Alyssa Peterson and Charlie Gittings, Your Hour Has Come

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LB

It’s generally hard for human rights workers to know if their efforts have any effect.  It’s probably the same for environmentalists. Can the efforts of many concerned citizens somehow coalesce? And what of individuals who clearly put themselves in danger by trying to help their fellow man – is it the right thing to do? Should they bother?

Yesterday, a US Senate committee published a Report on Torture. Amazing. One branch of the government, the legislature, now admits to the torture committed by another branch, the executive. This is quite a coup for the ordinary folks who have been trying to oppose torture. I say it implicitly acknowledges the work of Alyssa Peterson and Charles Gittings.

Alyssa Peterson

Alyssa Peterson, a 26-year-old specialist in the US Army, a devout Mormon, died on September 16, 2003, in Iraq. The online Military Times has a page called “Honor the Fallen.” It lists the cause of her death as “from a non-combat weapons discharge.” Why beat around the bush? She was shot.

Granted, the military says she shot herself, but this is extremely unlikely.  She was a translator of Arabic and saw prisoners, up close, being tortured by Americans. She did what any decent American would do, in or out of uniform. She protested. Then she died of a gunshot. I presume we killed her because we did not want to hear her out, with regard to torture.  She was “in the way.”

Then there is Charles Gittings. He died in 2010 at age 57, after many years of trying to get the US prison closed at Guantanamo Bay. His death was by lung cancer.  I speculate it was “CIA cancer.” Did he smoke? Yes he did, but many people smoke and don’t get lung cancer. My ‘logic,’ which is not very good, says “We can’t really have a guy like Charlie running around trying to enforce the law against torture, can we?”

The Geneva’s If You Please

I’m on record as saying the Geneva Conventions should never have been written. I’d even go back to the founding of the Red Cross, in 1863, based on the soldier-protection ideas of Henri Dunant of Switzerland, and say it was a mistake. If a people are to make war against another people they WILL do whatever they see fit.  Having a written law about behavior in battle does not constrain, in the way that law on the home front does.

Nevertheless, we DO have the law of the Geneva’s! The United States even passed a War Crimes Act in 1991 to make it easier to prosecute, domestically, a crime such as torturing a prisoner-of-war.  Charlie Gittings was determined to see this law enforced.  He created the Project To Enforce the Geneva Conventions. I recommend a tour of his excellent website, PEGC.us, which is now manned by Jordan Paust.

The Real Purpose of Torture

That said, we need to take a fresh look at what is going on. It does not help to read relevant articles in the law journals, as they are premised on the FICTION that there’s a need to pump information out of prisoners. Conceivably, a person could know something so vital to a nation that it should be obtained at any price. But that is so rare that we needn’t be concerned with it. (And, also, there are ‘medicinal’ ways to get a man to talk.)

I think the following are true:

1. The covert agencies have all been involved in torture for a long time, and their record shows that the purpose is to find out the exact ways in which a human being can be controlled. For example, you can demoralize someone by sexual humiliation; you can make him lose his thought processes by sensory deprivation. God knows, the Powers That Be need every detail they can collect on how not to get themselves challenged by strong-willed individuals!
2. The point of ‘advertising’ to the American public that Muslims were being tortured at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib was to convey the false notion that Muslims were our enemy.  This helped justify World Government’s takeover of countries in the Middle East. Even in domestic society, if you hear that members of a particular ethnic group are often found in jails, this ‘tells’ you they are bad.
3. Men in the military have a problem with the fact that they are told to obey the Geneva Conventions and then are told not to. Maleness, and the instinct of males to bond together in a battlefield setting, goes against the desire to complain if one is told to be brutal to the enemy. It would feel ‘sissy’ to complain. Furthermore, whether male of female, people are strongly inclined to obey the authorized leader.
4. Get ready for this one. There are some sicko’s up there, and George Orwell knew about them. He wrote, in his book 1984, “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture.”  And don’t forget, Orwell said that our future is to have a boot stamping on our face – forever!
5. Thousands of military persons from Western countries have now become torturers. They are therefore on hand to act against people at home if so ordered. Very likely also, thousands of prisoners have been trained, by torture, to become torturers. This all adds up to a large force. God help us.

Conclusion: As there was never a legitimate reason to torture any Muslims, it should not have happened.  Moreover the law was clear: Don’t do it.  So now is the time for all good men to stop avoiding the enforcing of law. It will be useful for national security, in the genuine sense of that term, for us to get ahold of the idiots who have been running the show. I do not enjoy the thought of a future of having my face stamped on. How about you?

Praise be to Alyssa Peterson and Charlie Gittings, and may we come to honor such heroes and stop being embarrassed about them.

Mary W Maxwell lives in Adelaide. She can be contacted at the website ProsecutionForTreason.com, or at her website kisskiss.US.com, which is about the dangerous coziness of the judicial branch with the executive.