Why we can’t just move on

[nhboy]

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=3076

"If you’re tired of hearing about torture — memos and reports and disputes about waterboarding and so on — you should be. As Mark Danner explains in his New York Review of Books article “The Red Cross Torture Report: What it Means”:

…the broader discussion of torture is by now in its essential outlines nearly five years old, and has become, in its predictably reenacted outrage and defiant denials from various parties, something like a shadow play.

News of the “black sites” first appeared prominently in the press—on the front page of The Washington Post—in December 2002. A year and a half later, after the publication and broadcast of the Abu Ghraib photographs—the one moment in the last half-dozen years when the torture story, thanks to the lurid images, became “televisual”—a great wave of leaks swept into public view hundreds of pages of “secret” documents about torture and the Bush administration’s decision-making regarding it. There have been many important “revelations” since, but none of them has changed the essential fact: by no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.

So why are we still talking about it? First, because of the enormous cost of the Bush Administration’s policies — the policies that were supposed to be keeping us safe and advancing democracy throughout the world:

Torture has undermined the United States’ reputation for respecting and following the law and thus has crippled its political influence. By torturing, the United States has wounded itself and helped its enemies in what is in the end an inherently political war—a war, that is, in which the critical target to be conquered is the allegiances and attitudes of young Muslims. And by torturing prisoners, many of whom were implicated in committing great crimes against Americans, the United States has made it impossible to render justice on those criminals, instead sentencing them—and the country itself—to an endless limbo of injustice.

And second, because official news outlets, even in the face of a report as stark as the one Danner unpacks here — and in his earlier article, “U.S. Torture: Voices from the Black Sites” — still defer to Bush Administration officials’ claims that the U.S. never tortured, and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” they authorized were vital to our safety.

It is a testament as much to the peculiarities of the American press—to its “stenographic function” and its institutional unwillingness to report as fact anything disputed, however implausibly, by a high official—that the former vice-president’s insistence that these interrogations were undertaken “legally” and “in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles” continues to be reported without contradiction, and that President Bush’s oft-repeated assertion that “the United States does not torture” is still respectfully quoted and, in many quarters, taken seriously. That they are so reported is a political fact, and a powerful one. It makes it possible to contend that, however adamant the arguments of the lawyers “on either side,” the very fact of their disagreement makes the legality of these procedures a matter of partisan political allegiance, not of law.

This is the situation that Dick Cheney et al. are exploiting now that they are out of office. When Cheney goes on television to insist darkly, “If it hadn’t been for what we did….then we would have been attacked again,” he can simultaneously insist that we take his word for it, because backing up his claims would require releasing information crucial to America’s safety. As Danner notes, “Cheney’s story is made not of facts but of the myths that replace them when facts remain secret: myths that are fueled by allusions to a dark world of secrets that cannot be revealed.”

[wintersprings]

Why

Because if you have no leadership

Can only speak what the teleprompter says

You have to keep the division going.

Chairman Obama will keep the class warfare talk, as thats all he knows.

[cwo_ghwebb]

Is this why boy & nonno are still angry?

[edinsomd]

I feel a bit left out. I never had a caterpillar tossed in my box when I was in SERE School. A little company would have been nice between the trips to People's Pond, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and visits from the Sergeant Major.

[MMDad (Premo)]

If the left thinks there was REAL torture going on, they shouldn't have any problem proving it since they are now controlling Gitmo.

Show us some inmates who have no fingernails since they were ripped out. Show us some fingers chopped off. Show us some people who were blinded with a hot poker. Show us the scars from whippings. Show us some people who were hobbled.

Just show us some people who can complain about a little more than not getting enough sleep, listening to bad music, not having a koran, or being talked to harshly.

[czygvtwkr]

What happened is no worse than Fraternity Hazing, hell the first day of high school is usually more brutal.

They should put those turds in the general prison population of a federal pen and see how they like that.

[Freeway]

Originally Posted by MMDad

Just show us some people who can complain about a little more than not getting enough sleep, listening to bad music, not having a koran, or being talked to harshly.

Red Cross Described 'Torture' at CIA Jails - washingtonpost.com

Between sessions, they were stripped of clothing, bombarded with loud music, exposed to cold temperatures, and deprived of sleep and solid food for days on end. Some detainees described being forced to stand for days, with their arms shackled above them, wearing only diapers.

"On a daily basis . . . a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room," the report quotes detainee Tawfiq bin Attash, also known as Walid Muhammad bin Attash, as saying. Later, he said, he was wrapped in a plastic sheet while cold water was "poured onto my body with buckets." He added: "I would be wrapped inside the sheet with cold water for several minutes. Then I would be taken for interrogation."

Abu Zubaida said interrogators wrapped a towel around his neck and slammed him into a plywood wall mounted in his cell. He was also repeatedly slapped in the face, he said. After the beatings, he was placed in coffinlike wooden boxes in which he was forced to crouch, with no light and a restricted air supply, he said.

"The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in my leg and stomach became very painful," he told the ICRC.

After he was removed from a small box, he said, he was strapped to what looked like a hospital bed and waterboarded. "A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe," Abu Zubaida said.

After breaks to allow him to recover, the waterboarding continued.

"I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless," he said. "I thought I was going to die."