Accounts of torture
Adam Serwer has a good article in The American Prospect:
Yesterday the Obama administration ordered the release of four Bush-era memos from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that vividly describe "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by the CIA. The memos were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"Transparency won today," said Ken Gude, a human-rights and international-law expert at the Center for American Progress.
One memo, written in August 2002 and signed by then OLC Chief Jay Bybee, approves a list of 10 "enhanced interrogation" techniques that the CIA wanted to use against Abu Zubayda, who was believed to be a senior member of al-Qaeda. The techniques are described in a detached, clinical manner: "walling," the act of throwing detainees against a "flexible wall," and "close confinement," the act of placing a detainee within a confinement box that forces the detainee to stand or sit. The memo also approves the use of insects with the confinement box to enhance detainees’ sense of terror.
The techniques listed do not rise to the level of torture, the memo says, because they do not cause severe physical or mental suffering. But the abstract descriptions of these techniques stand in stark contrast to detainee testimony of how they were actually applied, according to a 2007 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross. In addition to describing techniques outlined in the Bybee memo, the ICRC report describes several other techniques, such as forced nudity, the dousing of detainees with cold water, and forcing detainees to wear diapers. All of these appear to violate the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to which the United States is a signatory.
Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s National Security Project, says comparing the clinical description in the OLC memos to the ICRC report was surreal. "The four memos were written by lawyers trying to construct a legal regime that allowed the unthinkable. The sterilized language they use in the memos as compared with the graphic descriptions of the ICRC report make that patently clear," Abdo says. "It’s as though you’re in Alice in Wonderland."
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Waterboarding is a form of torture in which cloth or cellophane is placed over the victim’s mouth or head and water is poured over him to force a sensation of suffocation and drowning. The victim is restrained to a wooden board by leather straps to prevent struggling during the procedure. In the Bybee memo, waterboarding is described as a "controlled acute episode." During the procedure, "although the subject may experience the fear or panic associated with drowning, the waterboard does not cause physical pain." The personal accounts from the detainees contradict this description…
