by anna missed
Crossposted from anna missed
Emptywheel has
a post up today on the newly released torture memos, that reveal some
profoundly disturbing details. According to the documents (and in spite
of the presidents denials that we torture) both Al Qaeda Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah were tortured by waterboarding. While it’s
disturbing enough that the president broke both domestic and
international laws in authorizing the torture in the first place, had
doctors and psychologists (in violation of their hippocratic oath)
assist in the procedures, and had the whole process filmed repeatedly
by the CIA and delivered to the White House for viewing – these are bad
enough, but, now it also comes to light that both men were not only
subjected to torture, but tortured so many times repeatedly that it
defies all comprehension.
In the course of a month Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed was waterboarded no less than 184 times, and Abu Zubaydah was
waterboarded 84 times during one month. That averages out to being
waterboarded something like 6 and 3 times a day for 30 consecutive
days. Bear in mind also that these procedures were not the so called
“simulated drowning” technique (used in training), but the “real
drowning” technique of actually pouring water into the respiratory
system. Most experts in such matters agree that these methods are
unreliable as intelligence gathering tools because the terror inspired
by enduring one or two of these procedures is enough for the subject to
begin confessing and admitting to what ever information they think the
perpetrators are after in order to make it stop. The evidence of the
intelligence received from these two, according to many accounts, would
also confirm this, in that the only reliable information gathered was
early in their confinement. And when the information flow began to slow
to a tickle, the Bush administration then ordered that the torture
increase in intensity to the astronomically absurd levels now being
revealed.
There is really no other way to process or account for this
information other than to view it as an act of pure sadistic sickness,
hell bent, and addicted on the tactile pleasure of revenge. Is it any
wonder that just a year or so after this, the Abu Ghraib debacle would
also be revealed repeating the same mindset, if not in the same
proportions. There’s no way any of this can be reduced to euphemism or
the polite nomenclature of “what if’s” – this is pure evil, in
undeniably large, unfathomable, and unwieldy quantities, that will not
go away quietly, because there is a big difference between someone who
commits a crime of passion and one who keeps his victim alive and
locked in the cellar for his personal pleasure.
