Monday, May 4, 2009

Add this to the torture techniques...

According to a recently declassified Justice Department document, the CIA believed that so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques like sleep deprivation worked better when a detainee’s resistance was weakened from hunger. The agency, with the legal approval of the Justice Department, employed a regimen that sharply restricted the caloric intake of detainees in its custody — an intake distinctly below federal nutritional guidelines for inmates in U.S. prisons.
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1 comment:

the talking dog said...

None of the specifics of the United States' institutional torture regime are particularly surprising. With respect to diet, it became obvious to habeas corpus attorneys talking to their clients that diet was played with: we knew that Duncan Hunter's Congressional homile of "lemon chicken and rice pilaf" was utter nonsense (save perhaps for the Potemkin Village section of the prison on Congressional visiting day).

Unfortunately, the other part of this is that the shock value isn't there anymore: once we're considering dropping insects in a coffin sized "containment unit" to ply a man with fear of insects... there's nothing left. We can (and did) threaten to kill people and their families, we can, and did, on occasion, actually kill the detainee themselves (usually not at GTMO, though elsewhere). And so... we learn yet something else...

And as it becomes more and more obvious that the whole thing is eerily reminiscent of Soviet or Nazi practices, the shrill cry of "can't we move on" will, amazingly, only get louder... we'll have to keep whatever pressure we can on the current regime to avoid that result.