Today’s Torture News
by digby
Do you see something odd about this?
The techniques themselves — forced nudity, sleep deprivation, painful shackling — had been used for years to prepare U.S. fighter pilots for possible capture by an enemy. But Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force instructor, said he was shocked in 2003 to see the same harsh methods used haphazardly on Iraqis in a U.S. prison camp. “It had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn’t cooperate,” said Kleinman, a career intelligence officer and survival-school instructor. In dramatic testimony before a Senate panel yesterday, he gave a rare account of how the Pentagon adapted an Air Force training program to squeeze information from captured Iraqis. What Kleinman witnessed in Baghdad in September 2003 prompted him to order a stop to three interrogations, and to warn his superiors that the military’s interrogation practices were abusive and, in his opinion, illegal. “I told the task force commander that the methods were unlawful and were in violation of the Geneva Conventions,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
That’s right. This was done in Iraq. In 2003. While we were still “liberating” the Iraqi people of their lives.
I can’t tell you how infuriating it was last night to hear McCain take credit for ending torture (and Barack for crediting him with it) when he was actually instrumental in legalizing it:
After first insisting that federal law clearly and unambiguously outlaw “torture,” McCain suddenly caved to White House pressure on the MCA, allowing the Administration to insert into the law a clause that effectively allows (and, indeed, legally buttresses the efforts of) the executive branch to implement torture as a means of interrogation.
Without McCain’s pander, there would have been no bad law for the Court to strike down last week. Without McCain’s grandiloquent appeal to Democrats and moderates during that lame-duck session, there quite possibly might have been a better law that just might have passed its constitutional test this term.
McCain’s sell-out on the torture language is not the reason the Justices declared the MCA unconstitutional [in Boumadienne]. It is not the reason why the detainees now have more access to federal courts than they did before. But it is emblematic of the larger and much more destructive, seven-year-long sell-out of the legislative branch in the legal fight against terrorism.
This is the major reason I have such a visceral loathing of this man. Ask yourself what kind of a person would undergo torture, then help legalize it against others while falsely taking credit for standing against it? It’s perverse and immoral in the extreme. It’s evil.
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