America’s Concentration Camps category archive
“We Don’t Torture,” Says He 0
Dan Froomkin searches for the truth (emphasis added, because it echoes what I’ve been saying). Follow the link, read the whole thing, and wonder what have we allowed to happen in our names.
How the United States became associated with torture is not just a matter of historical interest. And that’s all the more clear today, with the publication of a major New York Times story describing the Bush administration’s ongoing circumvention of national and international prohibitions against barbaric interrogation practices.
In other words: It continues.
Finding out what our government has been doing in our name, and openly debating our interrogation policies, should have been high on the national agenda since the disclosure of the shockingly inhumane treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Few other issues speak so clearly to how we see ourselves as a people — and how others see us.
But the White House’s non-denial denials, disingenuous euphemisms and oppressive secrecy have repeatedly stifled any genuine discourse. Bush shuts down discussion by declaring that “we don’t torture” — yet he won’t even say how he defines the term.
Shame on us all for tolerating this, this, this vile gaming.
Dishonor (Updated) 1
I could probably improve on the essay below, but it’s not worth the effort.
I’m so disgusted I could spit.
But I’m not surprised.
On second thought, I don’t feel disgusted.
I feel soiled.
Soiled by what these thugs have done in your name, in my name, in our name.
The New York Times stops just short of using the “T word,” preferring to call it “severe interrogations.” But let’s not beat around the bush: Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department secretly approved torture — even as it told the rest of the world it didn’t, and as Congress was passing laws to ban torture
In a long investigative piece, the Times digs up two classified opinions issued by the department under Gonzales’ reign to prove it.
The first, issued soon after Gonzales’ arrival as attorney general in 2005, for the first time provided “explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including headslapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.”
(That “simulated drowning,” by the way, is the technique known as waterboarding: “pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.”)
Meanwhile, the department’s official stand to the public was the one it issued in 2004, calling torture “abhorrent.”
Later in 2005, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion declaring that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
If they didn’t violate that standard, they at least produced some of the tainted results torture often yields: confessions to crimes the confessor probably didn’t commit.
When the C.I.A. caught Khaid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were “haunted by uncertainty.” They used a variety of “tough interrogation tactics” about 100 times over two weeks on the man known as K.S.M., and got all kinds of confessions. The problem is, intelligence officers say that “many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false.”
Reacting to the Times story, a White House spokeswoman said: “Our intelligence agencies legally obtain information. This country does not torture.”
The only way they can say “This country does not torture” is that they call it something else. Like Ralph or Fred or Betty.
That’s it. “Let’s take them to the Ralph room.”
Addendum, Later That Same Evening:
ASZ.
Morally Clueless (Updated) (Updated Again) 0
(snip)
“In Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Iran, brutal regimes deny their people the fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration” of the United Nations.
This appeal against “brutal regimes” comes from the same bunch who gave the world Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and “black sites,” and who made “waterboarding” a household word.
The hypocrisy is sick-making.
Where’s my Maalox?
Addendum, Later that Same Day:
Judgement at Northwest Washington.
Judging from the internal evidence of the tape and the reference to the upcoming election, it seems like a done deal.
The perps walk.
Via Brendan.