Andrew Sullivan is right:
The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if you can. It is a distressing document. Here’s what the “CIA pros” did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president’s directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance “the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody”. Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That’s what Cheney did to America. He’s proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.
This is what the neocon right believe in, even as they prattle on about extending human rights as an American value. They say they believe in democracy. What they also believe in is what we saw done to innocent human beings at Abu Ghraib:
Nudity. The HVD’s clothes are taken from him and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.
Sleep deprivation. The HVD is placed in the vertical shackling position to begin sleep deprivation. Other shackling procedures may be used during interrogations. The detainee is diapered for sanitary purposes, although the diaper is not used at all times.
The diapers are necessary because when you shackle someone in the same position for hours and hours on end and feed him Ensure, he will shit himself. All torturing regimes deal with shitting torture victims. The US followed other regimes in both diapering prisoners or, better still, forcing them to lie in their own excrement, as was discovered by horrified FBI agents at Gitmo. Other torture regimes capture piss and shit in bowls beneath the torture victims. Various forms of nude shackling, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (all barred under Geneva and the UN Convention) are then supplemented by constant bombardment with light, loud noise, water-dousing and walling. These techniques can be used in combination. [emphasis added]
Don’t it make you proud? Don’t you wonder why the Obama administration would want to politicize criminal conduct by actually investigating torture and holding those that tortured accountable under the law?
