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Dante’s wisdom is that hell is an endless, bottomless, relentless onslaught of horror. Demonstrating the point is this:
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
My friend Malcolm Nance — who, as part of SERE training, was waterboarded — told Congress last year that the provenance of these torture techniques is the 20th century’s totalitarian miseries. No one much listened to him. Will they listen now? How much more of America do we have to betray?
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yeah, you’d think at some sense even the 27 percenters would feel shame at what they’ve enabled, and then outrage at the bush crime syndicate.
but i wouldn’t get your hopes up. they’re going to have some bullshit excuse for why this is perfectly fine, too, and anyone who doesn’t think we should copy the communist chinese in their torture methods is an american-hating defeatocrat.
they’re beyond shame.
If you use memeorandum, you’ll realise it ain’t even gonna register.
In the same way that anything indefensible is steered clear of by left-wingers, it’s simply better left unacknowledged.
I think the people who run “Hot Air” are massive racists, but they are one of the only sites that crosses this divide to acknowledge shit that their ideology would dictate they better leave unmentioned. Then again, I don’t read that site so they could just be linking to it and calling it BS, but that’d just make em the exception that proves the rule.
This is what political blogs have given us. A print version of O’Reilly vs Olberman. Where nothing that doesn’t have a positive partisan spin makes it through the filter.
A practice perfected at Ackerman’s old home Thinkprogress.
Iraq violence stats increase for the month ? We’ll report on them complete with graphs the second they’re released.
Iraq violence stats decrease during the surge ? Nothing for months on end.
The very first month that stats increase again ? Back to reporting them the second they are released, along with emphasis that these are the highest levels seen in oh so long… which happens to correspond with the period they stopped reporting them because they were improving.
BTW… the memory hole does wonders for torture, so don’t worry too much about this.
I often ask people these same questions. What do you think authors who write books titled “American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond” fill the first half of the book with ?
Do you think someone wrote a book titled: “Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture” in 2005 and had it reach back a whole 2 years ?
Do you think Obama’s message of change will extend to anywhere near the gates of the same US-based torture training school that’s been operating with bipartisan support uninterrupted for 60 years ?
Because along with “teen” I’ve pretty much had my fill of misleading uses of the word “unprecedented” over the past 8 years.
I think they knew. If not, they should have known. The Air Force study is online.
A few quotes:
Second, one form of torture was experienced by a considerable number of Air Force prisoners of war during efforts to coerce false confessions from them. The prisoners were required to stand, or sit, at attention for exceedingly long periods of tinme-in one extreme case, day and night for a week at a time with only brief respites. In a few cases, the standing was aggravated by extreme cold. This form of torture had several distinct advantages for extorting confessions.
….
Where the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The contest becomes, in a way, one of the individual against himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter. Bringing the subject to act “against himself” in this manner has additional advantages for the interrogator. It leads the prisoner to exaggerate the power of the interrogator.
…
For the interrogator, forced standing has still further advanitages. It is consistent with formal adherence to mythical principles of legality and humaneness important to the Communists. These principles are important in the interrogation-particularly in facilitating the adoption of a positive attitude by the prisoner toward the interrogator and the forces he represents. Adherence to these mythical principles also protects the interrogator from potential punishment at some future time for mistreating prisoners. The Communists, furthermore, can gain a considerablc propaganda advantage when victims who are released truthfully state that no one ever laid a hand on them.
Since the stress positions, time-disorientation, living in your own waste, waterboarding, etc. that the US adopted from the Chinese Commies who were after false confessions, but the Bush/Cheney cabal thought they could get true confessions, who could object if we salted Bush/Cheney/Addington, et.al. away somewhere (how about a Navy ship patrolling the antarctic waters – and away from inferring US courts) after Jan.20, 2009, and more rigously tested whether these techniques lead to true or false confessions – and lets video-capture the sessions for the nightly news so we can see that “this isn’t torture”.
The numbers are all approximations anyway. When you don’t count men shot in the back, etc… I don’t report on such numbers up or down anymore.
Was this somehow relevant to what I wrote concerning someone who’ll, as a rule, report on increases in violence but not decreases with such an obvious motivation and bias for doing so ?
BTW they’re not approximations any more than the death notices here are.