“The existence and destruction of the tapes was first revealed on Thursday by CIA Director Michael Hayden in a letter to CIA employees. … Hayden made the improbable claim that the tapes were destroyed to protect CIA interrogators from retaliation by Al Qaeda. He wrote in his letter that the CIA halted the practice of taping interrogations in 2002, after only a few recordings had been made.”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7579

As for the Physicians saying the evidence is “unclear”, I think it’s pretty clear that Obama’s response that we have no jurisdiction to investigate is bullshit.

I’ll take a look at your links. The wiki link on the 2001 events highlights the problem though. The claimed video tape doesn’t exist and even the Physicians group says the evidence is not clear. This reminds me of alleged massacres by US and allied troops during WWII and Vietnam, some of which are still disputed. That siad, I will take a closer look at the links you provided. Thanks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasht-i-Leili_massacre

between 250 and 3,000 (depending on sources) Taliban prisoners were shot and/or suffocated to death in metal truck containers, while being transferred by U.S. and Northern Alliance soldiers from Kunduz to Sheberghan prison in Afghanistan in 2001.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090711/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_afghan_war_crimes

Obama administration officials said on 11 July 2009 that there were no grounds for a war crimes investigation, not because they said no crime occurred, but because they claim the prisoners were not killed by American forces. Rather, they claim the prisoners were killed by Afghan forces who were working with American military and the CIA.

Dostum, was the Northern Alliance general who is accused of overseeing the atrocities. A former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, told the Times that the Bush administration was reluctant to investigate the deaths, even though Dostum was on the payroll of the CIA and his soldiers worked with U.S. special forces in 2001.

Dostum was suspended from his military post last year on suspicion of threatening a political rival, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently rehired him, the Times reported.

hundreds, probably thousands, of prisoners executed by someone working with the US military and paid by the CIA.

And Obama claims we can’t touch him.

http://www.slate.com/id/2222523

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html

It’s a very good opinion piece on Sarah Palin.

My daughter is doing great too =)

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. In his report, he stated “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture.”

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/41514.html

In 2008, Taguba wrote a preface a Physicians for Human Rights report accusing the Bush White House of war crimes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/06/18/BL2008061801546.html

The man in charge of investigating the torture going on at Abu Graib, a retired military general, has said that the torture was systemic, came through the chain of command all the way from teh president himself, and said Bush committed war crimes.

Think about that for a second. Based on the shit that happened at Abu Graib alone, not looking at Bagram, not looking at Guantanamo, not looking at all the black sites in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and wherever, just on Abu Graib alone, the investigator concluded that Bush had committed war crimes.

We don’t need a Truth Commission. We already have enough to take Bush to court with just this one site.

If you want to go after Pelosi too, I’m fine with that. But there’s no need to drag our heels about Bush. Abu Graib has already been investigated and it points directly to Bush committing war crimes.

Well, then it’s just a matter of negotiating the price I suppose.

Human Rights Watch has a report on various numbers relating to cases of abuse that we know about.

http://www.hrw.org/en/node/11352/section/3

at least 330 cases in which U.S. military and civilian personnel are alleged to have abused detainees, ranging from beatings and assaults, to torture, sexual abuse, and homicide.

At least 600 U.S. personnel have been implicated. At least 460 detainees have been subjected to abuse. authorities opened investigations into approximately 210 out of the 330 cases. Of the approximately 410 personnel implicated in cases that the military and civilian authorities have investigated, only about a third have faced any kind of disciplinary or criminal action. 75 percent of the cases in which investigations were conducted do not appear to have resulted in any kind of punishment.

Researchers identified more than 1,000 individual criminal acts of abuse.

Of the fifty-four guilty verdicts, forty resulted in sentences involving prison time. the average sentence was about four months.

Section 4

Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a long-recognized principle of U.S. domestic and international law, commanders can be held criminally liable as principals for the criminal acts of their subordinates, if they knew or should have known about criminal activity, but did not take steps to prevent it or to punish the perpetrators. For example, if prosecutors demonstrate that commanders knew their troops were committing abuses, but failed to stop them, the commanders can be charged as though they committed the crimes themselves.

Not a single U.S. military officer serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, or GuantnamoBay has been criminally charged under the doctrine of command responsibility for detainee abuses committed by his or her subordinates.

section 5

Congress should appoint an independent commission to review U.S. detention and interrogation operations worldwide in the “war on terror.” Such a commission should identify and analyze the systemic failures that have lead to widespread torture and abuse, and make detailed and specific recommendations to ensure that reforms are instituted.

section 7

Sample homicide cases listed here.

I have a bunch of URL’s listed here:

http://www.warhw.com/2009/05/04/us-torture-statistics/

Most blogs have a three-URL limit on comments to stop spam, so I’ll link to that and you can click on the various links there.

The wikipedia links I don’t trust directly, but I use them for the various off-wikipedia articles that they use for citations.

The ACLU link has tons of stuff gotten through teh FOIA, most of them have stuff redacted, but pretty brutal none the less.

That should be a good start.

I can google disturbing anecdotes, but I can find those online for events that I know are false. I’ve conducted investigations for my work and discovered many times that initial factual allegations turn out to be false or over stated due to all kinds of reasons.

If you have links to highly credible evidence of “Americans tortured and murdered hundreds, maybe thousands, of prisoners, for months and even years, and many of these prisoners were actually innocent of any wrongdoing.”, then I’d be interested in seeing those.
If you have links to credible evidence that such action was ordered by the President I’d look at that too.

If you support the use of torture, then man up and say so and I’ll stop tryign to convince you that torture occurred. Because if you don’t care that torture occurred, then proving it to you is pointless.

If you assume the numbers I gave you were true, and you would support criminal investigations into those cases and all the way up the chain of command to whoever gave the orders to perform that torture, then say that, and then I’ll find you some websites to back up the numbers.

Where do you stand?

“Americans tortured and murdered hundreds, maybe thousands, of prisoners, for months and even years, and many of these prisoners were actually innocent of any wrongdoing.”