The Truth Hurts, But It Cannot Be Contained

GIBSON: OK, but would you have – by that same reasoning would you have not reported Abu Ghraib if somebody had brought you those pictures.

SCHONFELD: Abu Ghraib is the greatest foul up of all time. Those pictures were on the internet. The problem is not that we were – we – I only wish the Pentagon could have been able to deny that story, to be able to li – that’s the right of the Pentagon to lie, when it is in the country’s best interest to lie, you do lie. And when I made that statement in my book, an undersecretary – well – at Defense told me I don’t have it quite right, the – uh – Rumsfeld, the Secretary can never lie but any, anybody under him can, that you have to do it when it’s in the public, in the government interest.
News Hounds

…I wonder when Mr. Bush and Mr. DeLay will find the time to address – or rather, to denounce – the depraved ways in which the United States has dealt with so many of the thousands of people (many of them completely innocent) who have been swept up in the so-called war on terror.
NYT: Bob Herbert

People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or in some cases simply made to “disappear” in an all-American version of a practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships. All of this has been done, of course, in the name of freedom.

The government would prefer to keep these matters secret, but we’re living in a digital age of near-instantaneous communication. Evidence of atrocities tend to emerge sooner rather than later, frequently illustrated with color photos or videos.

A recent report from Physicians for Human Rights is the first to comprehensively examine the use of psychological torture by Americans against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The employment of psychological torture, the report says, was a direct result of decisions developed by civilian and military leaders to “take the gloves off” during interrogations and “break” prisoners through the use of techniques like “sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, the use of military working dogs to instill fear, cultural and sexual humiliation, mock executions, and the threat of violence or death toward detainees or their loved ones.”

“Although the evidence is far from complete,” the report says, “what is known warrants the inference that psychological torture was central to the interrogation process and reinforced through conditions of confinement.”

In other words, this insidious and deeply inhumane practice was not the work of a few bad apples. As we have seen from many other investigations, the abuses flowed inexorably from policies promulgated at the highest levels of government.