Let's start with everyone's favorite topic...How are we torturing people today? Oh wait...we aren't...
"This government does not torture people. We stick to U.S. law and our international obligations," Bush told reporters in the Oval office. "There are highly trained professionals questioning these extremists and terrorists."
Wait a second...when we we start the "War on Extremism"? When we expand the war to a whole new set of people? I remember declaring the war on "terror" (and therefore "terrorists"), but when did we expand it to a war on "extreme" (and thefore the abovementioned "extremists"?
We all know that reality rarely maps to Bush's neoconceptions, but in this case, it is so cut and dried as to be beyond obvious. Only the oblivious could miss this.
Here is what Bush thinks isn't torture.
Renewed controversy over interrogation methods erupted after The New York Times reported that a 2005 secret opinion by the Justice Department explicitly authorized painful interrogation tactics including head-slapping, exposure to frigid temperatures and simulated drowning or "waterboarding."
[full story]
Hmm, that's a bit vague....how about this one?
The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.
Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an incident in which Defense Department interrogators at Guantánamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using "torture techniques" against a detainee. The e-mail concludes "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the 'FBI' interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public."
The document also says that no "intelligence of a threat neutralization nature" was garnered by the "FBI" interrogation, and that the FBI's Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) believes that the Defense Department's actions have destroyed any chance of prosecuting the detainee. The e-mail's author writes that he or she is documenting the incident "in order to protect the FBI."
"The methods that the Defense Department has adopted are illegal, immoral, and counterproductive," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "It is astounding that these methods appear to have been adopted as a matter of policy by the highest levels of government."
[full story]
So, according to our waste of space that we are supposed to call "President", it's not torture to strip a man naked, hand-cuff him to a chair, not feed him for days, pour water on him and freeze him, and BEAT HIM ABOUT THE HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS. Wait, does "head-slapping" allow smacks to the face? After all, the face is a part of the head...?
And frankly, if you even have to ask these question...you know the answer to the previous one...does this constitute torture?
Any rational person says yes. Unfortunately those don't seem to be a majority here in the 21st Century United States.
Back in the 20th Century United States, when the U.S. was fighting those kittens called Nazis (before the enemy became terrorists and extremists), this is how we interrogated our prisoners of war.
One by one, some of the surviving 100 or so military intelligence interrogators who questioned Third Reich scientists, submariners and soldiers at one of the United States's most secretive prisoner camps are, in the twilight of their lives, spilling tales they had dared not whisper before.
"It's good. Very good to talk about all this, at last," Fred Michel said last week, steadying himself on his cane as he looked over the rolling, green land along the Potomac River in Fairfax County that once was home to prison cells and interrogation rooms embedded with hidden microphones.
Michel, 85, slowly lowered himself onto a picnic table bench next to his old friend, H. George Mandel, 82. Although they have lived just a few miles apart for most of six decades, they had not spoken since their discharge Dec. 13, 1945. So hush-hush was their work for P.O. Box 1142 that the men recruited for it were ordered to never mention it. To this day, some have refused to speak to the park ranger gathering their oral histories, believing that the oath they took more than 60 years ago can never be broken.
--
"I know my family wondered where the hell I was," he said. "I told them I was speaking to scientists, or something like that. They didn't know I was interrogating Nazis."
His past revisited him once, at a scientific conference in Paris. In passing, he locked eyes with another scientist, a man he had interrogated in a cramped cell years ago.
"He looked at me, and I heard him say to someone in German: 'That was my prison warden,' " Mandel said. The two men shook hands. The exchange was respectful and friendly, he said.
[full, fascinating story of a better way to win a war]
O.k....see that? That's how the "Greatest Generation" did things and why they got that label. Now we have those dumb-ass Baby Boomers in charge, and all they want to do is blow shit up.
The next generation (my generation) needs to fix this stuff. We need to tell people about high speed cameras and facial analysis techniques. And about the power of simple respect. And the fact that most people, particular those who claim to be devout, are ultimately honest....if treated with simple, basic human dignity. The way Americans used to treat everyone....back in that glorious 20th Century.
UPDATE!!!
It looks like the SCOTUS is going to let U.S. torture policy stand. I can't believe this crap.</FONT>
The justices' refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri's lawsuit on the grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets.
You mean state secrets like how we torture people? Guess what, it ain't a secret anymore.
The Fourth Circuit acknowledged the seriousness of the issues when it dismissed Mr. Masri's suit. "We recognize the gravity of our conclusions that el-Masri must be denied a judicial forum for his complaint," Judge Robert B. King wrote in March. "The inquiry is a difficult one, for it pits the judiciary's search for truth against the executive's duty to maintain the nation's security."
Good to know, eh, comrades? If the government deems your torture necessary for national security, you are well and truly fucked.
"They asked a lot of questions — if I have relations with Al Qaeda, Al Haramain, the Islamic Brotherhood," Mr. Masri said in a 2005 interview with The New York Times. "I kept saying no, but they did not believe me."
After 23 days, he said, he was turned over to C.I.A. operatives, who flew him to a secret C.I.A. prison in Kabul. There, Mr. Masri said, he was kept in a small, filthy cell and was shackled, drugged and beaten while being interrogated about his supposed ties to terrorist organizations. At the end of May 2004, Mr. Masri said, he was released in a remote part of Albania without ever having been charged with a crime.
Read the article. Try not to cry on your computer, they hate that.