KO and Jane Mayer Discuss The Horrors Of Torture And Dick Cheney's Lies
[Editor's note: Please welcome D-Day to the Crooks and Liars team. Most of you are no doubt familiar with him through his always-impressive work at Digby's Hullabaloo, where he'll continue to contribute; you'll just get to read more of him here. D-Day also helped fill in a few weeks back while I was on vacation. John's trying to swim against the tide of blogs pulling, so he's hired D-Day to write several posts a week for us. We're lucky to have him. -- DN]
Keith Olbermann talks with Jane Mayer in this clip about the release of the CIA IG report and the preliminary investigation into some of the worst practices of the torture regime. She talks about how the IG report reads like "a crime scene," foregrounding the idea that the architects of the policy at CIA were warned in this 2004 report and repeatedly thereafter that their agency would be in deep legal trouble for continuing these actions, and yet they kept justifying them and/or actually engaging in them for years afterward. Nobody took the warnings seriously, knowing both the makeup of the Justice Department and the Presidency at that time, and perhaps banking on how Washington would view these efforts, as part of the past and best kept their, given the Establishment culpability for torture.
Here's just a few of the facts of what CIA interrogators did in our name, just the ones that come from this IG report, as masterfully summarized by Glenn Greenwald:
• Threats of execution, using semi-automatic handguns and power drills
• Threats to kill detainee and his children
• Threats to rape detainee's wife and children in front of him
• Restricting the detainee's carotid artery
• Hitting detainee with the butt end of a rifle
• Blowing smoke in detainee's face for five minutes
• Multiple instances of waterboarding detainees, of the type we prosecuted Japanese war criminals for using:
• Hanging detainee by their arms until interrogators thought their shoulders might be dislocated
• stepping on detainee's ankle shackles to cause severe bruising and pain
• choking detainee until they pass out
• dousing detainee with water on cold concrete floors in cold temperatures to induce hypothermia
• killing detainees through torture techniques, whether accidental or not
• putting detainee in a diaper for days at a time to live in their own filth
On that last point, Digby notes that this could have been used in tandem with another technique we know about, the use of forced enemas, a particularly degrading technique, part and parcel of the humiliations heaped on prisoners that were psycho-sexual in nature. A lot of these stem from misreadings of books like Raphael Patai's "The Arab Mind," which presumed a host of dubious generalizations about Muslims and their predispositions, all of it willingly lapped up by neoconservatives willing to believe that their opponents were somehow subhuman. As if anyone would react favorably to being made to live in their own shit. These stereotypical projections that manifested themselves in essentially an allowance for torturing brown-skinned people have dangerous and deadly repercussions.
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