Diapers

by digby

Spencer Ackerman and others have been writing about the revelation in the CIA IG report that diapers were used as an “enhanced interrogation technique,” presumably as one of the many humiliation rituals designed by the SERE psychologists/sadists to “break” the prisoners. Spencer is calling it the “11th technique.”

He meticulously puts together the available evidence to show that this resulted in prisoners having to live in their own filth for long periods of time while they were hanging by their arms in agony — among other things.

But there’s another reason they were kept in diapers, at least while in transit, and I suspect at other times as well: forced enemas.

Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.

Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, “I bet they said he was dehydrated,” adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.

Diapering would likely be part of such a torture technique, I imagine. The American torturers prided themselves on hygiene, after all.

This stuff is actually one of many sick, psychosexual techniques that were used on prisoners under the assumption that “teh ayrabs” were especially a-scared of the dirty dirty. The manly men of the Vice President’s sadism corps knew exactly what to do (and anyway, the torturers probably needed to blow off some steam — it’s a stressful job.) As Greenwald pointed out yesterday, Holder is using the Abu Ghraib model for the investigation, so perhaps this all makes some sort of grotesque sense.

If you have followed the torture revelations over the years, you can’t help but be just a tad disillusioned by the fact that the mainstream media acts over and over again as if they were born yesterday and each time these stories are validated it’s as if it’s the first time they’ve heard it.

We already know they tortured. We know that DOJ bureaucrats illegally approved the torture on Dick Cheney’s request and we know that a bunch of unprofessional, untrained interrogators complied and then went beyond even what was approved. We know that innocent people were tortured and we know that prisoners were killed. We’ve known all this for a long time. The question is not what happened, it’s whether anyone will be held accountable for it.

The Village wants to sweep this under the rug and one of the ways they do that is simultaneously restart the clock with each new revelation while taking official action at a glacial pace. At this point, most people are so inured to information about torture that they barely notice and those who do are expected to be satisfied with another bad apple prosecution.

There is always hope that even a sham investigation will lead the prosecutors down paths they can’t avoid so it’s not over. Keep your fingers crossed. Otherwise, we will be left with a very dangerous precedent and a shameful, disgusting American legacy which will haunt us all.

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