1-08-08, 9:45 am

Yes, like it or not, the George W. Bush government has won itself without a doubt the dirty name of torturer. Bush and his closest allies, at the same time those with the least ethics, planned and ordered the violence against those detained in the so called anti terrorist crusade beyond acceptable norms.

The scandal in the Iraqi and Afghanistan prisons and in the illegal US naval base in Guantanamo are still talked about and will echo in the heads of the representatives of the empire as a indicator of their lack of scruples and the shameful way in which they have lied to the nation calling it “land of the free and with total rights.”

But the stories are not only restricted to the cells of Baghdad or Kabul or in the cages erected on Cuban land taken by force by the US government. Because the White House is also the promoter of other forms of torture called the “extraordinary rendition program¨, that is to say the equivalent to kidnapping suspects in any part of the world, and secretly reshuffling from border to border and the application of all forms of physical and psychological means to force them to “confess”.


Such the case of Yemen citizen Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, who took out, together with another three victims, a recent law suit against the US Jeppesen Dataplan Inc company, a subsidiary of the Boeing Corporation, and in charge of what has been called “torture flights”, that is to say, by orders of the CIA, the transfer of “enemy combatants” from one geographic location to another.

According to US journalist Amy Goodman, who interviewed Bahmilah, who was detained in his home at the end of October 2003 and was immediately tortured. With the threat that his wife would be raped and attacks on his family, he accepted the false accusation of being an Al Qaeda member.

He was later transferred to another country which he believed was Afghanistan, where CIA specialists once again applied violent measures against him and was informed that his case would be evaluated in Washington, in charge of his future.

Only on May 5th, 2005, after the torture sessions that were taped by CIA agents and long negotiations by his family with the International Red Cross and other institutions, he was returned to Yemen and was later released in 2006 without any charges against him or the least explanation regarding his imprisonment.

Bashmilah’s case is not, of course, the only one and last. The number of people that are in the same position, in the hands of the terror machine lead by the Bush government, is not known.

Torture is, meanwhile, another of the “horrors” in the file of the man that will have to leave the White House at the end of they year, with record showings of unpopularity and inability.

From Cuban News Agency