To: Peter Dierks who wrote (354323 ) 10/14/2007 1:14:04 PM From: tejek Respond to By contrast, "slaps to the head," among the examples cited by the Times of the administration's "brutal" methods, doesn't come close to meeting any plausible definition of torture. The other examples--"hours held naked in a frigid [50 degree Fahrenheit] cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding"--come progressively closer to the line, and perhaps they cross it. But how do we tell? In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him. At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time. In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning. nytimes.com
