Call Cruelty What It Was

[MountainLaurel]

Wow, we're apparently using the same techniques as Stalin. Somebody cue up the Lee Greenwood, would ya?

President Bush is urging Congress to let the CIA keep using "alternative" interrogation procedures -- which include, according to published accounts, forcing prisoners to stand for 40 hours, depriving them of sleep and use of the "cold cell," in which the prisoner is left naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and doused with cold water.

Bush insists that these techniques are not torture -- after all, they don't involve pulling out fingernails or applying electric shocks. He even says that he "would hope" the standards he's proposing are adopted by other countries. But before he again invites America's enemies to use such "alternative" methods on captured Americans, he might benefit from knowing a bit of their historical origins and from hearing accounts of those who have experienced them. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for the president's reading list.

He might begin with Robert Conquest's classic work on Stalin, "The Great Terror." Conquest wrote: "When there was time, the basic method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the 'conveyor' -- continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? . . . At any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was as painful as any torture."

Conquest stated: "Interrogation usually took place at night and with the accused just roused -- often only fifteen minutes after going to sleep. The glaring lights at the interrogation had a disorientating effect." He quoted a Czech prisoner, Evzen Loebl, who described "having to be on his feet eighteen hours a day, sixteen of which were devoted to interrogation. During the six-hour sleep period, the warder pounded on the door every ten minutes. . . . If the banging did not wake him, a kick from the warder would. After two or three weeks, his feet were swollen and every inch of his body ached at the slightest touch; even washing became a torture."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/17/AR2006091700516.html

[sui generis]

1. well since it's a scientific fact that sleep deprivation can kill you

as can hypothermia, that very loud music played 24/7 can cause permanent hearing loss, and being kept on your feet for days at a time can cause congestive heart failure, and being kept compressed in a position where you can't stretch out your limbs can cause DVT's, these are not "harmless" interrogation techniques.

George Dubya Fucking Bush, I want you to volunteer your daughters to a week of these interrogations so they'll tell us where they stashed that eightball and bottle of Jack.

Better yet, if TORTURE is acceptable, and a mistakenly tortured civilian can't prosecute, then it's only a very very short matter of time before the CIA starts torturing your kids in front of you to make you talk, instead of you.

When are we going to figure this out. This is not science fiction, it's happening right now starting with this absurd president.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Yes, that's what people DON'T GET

This is the slippery slope.

If it's okay to torture "terrorists" (whether real or falsely accused), then it becomes okay to torture, say, someone who might have information about a "terrorist." Then somebody who knows somebody.

Don't laugh. This is what happened during the witchcraft hysteria in the Middle Ages. It also happened, closer to our own time, in Argentina and Uruguay during the 1970s. Young people were "disappeared" off the streets because they were acquainted socially with other young people accused of terrorism.

[MountainLaurel]

3. Slippery slope, indeed.

This is exactly what the U.S. has done in detaining Muslims for terrorist activity: "A known terrorist visited your roommate at some point for dinner? Obviously, you were involved and need to be interrogated and charged as well."