CIA: None Dare Call It Rape

[FourScore]

Tue Dec 09, 2014 at 10:34 PM PST
CIA: None Dare Call It Rape
by zootfloggin

I thought I could not be shocked by the CIA torture report until I listened to NPR's Audie Cornish interview with the former Deputy CIA director John McLaughlin:

CORNISH: What about the issue, then, of the brutality itself? Another charge here is that the program was just much more brutal than the CIA represented to law makers or to the public, and gets fairly graphic in terms of things like abuse of detainees rectally and things like that. I mean, what's your response to the idea of the brutality being far worse than represented?

MCLAUGHLIN: Well, people need to read the CIA rebuttal on this.

We live in a never-never world of Newspeak, where waterboarding of American prisoners by the Japanese soldiers in WWII was prosecutable torture but only "enhanced interrogation" when performed by the CIA.
Now it appears that CIA interrogators were raping suspects as well. "According to the Senate report: "At least five CIA detainees were subjected to "rectal rehydration" or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity."

This is emphatically clear--there was no sane medical reason to rectally insert anything into these prisoners. Do not let McLaughlin and others lie their way out of this. In a premeditated manner the interrogators planned the rape and humiliation of these prisoners. Their only justification was to break the victim emotionally, the same goal that all rapists have.

When feeding or rehydrating someone who cannot or will not be fed or rehydrated, every beginning medical student knows that you use a nasogastric tube to deliver fluids. The tube goes in the other end, down the mouth so that liquids are naturally processed by the digestive tract. It is common to see prisoners on hunger-strike being force fed with a naso-gastric tube, so the technology was not completely unknown to the interrogators. And they didn't just accidentally get it wrong.

Except in very unusual circumstances, sticking this tube up someone's rectum is medically contraindicated since you don't get efficient large bowel absorption of water and nutrients and you end up giving the patient an enema. As any first year med student knows, you would have to be a moron to do this. Or a sick rapist bastard. And this was part of their interrogation tactics.

Place yourself in the detainee's position for a moment. They strip you, beat you, threaten and humiliate you. And then they start forcing something up your ass. Regardless of the value of your information that could stop a crime, can you imagine this occurring in any police station in the United States? Fortunately, when the perpetrators are caught and convicted, they go to jail for a very long time.

Is it justifiable to rape someone to get actionable intelligence to stop terrorism? This takes the debate to another, more twisted plane than simply beating, threatening, waterboarding and sometimes killing detainees. Somehow, abusing and torturing a terrorist suspect seems less evil, more morally equivalent. But to rape with premeditation the prisoners? What demented soul thought that this was a good patriotic American thing to do?

How do these interrogators live with themselves? These CIA interrogators were Americans and were paid by taxpayers like you and me a living wage to rape individuals in the course of their work. Legally. Some of these folks may be your neighbors or coaches on your kids' Little League teams. I wonder what kind of hell they live in if they have any kind of self-reflection. I only wish Cornish had used the word "rape" in her interview instead of her clinically-detached description, just as I wished reporters would have had the guts to use the word "torture" instead of "enhanced interrogation" eight years ago in their reporting.

The irony of this is too great--with the ongoing debate over college rape and Aaron Sorkin and the rest. Apparently, it can be, under some circumstances, reasonable for US officials to rape prisoners under United States policy. Sirs, do you have no shame?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/10/1350670/-CIA-None-Dare-Call-It-Rape