Who would be the first witness on the stand in a torture hearing?

[Hubert Flottz]

Major General Geoffrey D. Miller gets my vote...

Torture at Abu Ghraib Followed CIA's Manual
by Alfred W. McCoy

THE PHOTOS from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots not of simple brutality or a breakdown in discipline but of CIA torture techniques that have metastasized over the past 50 years like an undetected cancer inside the US intelligence community. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led secret research into coercion and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method of torture that was psychological, not physical -- best described as "no touch" torture.

The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counterintuitive breakthrough -- indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel science since the 17th century. The old physical approach required interrogators to inflict pain, usually by crude beatings that often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information. Under the CIA's new psychological paradigm, however, interrogators used two essential methods to achieve their goals.

In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple, nonviolent techniques of hooding or sleep deprivation to disorient the subject; sometimes sexual humiliation is used as well.

Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second stage with simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as standing for hours with arms extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims feel responsible for their own pain and thus induce them to alleviate it by capitulating to the interrogator's power. In his statement on reforms at Abu Ghraib last week, General Geoffrey Miller, former chief of the Guantanamo detention center and now prison commander in Iraq, offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees," the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations." More...

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0514-05.htm

Who is Geoffrey Miller?

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/05/b78956.html

This man needs to be deposed on live TV, to find out from where his orders came, exactly when they were issued and exactly what those orders were.

[Booster]

1. I think the honor should go to Janis Karpinski - she's certainly

got the guts to get up there and tell the truth.

[Stinky The Clown]

2. I agree ....... Karpinski

She was all caught up in the initial public reports of Torture In Our Names. She deserves to start the ball rolling.

[underpants]

3. Col. Nathan R. Jessep

[coalition_unwilling]

4. John Walker Lindh (presumptive first victim of

torture by US government agents)