Book by Innocent Victim Suggests Torture by U.S. Was Widespread

 

"We don't torture," squawked George W. Bush time and again; he was lying. Murat Kurnaz in Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo describes the horror that we, America, became. - Although U.S. officials have attributed the torture of Muslim prisoners in their custody to a handful of maverick guards, in fact such criminal acts were widely perpetrated and systemic, likely involving large numbers of military personnel, a book by a survivor suggests. Additionally, guards were responsible for countless acts of murder, including death by crucifixion, lynching, poisoning, snakebite, withholding of medicines, starvation, and bludgeoning of innocent victims. And the murders committed by U.S. troops numbered at least in the hundreds, according to reliable sources. As well, Pentagon architects designed prisons that were sadistic torture chambers in themselves, barely six feet high and seven feet wide, in which human beings were kept for months or years at a time - spaces which, one prisoner noted, are smaller than the legal requirements in Germany for doghouses. Architects who knowingly designed these hellholes may have also committed crimes against humanity. After the photographs of sadism at Iraq's Abu Ghraib in May, 2004, shocked the world, President Bush called the revelations "a stain on our country's honor and our country's reputation." He told visiting King Abdullah of Jordan in the Oval Office that "I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families." Bush told The Washington Post, "I told him (Abdullah) I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America." A year later, Lynddie England and 10 others from the 372nd Military Police Company were convicted of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq, yet the events of that prison were likely duplicated everywhere across the spectrum of Pentagon and CIA detention camps acting on orders from the Bush White House.