TORTURE UPDATE…Here’s the latest on the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Cuba:
According to FBI officials, the Bush order approved interrogation tactics that include “sleep deprivation and stress positions,” as well as “loud music, interrogators yelling at subjects and prisoners with hoods on their heads.”
What’s that, you say? This doesn’t sound all that horrible? Keep reading:
In a June “Urgent Report” to the FBI director from the Sacramento field office, for example, a supervising special agent described abuses such as “strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees’ ear openings and unauthorized interrogations.”
…In June, for instance, an agent from the Washington field office reported that an Abu Ghraib detainee was “cuffed” and placed into a position the military called “The Scorpion” hold. Then, according to what the prisoner told the FBI, he was doused with cold water, dropped onto barbed wire, dragged by his feet and punched in the stomach.
…Another agent reported this past August that while in Cuba he often saw detainees chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor “with no chair, food or water.”
“Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left for 18-24 hours or more,” the agent wrote.
Sometimes, he reported, the room was chilled to where a “barefooted detainee was shaking with cold.” Other times, the air-conditioning was turned off and the temperature in the unventilated room rose to well over 100 degrees.
We’re really setting a good example in the war of civilizations, aren’t we? I mean, are these guys trying to help Osama’s recruiting efforts, or what?
That stupid fucking fascist is going to get us all killed.
It’s terrible, but I have to believe that if that stuff was in the Bush order, the article would have said so. I have to hold out for a little more information on this one before I fully buy it.
Either way, it’s still happening under his watch. And that is utterly despicable, especially considering it’s not the first time something stupid like this has happened under his watch.
Either way, it’s still happening under his watch. And that is utterly despicable, especially considering it’s not the first time something stupid like this has happened under his watch.[/quote]
Yeah, I know. But look, as terrifyingly believable as this is, I’d rather wait for confirmation that the President has endorsed balls-out torture before I just accept it.
There’s no election coming up, remember? I’m just trying to assume the best, hard as it may be.
That’s totally the wrong attitude for this forum. Don’t you know that everything you hear bad about Bush is true? Especially if it is printed in a foreign newspaper!
A prisoner doesn’t have to undergo excruciating pain to be considered a victim of torture, the Justice Department (news - web sites) now says. But it’s not clear whether this revised, broader definition of torture will change the treatment of foreign detainees.
So is torture now something we can call very naughty again? Are all the principled defenses of “beating the crap out of them isn’t torture” non-operative?
Well there were certainly alot of people (myself included) who said that embarassing photographs and flashing lights and loud music weren’t torture. Any cites for who claimed “beating the crap out of them isn’t torture”?
Shift, I can’t find the thread, but I remember someone on here saying that it wasn’t torture to punch someone so hard in the chest they have a heart attack.
It doesn’t sound like torture so much as murder. Or is this some new torture by repeated heart attacks/defibrillations thingy that Bush no doubt concocted at his secret underground hideout?
So you’re saying the purpose of the punch is not a heart attack? So what we are addressing here is straightforward beatings +/- some hyperbole? Which I have yet to see Bush or Gonzalez endorse or suggest, or for that matter anyone here, as acceptable “tier 2” torture.
I can’t find the thread, but someone here did say it wasn’t torture. Everyone seems to use a much more loose definition than mine - “how pissed would you be if they did it to your mother.”
Yes, but I wouldn’t be overwhelmed with blinding rage. Which I would if they were trying to freeze here, deprive her of sleep, punch her, any of the stuff that’s been mentioned going on.
