hardly no one picked up on?
March 14, 2009: Obama’s Stem Cell Policy Hasn’t Reversed Legislative Restrictions, On Wednesday, President Obama signed a law that bans federal funding of any research that leads to the destruction of human embryos just two days after lifting Bush-era restraints on it.
The General should be peeling potatos in a military kitchen………..oops, I forgot that we the taxpayers pay Kellog -Brown -Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton) fifty thousand dollars per person per year to do that now.
IT is Not
“so-called ‘enhanced interrogation’ ”
IT IS TORTURE!
Call IT What It IS… A Serious Federal Crime
SEE http://tinyurl.com/besdd3
Torture is always a heinous Federal Crime.
Those that order it or conspire to do it
Must Be Prosecuted.
We must keep the pressure on Obama.
SIGN THE PETITION
To Prosecute Them For Torture
http://ANGRYVOTERS.ORG
Over 250,000 have signed
Join them and call yourself a Patriot
Help keep the pressure on Obama.
this is a bit disturbing… this fellow is supposed to understand counter insurgency war… u cant win that type of war by torturing the citizenry
actually this is completely fucked.
“A government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy,” he declared in comments on his official Web site. “I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to ’sell their religion,’ and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God.”
I lifted this quote from another article on Rawstory. It is from opposition leader Mousavi speaking to the alledged vote fraud in Iran. I think that it would fit if spoken to Amerikans about the 2000 and 2004 elections, and the torture that has been done to captives in OUR name. Also, WE voted for Obama because he promised that certain things would happen if elected. The same reasons we voted for our Congresspersons. Evidently our votes don’t carry the weight of lobbyests contributions. The battles over ending the wars, healthcare reform, jobs, climate, etc show that we are not being represented very well by our elected officials. Now a torturer has been promoted. The Republicans are foot tapping, tea bagging, fucking their help, and the same ones were giving Clinton all that hell over Lewinsky. They are fucking up big time, and the Democrats are playing footsie with them when they could ram progressive bills through congress right and left if they only would. They could get single payer healthcare pushed through, they could have stopped funding the war and funded bringing the troops home instead, they could get energy bills, environmental bills, gun control bills, jobs bills, anything they wanted, but they are not doing it! There is, and will be no better time then the present to get progressive legislation passed. There has never been a better illustration of what is REALLY going on in Congress before.
We are the 4th Reich.
If Americans knew our Real history, all of the activities the CIA and other acronyms engage in to keep this crumbling Disneyland running - we’d hang our heads in shame.
It’s completely necessary for the teeming masses to be kept ignorant; that’s why the news is just hypey nonsense.
Ziocons are like farking cops. No matter what the circumstances they are never, EVER, wrong, and never have anything to apologise for.
It’s unfortunate but true the highest in the military have long been bought off by the anti Republic Military Industrial Complex and serve a higher purpose than our country. He is no doubt a traitor to the Constitution. He reminds me of a SS officer.
Say there, Gen. MacChrystal . . . any comment on your involvement with the Pat Tillman hit . . . the one where the 3-shot cluster in his forehead led medical examiners to call it homicide?
Just askin’ . . . . .
Have we all fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole with the likes of lunatics?
The leader of cheney neurotic assassination ring leading the military in Afghanistan?
Just fucking great.
While Feingold is certainly correct to criticize McChrystal, Feingold would have done well to also accuse Obama and his administration of misleading the country into carrying on Bush’s bogus war on terror. But then it should alxo be remembered that this is the same president who started off a passage of his speech that he was making in Cairo on June 5 by stating that:
“But let us be clear: Al Qaeda killed 3,00 people that day.”
Obama ended that part of his speech by declaring:
“These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with.”
Why is Feingold not reminding Obama that this is not a dictatorship and that people still have the right in this country to question the fairy tale put forth by the Bush administration concerning the events that transpired on Sept. 11, 2001? By making those statements Obama has now indicated that he has no desire to call for an open and honest and genuine investigation [as opposed to the whitewash perpetrated by the Kane-Zelikow Commission] of what occurred on 9/11/01.
Agent of change? More like agent of the status quo.
Agent of hope? Probably for the former Bush administration as they understand that they have no reason to fear that Obama or Congress have any desire to get to the bottom of what truly happened on that heinous day.
Cur bono? Undoubtedly that would be people like Cheney and Bush and /Rumsfeld and Rice.
If this article has piqued your interest, then the following will be worthwhile checking out.
Obama Looses the Manhunters
The team he’s now assembling in Washington to lead his operations in Afghanistan (and someday maybe Pakistan) tells you what you really need to know. It’s filled with special operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in special ops work. At the same time, reports Rowan Scarborough at Fox News, an extra 1,000 special operations troops are now being “quietly” dispatched to Afghanistan, bringing the total number there to about 5,000. Keep in mind that it’s been the special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night raids and air strikes, who have been involved in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.
Note, by the way, that while the president is surging into Afghanistan 21,000 troops and advisors (as well as those special ops forces), ever more civilian diplomats and advisors, and ever larger infusions of money, there is now to be a command surge as well. General McChrystal, according to a recent New York Times article, has “been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans… [He] is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
…….
So, this is now truly Obama’s war, about to be run by his chosen general, a figure from the dark side. Expect, then, from our sunshine president’s men an ever bloodier secret campaign of so-called counter-terror (though it’s essence is likely to be terror, pure and simple), as befits an imperial power trying to hang on to the Eastern reaches of the Greater Middle East.
The new crew aren’t counterinsurgency warriors, but — a term that has only recently entered our press — “manhunters.” And don’t forget, President Obama is now presiding over an expanding war in which “manhunters” engaging in systematic assassination programs will not only be on the ground but, thanks to the CIA’s escalating program of targeted assassination by robot aircraft, in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands.
http://tomdispatch.com/post/175083/the_ir_af_pak_war
What we need is a Senate that isn’t a rubber stamp for whoever is in the White House. There are important reasons why there are three branches of government and they don’t include rewarding criminal behavior by promoting perps.
Good for Feingold for speaking up. Shame on him for voting to confirm.
Obama=fuckwad. McCrystal=total lying fucking asshole! Five minutes in a room alone with this little shit. Just five fucking minutes and he’s wish his momma was there to put his teeth back into his fucked up head, so he could get back to sucking Obama’s dick.
For some time now misleading congress has become institutionalized in the U.S.