The link: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12602098/
Here we have a picture of the humane restraint chair. I refuse to put that in sarcastic quotes like the fuckwits at MSNBC did, because, the fact is, being tied to a chair is humane. To quote the article:
“His jailers, U.S. Army military police, said that he was being punished for disrespecting them, and that he would spend 2 hours in the chair as punishment. The suspected insurgent, a juvenile, had earlier been moved to the maximum security section of the prison for 30 days for attacking a guard in another section of the facility.”
So, this person attacks a guard, disrespects guards, and this leads to him getting sat in a chair for 2 hours. This is “torture?” Having to sit in a chair and not attack people for 2 hours is torture? What in the hell are prison guards supposed to do if they can't even force a prisoner to sit down? This is literally what it's come to. Our soldiers are trying to control a criminal population. They're relentlessly heckled and demonized by the press, and by AI. So, they come up with the adult equivalent of “time out,” and then bring AI in to show them they're being nice, and AI is somehow still upset with it.
This is a broken organization. they are not interested in preventing torture. They're interested in trying to undercut the American war effort, to attack American credibility, and to generally damage the world's perception of America, especially as it relates to our foreign policy, as much as possible.
If AI was even marginally serious about its job, it would have an infinite amount of complaints for China, Cuba, all of Africa, all of the Middle East, both Koreas, huge swathes of Asia, Russia, eastern Europe, etc. etc. If they had any interest in actual mistreatment of prisoners, AI would literally never even have time to notice that American MPs were making prisoners sit down when they attacked people.
And yet, they insist there's rampant torture, and to support this they show a guy in a nice clean jumpsuit sitting in a chair, in restraints. Do these fucking imbeciles know that if a patient in a hospital or EMT situation is violent they're also restrained?
But that's not the worst of it. What pisses me off the most about this isn't the utterly transparent political motivations at work here. The worst part is that AI is basically wasting the credibility of its position to play political games. This is an organization that is supposed to be fighting torture and unjust imprisonment around the world. Since they're nominally accomplishing this task, no other such organization is created. The job is filled, so to speak. So, not only is this organization spreading lies and misrepresentation to further their own political biases, but they're also denying the world a function which is actually valuable and worth having. They don't just give us lies. They deny us a valid watchdog organization as well.