According to the Guardian, the techniques sought by the CIA are:
1. induced hypothermia; this is usually done to help protect that brain function of people that have suffered cardiac arrest. It is done is a hospital setting, using catheters or intraveneous techniques. The CIA seems to prefer using prolonged exposore to extreme air conditioning. Why this is an effective interrogation technique, if it is, is unknown.
2. forcing suspects to stand for prolonged periods; In a November 27, 2002 memo on acceptable interrogation methods, Rumsfeld wrote the following comment: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing [as a counter-resistance technique] limited to 4 hours?” Here I would like to interject with something unfortunately familiar.
What do you do with an erection that won’t quit?
Call your doctor—and be very, very afraid. Though the makers of erectile dysfunction drugs list prolonged, unwanted erections as a potential side effect, urologists have their doubts. Priapism, a rare condition defined by prolonged erections in the absence of sexual arousal, is associated with certain blood diseases, hypertension, and recreational drug use. No matter what its cause, priapism can be dangerous if left untreated. A man who has a painful erection for more than 12 hours is at high risk for permanent damage.
I guess that should answer Rumsfeld’s question.
John Schlapobersky, consultant psychotherapist to the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, was himself tortured through sleep deprivation, in his case in apartheid South Africa in the 1960s.
“Making a programme in which people are deprived of sleep is like treating them with medication that will make them psychotic. It also demeans the experiences of those who have involuntarily gone through this form of torture. It is the equivalent of bear-baiting, and we banned that centuries ago.
“I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which is a form of psychosis.
“By the week’s end, people lose their orientation in place and time – the people you’re speaking to become people from your past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium and their sanity.”
4. a technique called “the attention grab” where a suspect’s shirt is forcefully seized; I can see it now. A CIA officer is put in jail because he grabbed a suspected terrorist’s shirt and shook him. Get real. No one is worried about a little roughhousing. Seriously. This is a joke. You want explicit Congressional permission to shake a suspect by his shirt? They only add crap like this to make anti-torture advocates seem unreasonable.
5. the “attention slap” or open hand slapping that hurts but does not lead to physical damage; much the same can be said for this item. The open-hand slap is an age-old way to make a boorish man mind his manners. It can also be used to focus the mind of an uncooperative witness. No one is worried that Bush’s pro-torture policies will lead to a little open-handed slapping of our troops. The concern is that people will wind up with broken jaws or be slapped for days without intermission. This is a red herring.
6. the “belly slap”;
slap my face, slap my belly, slap my ass. It’s all in the eyes of the beholder. Slap my belly once and I might retaliate with a whip of my beach towel. Slap my belly 700 times while I’m tied to a concrete slab? That’s torture. This shit is just a distraction. Does the CIA really want permission to issue raspberries?
7. and sound and light manipulation. This is serious stuff. It may sound inncocent enough, but prolonged subjection to loud music or intense light is definitely cruel and degrading punishment.
We all know that the CIA wants clarity on what is permissable when interrogating a suspected terrorist. But let’s be clear about what we are talking about. It ain’t belly or face slapping, and it ain’t grabbing a guy by his shirt.
At the end of a secluded cul-de-sac, in a fast-growing Virginia suburb favored by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a handsome replica of an old-fashioned farmhouse, with a white-railed front porch. The large back yard has a swimming pool, which, on a recent October afternoon, was neatly covered. In the driveway were two cars, a late-model truck, and an all-terrain vehicle. The sole discordant note was struck by a faded American flag on the porch; instead of fluttering in the autumn breeze, it was folded on a heap of old Christmas ornaments.
The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.
After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding—the near-drowning of a suspect—have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on “Meet the Press,” said that the government might have to go to “the dark side” in handling terrorist suspects, adding, “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.”) The harsh treatment of Jamadi and other prisoners in C.I.A. custody, however, has inspired an emotional debate in Washington, raising questions about what limits should be placed on agency officials who interrogate foreign terrorist suspects outside U.S. territory.
This fall, in response to the exposure of widespread prisoner abuse at American detention facilities abroad—among them Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba; and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan—John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in Congress that would require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution. Prisoners must not be brutalized, the bill states, regardless of their “nationality or physical location.” On October 5th, in a rebuke to President Bush, who strongly opposed McCain’s proposal, the Senate voted 90–9 in favor of it.
and this:
Habibullah, was captured in November 2002. He was locked in an isolation cell with his hands shackled to the wire ceiling over his head. The report describes how he was literally kicked to death over several days.
The guards found him “uncooperative”, and he was given multiple “peroneal strikes” – a disabling blow to the leg just above the knee. “That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg,” former Sgt Thomas Curtis told investigators.
A lawyer for one of the guards who kneed Habibullah in this fashion told US investigators: “My client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility.”
When Habibullah started coughing up phlegm and complaining of chest pains, the guards laughed at him. Eventually his dead body was found hanging from the handcuffs that still chained him to the ceiling. A post-mortem examination found that he was probably killed by a blood clot, caused by the leg injuries, which travelled to his heart and blocked the blood supply to his lungs.
Dilawar, a taxi driver, was detained in December 2002 as he drove past a US base that had earlier come under rocket attack. Passengers he had picked up were carrying suspicious items.
Spc Corey Jones, an interrogator, told investigators that Dilawar spat in his face. He responded with a couple of knee strikes.
“He screamed out, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his God,” Spc Jones said. “Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny.” The report says it became a running joke and prison guards kicked Dilawar just to hear him scream “Allah”. “It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes,” he said.
During an interrogation, the severely injured Dilawar begged a translator to get him a doctor. The translator says he told the interrogators, but one replied: “He’s OK. He’s just trying to get out of his restraints.”
An autopsy found that Dilawar died of heart failure caused by “blunt force injuries to the lower extremities”. The coroner, Lieutenant-Colonel Elizabeth Rouse, told a pre-trial hearing that his legs “had basically been pulpified … I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.”
So, let’s stop playing games. Is it okay to beat people to death, or isn’t it?
