Spencer Ackerman has an article out this evening in The Washington Independent discussing the just-released unclassified version of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. The report demonstrates how the torture began and how its authorization from senior officials led to abuse, including the abuse of prisoners by military personnel at Abu Ghraib:
As has been documented in numerous Pentagon inquiries stretching back to 2004, Rumsfeld ultimately recommended in April 2003 the use of several extreme interrogation techniques, including stress positions, dietary manipulation, “long time standing” and other techniques that are now revealed to have originated from SERE. Similarly, while Rumsfeld declared that those techniques were applicable only to “military and civilian interrogators assigned to Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the extreme pressure for intelligence in Iraq later that year sent Guantanamo Bay’s commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, to Iraq, where he delivered a list of Guantanamo-approved techniques to the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, with the explicit instruction to “Gitmo-ize” intelligence operations. A 2004 report by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that instruction to be a central cause of the torture at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in late 2003.
Ackerman ends his short article with a quote from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee:
Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses. As the Committee report concluded, authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.
You can read Spencer Ackerman's article, from which these quotes were taken, here: "Report Details Origins of Bush-Era Interrogation Policies," The Washington Independent, posted 4/21/2009, 10:00 p.m.
Spencer Ackerman has also written a short post on his article here: "How the Torture Started."
Earlier this evening, I watched Jon Stewart's clip of people justifying torture (Yes, I usually watch Jon Stewart a day late). Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, I, too, found it difficult to laugh even though I appreciate Stewart's satire. But, as Coates noted, Peggy Noonan's comments on the release of the torture memos were so absurd as to be almost impossible to satirize. Listening to Noonan's so soft, so reasonable voice and watching her sad, sympathetic smile as she said the following words just about made me gag (beginning at 6:09 into Stewart's "We Don't Torture" clip):
It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents [the Obama administration's releasing the torture memos written by the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel] and sending them out to the world and thinking, 'Oh, much good will come of that.' Sometimes in life you want to keep walking... just keep walking. Some of life has to be mysterious.
(hmmmmm... What was that parable told by Jesus about the folks who just kept walking? Yeah, the priest who kept walking....the Levite who kept walking....the Samaritan who stopped...) So, according to Noonan, torture should be mysterious? Something from which we avert our eyes, whistling in the dark?
The critics who justify our "great nation's" use of torture evidently think it's more egregious to send truth out into the world than to send torture out into the world.
For a discussion of a timeline on torture, read "Torture Planning Began in 2001, Senate Report Reveals," by Mark Benjamin, Salon.
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