Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009
What to Do About the Torturers?
By David Cole
So, where does that leave us?
<...>
In short, the United States has never taken full responsibility for the crimes its high-level officials committed and authorized. That is unacceptable. In the long run, the best insurance against cruelty and torture becoming US policy again is
a formal recognition that what we did after September 11 was wrong - as a normative, moral, and legal matter, not just as a tactical issue. Such an acknowledgment need not take the form of a criminal prosecution; but it must take some official form. We have been willing to admit wrongdoing in the past. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, officially apologizing for the Japanese internment and paying reparations to the internees and their survivors. That legislation, a formal repudiation of our past acts, provides an important cultural bulwark against something similar happening again. There has been nothing of its kind with respect to torture.
Some crucial chunks:
<...> The smoking gun is the Army's log of the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani. Al-Qahtani was thought to be the twentieth hijacker; he was denied entry to the United States in August 2001 at Orlando Airport, where Mohamed Atta, the leader of the September 11 attacks, was waiting to meet him. It was his interrogation that prompted the military to authorize new coercive techniques. The log of al-Qahtani's interrogation, leaked to the press and initially published by Time magazine, provides a detailed, minute-by-minute account of the tactics employed against al-Qahtani, all of which had been approved by Rumsfeld in his one-page memo
............................
When Sands asked Dr. Seltzer whether she thought the treatment had produced severe physical or mental pain, the legal threshold for torture, she pointed to the Army's own recording of al-Qahtani's expressions of distress. Sands puts them together in a single quotation, editing out the tactics that produced the reactions. It is the closest thing we have to seeing the experience through the eyes of its victim, and it is truly harrowing. Here is a portion:
Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee butted SGT R in the eye. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Turned his head from left to right. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Began to cry. Claimed to have been pressured into making a confession. Falling asleep. Very uncomfortable. On the verge of breaking. Angry. Detainee struggled. Detainee asked for prayer. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Pushed guard. Dizzy. Headache. Near tears. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Complained of dizziness. Tired. Agitated. Yelled for Allah. Started making faces. Near crying. Irritated. Annoyed. Detainee attempted to injure two guards. Became very violent and irate. Attempted to liberate himself. Struggled. Made several attempts to stand up. Screamed.... .......................
Who was responsible?
<...> Sands pressed this point with Feith, prompting a striking admission. As Sands relays the dialogue:
I was...curious about the connection between the decision on Geneva and the new interrogation rules approved by Rumsfeld at the end of 2002.... I observed to Feith that his memo to the President and the Geneva decision meant that its constraints on interrogation didn't apply to anyone at Guantánamo. "Oh yes, sure," he shot back. So that was the intention, I asked. "Absolutely," he replied, without any hesitation. Under the Geneva Conventions no one there was entitled to any protection. "That's the point."http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2009/01/dealing-with-torturers.html ..........................
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