A note from Snazzy: I was originally going to post just the table of contents of the ICRC report, which all Americans should read to witness how the CIA tortures people in their name.
I thought that the table of contents alone unmasks how the United States of America has devolved into a brutal torturing regime. And I believe that is a fairly objective statement. The ICRC also says so, in their reserved way, and calls for investigations, but it turns out that the ICRC report doesn't allow copy and paste. The full pdf is here (about 40 pages):
http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf
Should you actually read the text, which you should since you are the one paying for this torture with your tax dollars, you will find that what has been done is far far worse than anything reported in the media. There is no coverage; the tapes are destroyed so no pictures too. They, yes the mighty "they," are going to try to hide this. They cannot hide it because it is so evil and reprehensible that it cannot but come out. We as a society must deal with this, which is Danner's (the below excerpted article's author, and the guy who obtained the ICRC "secret" report) main point.
Danner's article is nuanced, subtle and lengthy--and not very well suited to a fair use soundbite. He has several interesting points.
One idea which he gets into right away explains Cheney's recent flurry of media appearances as a set up for "I told you so." The media/pr logic of that being if we scale back authoritarian policies of the Bush years, and something bad happens via terrorism, then that's why you need republicans, massive defense spending, wars, curtailed civil liberties and, of course, torture.-------------
Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009
The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means
By Mark Danner
ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody
by the International Committee of the Red Cross43 pp., February 2007
...
How to inflict pain without causing injury that might inhibit or prevent further interrogation? And how to do so in such a way that the pain inflicted might be said not to be akin to that "associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result"? This was of course the legal definition of torture concocted by White House and Justice Department lawyers (and codified in what has come to be known as the "Torture Memo," written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee on August 1, 2002). The challenging task set before these lawyers was to somehow "make legal" a set of techniques that had originated in a program developed expressly to prepare soldiers for techniques that were illegal, and thereby to offer officials and interrogators a "golden shield" that would suffice to convince them they would be protected from legal consequences.)
In answer to these questions, and with the benefit of experimentation, especially on Mr. Abu Zubaydah, one of the first of the alleged "big fish" al-Qaeda captives, the CIA seems to have arrived at a method that is codified by the International Committee of the Red Cross experts into twelve basic techniques, as follows:
* Suffocation by water poured over a cloth placed over the nose and mouth...
* Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head...
* Beatings by use of a collar held around the detainees' neck and used to forcefully bang the head and body against the wall...
* Beating and kicking, including slapping, punching, kicking to the body and face...
* Confinement in a box to severely restrict movement...
* Prolonged nudity...this enforced nudity lasted for periods ranging from several weeks to several months...
* Sleep deprivation...through use of forced stress positions (standing or sitting), cold water and use of repetitive loud noises or music...
* Exposure to cold temperature...especially via cold cells and interrogation rooms, and...use of cold water poured over the body or...held around the body by means of a plastic sheet to create an immersion bath with just the head out of water.
* Prolonged shackling of hands and/or feet...
* Threats of ill-treatment, to the detainee and/or his family...
* Forced shaving of the head and beard...
* Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food from 3 days to 1 month after arrest...
...
Snazzy again: I am also excerpting a small part below dealing, in my judgment, with an idea I have just seen recently in the press about Rumsfield demanding "metrics" much like the infamous body counts in Vietnam. I think this will become very important in understanding that this fish stank from the head. Like I said, this article doesn't excerpt well, read the report and the article when you have about an hour free.----------
...
The initial panicked rush to "round up prisoners," which was replicated in Iraq during the first months of the insurgency in the summer and fall of 2003, led to what Wilkerson calls an "ad hoc intelligence philosophy" developed to "justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy."
Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance.... All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals—in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.
Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential.
I saw the consequences of this policy in Iraq, in the fall of 2003, when "neighborhood sweeps" and "cordon and capture operations" in "hot areas" led to wholesale arrests of young men. These men, about whom nothing was known apart from the fact that they were young and lived in a neighborhood deemed "hot," were flex-cuffed, hooded, and promptly sent to Abu Ghraib, where they...sat. Interrogators were overwhelmed, mostly with prisoners who simply had no intelligence to impart. The interrogators were well aware of this, of course, but in part because officers of the combat units who made the arrests sat on the boards that had to approve prisoner releases, it was almost impossible to release prisoners once they had been brought to Abu Ghraib. "Certain
military intelligence officers told the ICRC," according to a 2004 Red Cross report on Abu Ghraib, "that in their estimate between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake."
...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614
{EDIT found a section similar to ICRC TOC, added that.}
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