Re: Well, that's progress.
Welcome back to the human race.
LOL... you mean, Welcome to Hell:
Will Americans all become torturers?
Mark Danner The New York Times
Friday, January 7, 2005
Gonzales's confirmation hearings
At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety.
As Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate Judiciary Committee for hearings to confirm whether he will become attorney general of the United States, Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line.
The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to one that practices torture routinely.
Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans began torturing prisoners, and they have never really stopped. However much these words have about them the ring of accusation, they must by now be accepted as fact.
From Red Cross reports, Major General Antonio M. Taguba's inquiry, James R. Schlesinger's Pentagon-sanctioned commission and other government and independent investigations, we have in our possession hundreds of accounts of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment that is - to use a phrase of the Red Cross - "tantamount to torture."
So far as we know, American intelligence officers, determined after 9/11 to "take the gloves off," began by torturing Al Qaeda prisoners. They used a number of techniques: "water-boarding," in which a prisoner is stripped, shackled and submerged in water until he begins to lose consciousness, and other forms of near suffocation; sleep and sensory deprivation; heat and light and dietary manipulation; and "stress positions."
Eventually, these practices "migrated," in the words of the Schlesinger report, to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where for a time last spring the marvel of digital technology allowed Americans to see what their soldiers were doing to prisoners in their name.
Though the revelations of Abu Ghraib transfixed Americans for a time, in the matter of torture not much changed. After those in Congress had offered condemnations and a few hearings distinguished by their lack of seriousness; after the administration had commenced the requisite half-dozen investigations, none of them empowered to touch those who devised the policies; and after the low-level soldiers were placed firmly on the road to punishment - after all this, the issue of torture slipped back beneath the surface.
Every few weeks now, a word or two reaches us from that dark, subterranean place. Take, for example, this account, offered by an unnamed FBI counterterrorism official reporting in August, more than three months after the Abu Ghraib images appeared, on what he saw during a visit to Guantánamo:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. When I asked the MPs what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion, the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."
This is a fairly mild example when judged against the accounts of the "abuses" that have entered the public record. I put quotation marks around the word "abuses" because most of these acts - as the FBI agent acknowledged ("the interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment") - were in fact procedures, which would not have been possible without policies that had been approved by administration officials.
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