FOR GENERAL RELEASE: Merely 20 or so minutes (approximately two cigarettes) after the announcement of a Justice Department investigation into whether there should be an investigation of CIA torture, I have completed my review of documents and decided: yes! From the 2004 CIA Inspector General's Report on Torture is this.
Yeah, I am pretty much going with "torture." Stand down, Attorney General Eric Holder! Don't bother coming in to work, special investigator John Durham, I finished early for you! (For the appendix, I am still working on figuring out that redaction there. With ____ consent... With OFFICER consent? With LANGLEY consent? Whatever-someone gave consent to hold a whirring power drill to the head of a naked, hooded man. Oh yeah and the gun-racking to the head too, I guess.)
Monday, August 24, 2009
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"With express written consent." Yes, Major League Baseball is part of the conspiracy.
"The debriefer". Sounds like a role for Harvey Kietel.
Also, "we'll kill your children" in paragraph 95. Much of this reads like scraps of dialogue from a 1980s Schwarzenegger vehicle.
God, I really hope they didn't wish Mr. Al-Nashiri a Happy New Year.
Unless the drill was loud enough to produce in the subject's ears, it is very hard for me to agree that this is torture. It doesn't sound like the gun touched either.
Why make a big deal out of nothing (this), when you already have something (waterboarding)?
Torture is not actually what you physically do to people, and that is always part of the definition of torture, including the UN Convention Against Torture, which uses this language: "Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession."
Do you not think that the above are intended to create severe mental suffering?
I don't think things like waterboarding are any more of a big deal than these tactics, actually! They just look more dramatic because they're physical.
Also? For an uneven parallel? Attempted rape is still a crime in the U.S. I would say that you could make a good analogy between attempted rape and rape, and between "racking" a gun held to someone's head and actually shooting them.
SEVERE mental suffering? No, I do not.
"...produce *pain* in the subject's ears..."
Dick Cheney used a similar technique at a Beltway Winn Dixie to determine Girl Scouts deployed on its perimeter were secretly holding three crates of Samoas.
Once you don't follow through on "OMG! What is he going to do with that drill" thingy the gun next the head is probably less effective.
This part regarding waterboarding reads like an FU-
"One of the psychologists/interrogators aknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique differed than that used in SERE training and explained that the Agency's technique is different because it is for real and is more poignant and convincing"
Chorie- what is your position on cigar smoke in the face?
I'm fairly pro on that. At least at the bars on the far west side that I've been to.