The United States of America professes to be the “Land of the free and home of the brave” it has shockingly been revealed this week that it is also the “Land of the torturer, and home of the state murderer.” Acts of torture that one would expect totalitarian and fanatical regimes to carry out have routinely been performed on prisoners of the US in such places as Guantanamo Bay. Many have long suspected the United States was engaged in acts of torture on suspected terrorists, but now it has been confirmed with a damaging US Senate Report into CIA torture tactics.
The US has come in for criticism from the United Nations and foreign governments for its human rights violations. The report concluded CIA torture tactics were ineffective and often brutal in the extreme with such acts as “rectal feeding”, forceful rectal examinations, mock executions, Russian roulette, threats to prisoners of murder of family, sexual abuse to others and threats to prisoner’s children. At least one prisoner died of hypothermia as a result of torture.
How can anyone condone such barbarism from a country that claims to be a free and democratic society, and the upholder of civil liberty?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/10/white-house-cia-torture-report

Dear Paul,

We can never be sure that any entity or any government always does right. However, one thing that differentiates a free from a totalitarian government is the capacity of the government or the people to point out that the government has done wrong. The wrongs that the CIA has committed have been acknowledged and examined by a US Senate report. The US Senate is part of the US government. A government that can criticise its actions can also correct its wrongs. The fact that it was a US Senate Report that condemned the CIA actions indicates that the US is a free and democratic society.

Could parliament condemn a government action in Australia? Of course not. The government in Australia is parliament. Australia does not have separate executive and legislative bodies. They are one and the same. The UN has condemned Australia's treatment of asylum seekers. The government of Australia which is part of parliament will of course defend it. There will be no parliamentary report on the abuse of asylum seekers coming from the Australian parliament. Australia might benefit from the separation of powers which is specified in the US Constitution.

Paul1405,

If you and the Trotskyist watermelon Greens didn't have such an irrational hatred of the US you would realise the proof of its positives lies in the heart-searching over this and the inevitability of court (and election poll) ramifications for those responsible.

Why in the world do people flee to the US from those dreadful Maxist social experiments and other *bleep*hole totalitarian states?

Name anywhere else than one of the western democracies where the whinging, indolent Watermelon Greens could ride the guvvy gravy train, while at the same time bordering on treachery in their lying BS?

You're right of course Paul about Guantanamo Bay. The US should have used the Islamic state method, & decapitated the ba##ards on capture. It is a huge waste of money feeding then for year.

As for 9/11, if it happened here, & a bunch of wogs killed thousands of our citizens, I would want whatever was necessary done to stop it happening again.

If that involved jamming the Geneva convention, printed on a pineapple up the backside, or down the throat of known fellow travellers, so be it.

I never could understand why the Poms let the IRA use their troops for target practice & much worse, then treated the buggers as if they were human when they were caught.

Turning the other cheek is a recipe for dying young.

Pfft, so what, the allies tortured false confessions of war crimes out of German soldiers in 1945-46 which provided the evidence for the Nuremberg trials.
You don't torture people to get information, you torture them to get confessions or to make them say what you want them to say, even hardened SS generals cracked and signed the papers when their testicles were smashed by their British and American interrogators.

Like Paul I am also a Green but have a great admiration for the US. I have never heard anyone at a Green meeting advocate Marxism. As a Green I want to maintain our environment so future generations will have a decent world to live in. As a Green I want to see everyone have a fair go.

Speaking of irrational hatred onthebeach expressed it for the Greens.

As far as decapitation, condemning people without trial and ignoring the Geneva Convention I’ll leave that sort of thing to the Jihadis and Hasbeen.

The reason the British treated their enemies as human is simply because they were human. On all sides of every human conflict are humans. Atrocities happen when we forget that.

Dear Jay of Melbourne,

What is your evidence for the Nazis being tortured for the Nuremberg trials?