Reprinted from Paul Craig Roberts Website
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has just released its report, "Extreme Measures: Abused Children Detained As National Security Threats."
From my reading of the report, Israel and the US are the two worst abusers. Boko Haram is a distant third.
Which country is the worst abuser, Israel or the US? Taking into account that the US is responsible for the violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria that has resulted in torture and detention, if we include these victims in the American total, then the US is the Number One torturer of children. As it is unlikely that Israel could get away with abuse of Palestinian children without Washington's support, we can add Israel's abuses to Washington's total.
Guantanamo Bay is a great distance away from Washington's wars against Muslims in Afghanistan, North Africa and the Middle East. Yet even at Guantanamo, where the only violence is the violence that the US military inflicts on detainees, the US government tortured children, according to the Human Rights Watch report.
What kind of military tortures children? The only answer that I can come up with is a military that has no self-respect.
What kind of US government would pay two US psychologists $81 million to help the CIA devise torture techniques? Only a lawless government with no respect for US law and international law.
Think back to the torture memos written by US Department of Justice (sic) officials John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee. These memos justifying the US government's torture of detainees despite the prohibition of torture by both US statutory law and international law to which the US is a signatory have been denounced by civil libertarians as the work of legal incompetents or criminals or both. Yet, John Yoo is a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and for his service to the White House torturers Jay Bybee was appointed a US federal judge to the second highest court. If Hitlery becomes president, Bybee and Yoo could end up on the Supreme Court.
The positions held by Yoo and Bybee tell the world all that is needed to know that the United States is a lawless entity and that this lawlessness is accepted by America's legal, political, and educational institutions and by the American people.
What self-respecting parent would send a son or daughter to study law at a university that hosts a "legal scholar" who discounts law in behalf of torture?
If you were a judge on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals and a torturer was appointed to the court, would you welcome the criminal or resign in protest against a government that has no respect for its own laws?
How many NSA officials have resigned over illegal spying on the American people?
How many FBI officials have resigned over false flag frame-ups of "terrorists?"
When the Democratic National Committee can hire Americans for $50 per night to fill up the empty seats at the Democratic convention, what does that tell you about the price of American integrity?
Do you remember the 775 Guantanamo detainees described by the US Secretary of Defense and the Vice President of the US as the most dangerous, most violent men on earth? We will never know how many of these detainees were tortured in an effort to elicit a confession in support of the government's unfounded claims, but nine of them died in custody. We do know that despite torture and the assurances from the highest officials that the detainees were dangerous and violent, as of July 12, 2016, 90 percent of the detainees have been released without charges. Only 76 remain, and apparently there is no evidence that can be used to charge them. Apparently, they are being held only in order to save the US government from being 100 percent wrong. Being 90 percent wrong is close enough for government work. See: here and here.
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