If you recall Abu Ghraib, you will remember how almost every one of these techniques was deployed on the night shift. This is a critical point. The kind of techniques used in Abu Ghraib - sexual humiliation, hooding, use of dogs, tying prisoners up in “stress positions”, mandatory nudity, humiliating prisoners for their religious faith, even the famous Lynndie England leash - were all developed at Guantanamo Bay under the strictest of supervision. What we were told were just frat-guy, crazy techniques on the night shift - had been deployed by the best trained, most tightly controlled, most professional interrogation center we have. The Schmidt report argues that, while some of this was out of bounds, it was only because of some extra creativity, not because the techniques themselves were illicit, or unauthorized by Rumsfeld and Bush. Abu Ghraib is and was policy - just policy absorbed by ill-trained, unprofessional hoodlums. But those hoodlums didn’t get their ideas from thin air. They got them from the Pentagon and the White House…

…”on seventeen ocasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject.”

This latter is a very curious statement. Presumably, the interrogators weren’t refreshing the detainee. This, I infer, was “water-boarding,” a technique finessed by the French in Algeria, where water is poured over a person’s face to bring them to the point of drowning, and then released from suffocation at the last minute. Later in the report, we are told that this was done not just seventeen times but “regularly” as a “control measure.” All this was “legally permissible under the existing guidance.” That guidance was crafted by John Yoo, approved by Alberto Gonzales and signed by the president. Rumsfeld himself personally signed off on this interrogation.

Link

Related Leave a Comment