Tuesday, March 29, 2016



Of course they did

So, in addition to being torturers, it seems the CIA are also perverts:

The CIA took naked photographs of people it sent to its foreign partners for torture, the Guardian can reveal.

A former US official who had seen some of the photographs described them as “very gruesome”.

The naked imagery of CIA captives raises new questions about the seeming willingness of the US to use what one medical and human rights expert called “sexual humiliation” in its post-9/11 captivity of terrorism suspects. Some human rights campaigners described the act of naked photography on unwilling detainees as a potential war crime.


Naturally, they'd argue that its not a war crime because the Geneva Conventions don't apply to people America doesn't like "terrorists" (and innocent teenagers, German tourists, and anyone else the American shove into that dragnet). And naturally, they'd howl with outrage if anyone did anything like this to a US soldier. So they're hypocritical as well as criminal.

Supposedly this was done to document prisoners' physical condition while in CIA custody and to protect the CIA from being blamed for injuries inflicted by the torturers they passed them on to. But coming from an agency which explicitly uses sexual humiliation as an interrogation technique, that's less than convincing, and simply sounds like more self-serving bullshit.

Again, the people responsible for rendition need to be prosecuted, and the US needs to apologise to and compensate its victims. Refusing to do so isn't simply unjust - its also stupid, a standing inspiration for future terrorist attacks.