Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

This idea was not a practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious

Back in the early blog days, I used to read Instapundit regularly. Compared to the neanderthal wingnuts I commonly sparred with on bulletin boards and the like, he was a breath of fresh air. But, after 9/11, like so many, he stopped making sense on a regular basis and I ended up having to put him in the “life is too short” file. Since then, when I do check in over there or follow a link I am quite stunned at how knee jerk he has become, even while there are nuggets of good sense still sometimes tucked between the lines.

Yglesias reminds me today of both why I used to like him and why he is so insufferable today:

I find it hard to respond to these things in terms of cost-benefit. My law school mentor Charles Black once said that of course you can come up with scenarios — the classic ticking-nuclear-bomb example — where torture might be justified. And you can be sure that, in those cases, if people think it’ll work they’ll use it no matter what the rules are. But there’s a real value to pretending that there’s an absolute rule against it even if we know people will break it in extraordinary circumstances, because it ensures that people won’t mistake an ordinary remedy for an extraordinary one.

Well said.

I also think that the rather transparent effort to use this against Bush — often by people who think nothing of cozying up to the likes of Castro, for whom torture and murder are essential tools of governance — has caused the Abu Ghraib issue to be taken less seriously than perhaps it ought to be.

Taking the second part first, when, exactly, did Reynolds decide that he had to ass-kiss the Right with such sycophantic upside downism? It’s “the Left’s” fault because if they didn’t make such a big deal out of it — and hold Bush accountable — people would take the issue more seriously. What Gillepie-esque nonsense. It’s that kind of hackery that makes Reynolds unreadable.

The first part of his analysis, as Yglesias points out with his “well said”, is quite interesting and relevant, however. It’s one that people don’t talk much about, perhaps because to debate it openly would render the concept useless. It’s a bit cynical and even a bit dishonest, but Yglesias can see the utility of it and so can I, Dershowitz’s torture[d] theories notwithstanding.

The idea that the “ticking time bomb” scenario might call for someone to break the law (and face the consequences of doing so) gets to the nub of our concerns with torture and the right of self-defense. As Reynolds points out, people will likely employ torture in a real ticking time bomb scenario whether it is legal or not. It is ridiculous to think someone wouldn’t if the scenario were as straightforward as it’s always presented. But, by outlawing acts of torture in all circumstances you prevent using torture in interrogations that are not ticking time bomb scenarios because you force the person who breaks that prohibition to show that it was a matter of self-defense. The bar is high. It must be so obvious that prosecutors or a jury of your peers can see that your actions directly saved the lives of specific would-be victims.

It would be a transparent legal process that everyone can judge based on the specific facts of the case. Finding that someone acted in self-defense under these circumstances would no more nullify our prohibition against torture than finding a policemen who acted in self-defense by shooting an armed man threatening people at a bus stop nullifies our prohibition against murder. The individual circumstances, reviewed in an open legal process, are all that would ever be required to justify the “ticking time bomb” torture defense. And, since there are an infinitesimal number of ticking time bomb cases, this specific circumstance is interesting but largely theoretical and therefore it’s actually a red herring.

The real problem we face here is determining what does and does not constitute a ticking time bomb and what does and does not constitute self-defense. And, that is where the Bush administration has gone so far off the rails as to be flying.

It’s not just that the torture memos explicitly give the president unprecedented powers to set aside the laws of the land (something the “libertarian” Reynolds should at least get a little bit exercized about), but that after 9/11, the Bush administration decided that the definition of self-defense is unlimited, even including preventive war. Under their definition pretty much anything goes. Somebody looks at you sideways — kill him. Why take a chance he might have a gun and shoot you first? Somebody says somebody might have some useful information? Torture him. It could save lives. In that sense, all threats, real or imagined, immediate or potential, are considered ticking time bombs that we have a right and obligation to diffuse any way we can.

This definition of self-defense is what makes it possible to excuse wanton torture, unprovoked aggression, lying and manipulation and usurpation of democracy itself. And what makes it so dangerous is that it allows it to be done under the rubrik of patriotism and the rule of law.

I have no doubt that many Americans see any act that might prevent further attacks as justified. Perhaps there are even quite a few who believe that if many thousands of innocent people, including children, are swept up in this “preventive” activity, it is a sad but necessary and moral thing. But, in order for this make any sense at all one would have to assume that the government has some idea what the threat is in the first place and knows who can tell them what they need to know to prevent it.

Unfortunately, recent events have just proven on the grandest scale imaginable that our government wouldn’t wouldn’t know a ticking time bomb if it fell into the oval office with a goddamned sign on it. The Bush administration did, after all, just invade a country on the basis of a threat that simply didn’t exist after ignoring people running around with their hair on fire for months about a threat that actually did. I’m afraid I just don’t have a lot of faith in these fellows’ ability to know when we are and aren’t being threatened. So, perhaps it’s best not to leave the definition of what constitutes self-defense in the hands of such incompetents and rely instead on the long established legal definitions that stood us in good stead through 223 years. Human beings, it turns out, aren’t very good at playing God.

The extreme overreaction of the government to the attacks of 9/11, heinous as they were, and its subsequent willingness to dispose of all previously agreed upon limitations to its ability to act in “self-defense” led directly to pictures of torture being shown all over the world — pictures symbolizing American indecency, immorality, incompetence and relentless will to power. And there is a paper trail that leads directly to the oval office where the man who sits behind the desk there says that he never ordered anything illegal and the world should be comforted by that.

If not that man, then who should we hold responsible for the utter vacuousness that has replaced a previously complex system of belief in the rule of law and inalienable human rights with a lizard brain definition of self-defense they wrap in meanlingless terms like “moral clarity?” The only people I see imitating Castro these days are sitting in the White House.

Tragedy Preceded By Farce

Sizzling, right on the money commentary by William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune. Simple, straightforward and devastating. I can’t excerpt any of it because every word is necessary. Read the whole thing and then send it to your friends.

Meanwhile, Back On Pluto

Kevin has more Reagan Lunacy from Comrade Norquist:

One of the considerations in favor of a Reagan $100 bill, Norquist said, is that the $100 bill is favored in many foreign countries as the currency of choice and “Reagan was a world leader.”

“But the $100 bill is also the currency of choice of people who sell cocaine, and that is not so good.”

Bet On It

It’s official. Clinton will definitely help Kerry win the election, probably in a huge way. How do I know this?

[Dick]Morris believes that “by sucking up the oxygen in the room during July, Clinton cripples Kerry and forces him to compete for attention with a charismatic former president”. He predicts that the Massachusetts senator “will look a decided second-best to Bill Clinton”.

Morris is the Bizarro Oracle of Delphi. If he predicts something, the exact opposite will come true. He has a very impressive record. For example:

“Eventually, France will cave to the U.S. position.” – On the Iraq/war alliance, New York Post, February 4, 2003

“Republican members of the Senate want their own person controlling the floor so they can have an independent voice … When they reconvene in January, Trent Lott will still be there for one good reason: The Republican senators don’t want him to go.” – New York Post, December 16, 2002

“(U)nless (GWB) starts this war on schedule in September … he’s going to lose Congress.” – Fox News Channel, Hannity & Colmes, August 5, 2002

How should we interpret these insights, do you think?

“Bill Clinton is using his long-awaited autobiography to help Hillary win the vice presidential spot on Sen. John Kerry’s ticket.”

“If Bill, who has trouble finishing anything and procrastinates constantly, actually finishes the book, there is a reason. Likely she was nagging him to do it so he could raise the pressure for her.”

According to Morris, Clinton blackmailed Kerry by threatening to release the book during the campaign. Since he IS releasing the book during the campaign, we must assume that Kerry did not succumb to the blackmail. Which means that Hillary will not be on the ticket.

But, since this came from Morris, it must mean that Clinton DIDN’T blackmail Kerry so there was no blackmail for Kerry to deal with in the first place. Therefore, oddly, Hillary will also not be on the ticket but for the opposite reason that Morris asserts.

It takes a while to get the hang of reading those Morris tea leaves, but once you do it’s money in the bank.

Via pandagon and Campaign Desk

Double Whammy

As much as I loved his howl of outrage (posted below) Alterman also gets something wrong:

“Bill Clinton is about to do the same thing to John Kerry with his book that Ronald Reagan did to George W. Bush by dying: remind everybody of everything the old guy was and the current guy is not.

Nope. Clinton is about to do the same thing to George W. Bush that Reagan did to him by dying: he also is going to remind everybody of everything he was and the current guy is not. The contrast is between presidents, not candidates.

This helps Kerry, the man who Clinton will be promoting right along with his book.

Compare and contrast.

Today Eric Alterman howls at the outrageous conduct of the Bush administration. The complaints are about huge matters of war and civil liberties and presidential actions that have extraordinary consequences for the entire world:

It’s hard to say which is the best representation of what this war is doing to and has done to this country. Is it the lies that were told to get us into it? Is the fact that we are picking up innocent people off the street and torturing them? Is it that we have suspended the most basic civil liberties in our own country? Is it that the work of professional intelligence agencies has been corrupted? Is it that we have drawn resources away from the fight against Al Qaida which has completely regrouped? Is it that we are creating more terrorists? Is it that more than seven hundred Americans have been killed and thousands have been seriously injured? Is it that thousands of Iraqis have been killed but nobody is keeping an account of the numbers of their deaths? Is it that we are now more hated around the world than we have ever been? Is it that we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars while actually decreasing our security? Is it that we are doing all this while starving the most crucial homeland security programs? Is it that everyone who told the truth about what was being planned has been dismissed and seen their characters attacked? The usually soft-spoken and moderate intelligence analyst and author Thomas Powers does not exaggerate when he notes that Bush and the neocons have “caused the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in modern U.S. history.”

Now take a look at a similar howl of outrage from William Kristol The Weakly Standard, August 31, 1998

WHERE ARE THE RESIGNATIONS?

…For seven months, the president asked his staffers and supporters to lie. He assured them — some of them personally — that he had told the truth when he denied a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ann Lewis and Paul Begala; Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala; Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt: All of them were lied to by the president. And all of them, in turn, were sent out to lie to the rest of us on his behalf.

[…]

As Charles Krauthammer said, “This is the point at which cynicism turns into moral depravity.” And the night of August 17 was the moment at which loyal service to Bill Clinton (already morally problematic) crossed the line into self-abasement.

Does no one in the administration realize this? The president engages in sordid activity in the White House — in the Oval Office — with a 21-year-old intern. He lies about it. He attempts to cover it up. Now he admits (albeit grudgingly and partially) to the truth. Yet none of his staff, no member of his administration, and almost no Democratic official seems to want to hold the president truly accountable for his actions — by demanding that he resign. And, in the absence of Clinton’s willingness to go, not a single person who works for him seems to have the honor to leave himself.

Is this an unrealistically high expectation? I don’t think so. I worked in two administrations, first for Bill Bennett, then for Dan Quayle. It goes without saying that neither of them would have done what Bill Clinton has done. It also goes without saying that, if either of them had done something even remotely so disgraceful, he would have resigned. But I honestly believe that, if either man had resisted resignation, my colleagues and I would have told him he had to go. Failing that, we ourselves would have resigned.

Bill Clinton is not a man of honor. But are there no honorable men around him? Can his staff and cabinet be lied to without consequence? Is there nothing that will impel them to depart? They need not become vociferous critics of the president. They need not denounce him. A quiet, principled leave-taking would suffice. But it would be refreshing if one of them refused to be complicit any longer in the ongoing lie that is the Clinton White House. Apparently, not one of them is willing to do that.

[…]

Personal loyalty is an admirable trait, and so is political loyalty. Up to a point. Government officials work for the nation, not simply for the president. They swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. To remain loyal to a president who lies is to make oneself complicit in his lies. To remain loyal to a man who has brought shame to his office is to make oneself complicit in that shame. At some point, blind loyalty must yield to principled honor. When?

Stirring, wasn’t it? From the son of the Neocon Godfather himself.

How did the nation survive the great Fellatio Threat of 1998 — a year which, not incidentally, Clinton bombed the shit out of Iraq (likely taking out any possible remaining WMD) and came this close to killing bin Laden. Not good enough for old Bill, PNAC wetdreams notwithstanding. Clinton’s manly member was causing a constitutional crisis.

Today we have lying on a massive scale about matters of war and national security and Bill isn’t worried. He isn’t exercized about the president asserting a right to set aside laws and order torture. Back in 1998, Clinton’s lie about his sex life required that the entire white house staff resign if the president didn’t. But, when it comes to lying about terrorism, nuclear weapons or Bush-approved pictures of Iraqi men being sexually tortured, Republicans are “outraged at the outrage.”

What absurd people these neocons, especially, are. It was clear then that those who were in high dudgeon about this naughty nothingness as if it meant something important were much too trivial to be entrusted with real power. For all of their dreams of world domination, (it seems almost cartoonish now) they are incredibly childlike and naive. They may have more respect for book learning, but these people have much more in common with Bush’s embarrassingly immature worldview than they’d ever admit to their cosmopolitan friends in Georgetown.

More broken Kristol at Liberal Oasis.

Useful Idiot

Come on Hitchy-poo. You’re almost there.

You know your grubby little neocon friends are a bunch of scumbag totalitarians in democratic drag, don’t you? And you know you blindly aligned yourself with a movement that pretended to be all about “liberation” when, in fact, it was all about domination. Bad move. Very bad move.

In the sober light of day, hung over and awash in moral clarity, you know it. Go ahead. Confess. We won’t even put you in a painful stress position. You’re already in one, aren’t you?

Testimony

“Torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

In case anyone’s wondering about the specific torture methods that are considered legal in the various gulags we now have around the world, there has been some work done on this by Human Rights Watch, even before Abu Ghraib. They found that at the “detention centers” in Afghanistan, torture as it was defined under the Geneva Convention was used routinely, often against innocent civilians.

According to the two men, bright lights were set up outside their cells, shining in, and U.S. military personnel took shifts, keeping the detainees awake by banging on the metal walls of their cells with batons. The detainees said they were terrified and disoriented by sleep deprivation, which they said lasted for several weeks. During interrogations, they said, they were made to stand upright for lengthy periods of time with a bright spotlight shining directly into their eyes. They were told that they would not be questioned until they remained motionless for one hour, and that they were not entitled even to turn their heads. If they did move, the interrogators said the “clock was reset.” U.S. personnel, through interpreters, yelled at the detainees from behind the light, asking questions.

Two more detainees held at Bagram in late 2002 told a New York Times reporter of being painfully shackled in standing positions, naked, for weeks at a time, forcibly deprived of sleep and occasionally beaten.

A reporter with the Associated Press interviewed two detainees who were held in Bagram in late 2002 and early 2003: Saif-ur Rahman and Abdul Qayyum.86 Qayyum was arrested in August 2002; Rahman in December 2002. Both were held for more than two months. Interviewed separately, they described similar experiences in detention: sleep deprivation, being forced to stand for long periods of time, and humiliating taunts from women soldiers. Rahman said that on his first night of detention he was kept in a freezing cell for part of his detention, stripped naked, and doused with cold water. He believes he was at a military base in Jalalabad at this point. Later, at Bagram, he said U.S. troops made him lie on the ground at one point, naked, and pinned him down with a chair. He also said he was shackled continuously, even when sleeping, and forbidden from talking with other detainees. Qayyum and Rahman were linked with a local commander in Kunar province, Rohullah Wakil, a local and national leader who was elected to the 2002 loya jirga in Kabul, and who was arrested in August 2002 and remains in custody.

According to detainees who have been released, U.S. personnel punish detainees at Bagram when they break rules for instance, talking to another prisoner or yelling at guards. Detainees are taken, in shackles, and made to hold their arms over their heads; their shackles are then draped over the top of a door, so that they can not lower their arms. They are ordered to stand with their hands up, in this manner, for two-hour intervals. According to one detainee interviewed who was punished in this manner, the punishment caused pain in the arms.

In March 2003, Roger King, a U.S. military spokesman at Bagram, denied that mistreatment had occurred, but admitted the following:

“We do force people to stand for an extended period of time. . . . Disruption of sleep has been reported as an effective way of reducing people’s inhibition about talking or their resistance to questioning. . . . They are not allowed to speak to each other. If they do, they can plan together or rely on the comfort of one another. If they’re caught speaking out of turn, they can be forced to do things, like stand for a period of time — as payment for speaking out.”

King also said that a “common technique” for disrupting sleep was to keep the lights on constantly or to wake detainees every fifteen minutes to disorient them.

Several U.S. officials, speaking anonymously to the media, have admitted that U.S. military and CIA interrogators use sleep deprivation as a technique, and that detainees are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, and held in awkward, painful positions.

Here is some direct testimony of men who have been interrogated under rules that allow torture short of the pain accompanying “organ failure or death”

“stress positions”

Many men were handcuffed or tied to a stool as a means of slow torture. The [detainee] sat in one position, day and night. Each time he would fall over, the guards would sit him upright. He was not allowed to sleep or rest. Exhaustion and pain take their toll. When the [detainee] agreed to cooperate with his captors and acquiesced to their demands, he would be removed. Here, I have pictured a guard named “Mouse,” who liked to throw buckets of cold water on a man on cold winter nights.

You’re always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that’s covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he’s always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don’t know. You really don’t know. But he doesn’t — he’s going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the — the torture. And he’s a — he’s a big guy that knows what he’s doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.

“dietary manipulation”

Our normal diet consisted of either rice or bread and a bowl of soup. The soup was usually made from a boiled seasonal vegetable such as cabbage, kohlrabi, pumpkin, turnips, or greens, which we very appropriately called, “sewer greens, swamp grass and weeds.

“sleep deprivation”

Some men were tied to their beds, sometimes for weeks at a time. Here, I have drawn a picture showing the handcuffs being worn in front, but the usual position was with the wrists handcuffed behind the back. A man would live this way day and night, without sleep or rest.

The guards come around the middle of the night just rattling the lock on your door. That’s a terrifying thing because they may be taking you out for a torture session. You don’t know.

“… obviously this is an emotional thing to me, was listening to the screams of other … prisoners while they were being tortured. And being locked in a cell myself sometimes uh, in handcuffs or tied up and not able to do anything about it. And that’s the way I’ve got to spend the night.”

“isolation”

The ten months that I spent in the blacked out cell I went into panic. The only thing I could do was exercise. As long as I could move, I felt like I was going to — well, it was so bad I would put a rag in my mouth and hold another one over it so I could scream. That seemed to help. It’s not that I was scared, more scared than another other time or anything. It was happening to my nerves and my mind. And uh, I had to move or die. I’d wake up at two o’clock in the morning or midnight or three or whatever and I would jump up immediately and start running in place. Side straddle hops. Maybe four hours of sit ups. But I had to exercise. And of course I prayed a lot

Oh, sorry. My mistake. Those illustrations and some of the comments are by former POW Mike Mcgrath about his time in the Hanoi Hilton. Other comments are from the transcript of Return With Honor, a documentary about the POW’s during the Vietnam War. How silly of me to compare the US torture scheme with North Vietnam’s.

It’s very interesting that all these guys survived, in their estimation, mostly because of their own code of honor requiring them to say as little as possible, fight back as they could and cling to the idea that they were not helping this heartless enemy any more than they had to.

As I read the vivid descriptions of these interrogation techniques of sleep deprivation, sensory manipulation, isolation, stress positions and dietary manipulation I had to wonder whether they would be any more likely to work on committed Islamic jihadists than they were on committed American patriots.

The American POWs admitted that they broke under torture and told the interrogators what they knew. And they told a lot of them what they didn’t know. And over time, they told them things they couldn’t possibly know. The torture continued. Many of them, just like the reports from Gitmo, attempted suicide. They remained imprisoned never knowing when or if they would ever be set free.

“unlimited detention”

We began to talk about the war. How long are we going to be there and everything and I — I was thinking well I’m only going to be there about six months or so. And then uh, Charlie says oh, we’re probably going to be here about two years. Two years? And when I — I finally came to that realization, my God, that’s going to be a long time. And when I – it just kind of hit me all at once. And I just took my blanket and kind of balled it up and I just buried my head uh, in this — in this blanket and just literally screamed with — with this anguish that it’s going to be that long. Two years. And then when I was finished, I felt oh, okay. I — I — I can do that. I can do two years. Of course, as it turned out, it was two years, and it was two years after that, and two years after that. Uh, until it was about seven years in my case. You know? But who was to know at that time.

I would imagine that our torture regime is much more hygienic than the North Vietnamese. Surely it is more bureaucratic with lots of reports and directives and findings and “exit interrogations.” We are, after all, a first world torturer. But at the end of the day it’s not much different.

“bad apples”

And he announced to me, a major policy statement. Some officers and some guards had become so angry at what the Americans were doing to their country that they had far exceeded the limits which the government had wished they would uh, observe in treatment of prisoners. That they had um, brutally tortured us. That was the first time they ever acknowledged that it was torture not punishment.

Same excuses, too.

The good news is that the mental torture that was used in North Vietnam, the isolation, the sleep deprivation etc. did not seem to create a lot of “long term” damage in the men who lived through it. Most have done well since. Therefore, all the mental torture they inflicted on our POWs was perfectly legal and above board under the Bush torture regime. So that’s nice.

“When word of torture and mistreatment began to slip out to the American press in the summer of 1969, our public-relations-minded captors began to treat us better. I’m certain we would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around.” John McCain

OhFerChristsake

Mr. Clinton’s efforts to help Mr. Kerry are fraught with risks, Democratic strategists say, including the danger of arousing the legions of Clinton-haters, the possibility of upstaging the candidate himself, and campaign finance rules restricting publicity expenditures around an election. For months, Democratic strategists have worried that if Mr. Clinton’s book appeared too close to the election, he could hog the limelight and upstage Mr. Kerry. In the last election, Vice President Al Gore sought to distance himself from Mr. Clinton on the campaign trail rather than risk association with the scandals surrounding his administration.

Christine Iversen, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, argued that Mr. Clinton’s popularity would prove as much of a liability for Mr. Kerry as an asset. “If Bill Clinton is the most energizing Democrat available, he is not on the ballot, and that is a problem,” she said.

Yes, it would be terrible to remind people of a time when the country was so peaceful and properous that we could afford to let a bunch of flaccid, hypocritical phonies gin up a bogus impeachment for fun and profit. And, needless to say, it’s always a mistake to have interesting, charismatic popular people supporting you publicly and making the case for your candidacy all over the country. Silly Kerry.

I don’t know what it’s going to take to get these anonymous “Democratic strategists” to recognize that Clinton was a very popular Democrat who has a remarkable ability to charm even people who hate him. It’s only when they let the Republicans caricature him that Clinton hating gets any traction. I would bet money that he’ll bring about a national wave of nostalgia for a time when watching him dodge the slings and arrows of Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich was the only war we saw on America’s news channels every night. Jesus, if the GOP were such nervous nellies as this they’d have dropped Reagans body off the Santa Monica pier at midnight and said the family wanted a private service.

Oh, and Republicans really should be careful about talking about “sex” and scandals in this campaign. They really should. The pictures of the Bush approved “frat boy hijinks” they are trying so hard to sweep under the rug are a lot fresher than Bill and Monica in that rope line.

More Paper Trails To Torture

Unit Says It Gave Earlier Warning of Abuse in Iraq:

Military officials said the assessment branch was created to help speed the flow of detainee releases. The unit screened prisoners in a process that fell somewhere between an exit interview and an interrogation. The purpose of the screening was to determine whether a detainee was no longer of ‘intelligence value’ — that is, whether other interrogators had forgotten to ask important questions, or failed to notice inconsistencies in the answers.

In preparation for the screening, interrogators read through the detainees’ files, which consisted mostly of notes by other interrogators and any intelligence reports written about the detainee. Detainee Assessment Branch personnel then asked detainees the same basic questions other interrogators had asked, like biographical queries and whether the detainees knew where Saddam Hussein was hiding.

Starting in mid-November, one member of the unit began asking detainees, ‘How have you been treated since you have been in U.S. custody?’ It was intended as a tactic meant to make the detainee feel like the interrogator cared, military intelligence personnel said. But the question soon began eliciting vivid and disturbing answers.

“One guy said he was thrown on the ground and stepped on the head,” said one soldier. “That’s when I started paying attention to it.”

As more abuse reports emerged, members of the unit made the question a formal part of the screening process. In early December, the question was added to a Microsoft Word document of questions for the unit’s interrogators to ask detainees, several military intelligence personnel said in interviews.

“We couldn’t believe what we were hearing,” said one soldier. Two detainees reported having been given electric shocks at other holding facilities before arriving in Abu Ghraib, according to the interviews. One prisoner’s file included photographs of burns on his body. “We didn’t want people to know that we knew about it and didn’t report it,” the soldier said.

First of all, whether the Torture Working Group deemed it legal or not, if electric shocks and burns aren’t at least called torture rather than “abuse” then we really have gone down the rabbit hole. The press needs to start using plain english. This is getting ridiculous.

These guys reported these incidents of torture, as part of their normal process, to a three person panel consisting of Generals Janis Karpinski and Barbara Fast and a lawyer, who then decided who could be released.

Karpinski has claimed Fast was responsible for overcrowding in the prison because she refused to let prisoners who had been cleared go:

…another female general says Fast was largely to blame for the overcrowding at Abu Ghraib.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq’s prison system until February, said Fast refused to release prisoners who were no longer security threats and ordered them “back in the box” for more questioning.

This new article says that the panel voted on who was to be released, so I don’t know what the real story is. However, it looks fairly obvious that Fast was in charge of the prison — Karpinski has said that Fast spent more time there than she did — so I wouldn’t be surprised if her vote was a bit more important than the other two.

Why do you suppose Fast wouldn’t want to release these useless prisoners from an overcrowded and understaffed facility?