SubscribeAs we explained in the Section 2340A Memorandum, "pain and suffering" as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of "pain" as distinguished from "suffering"... The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict "severe pain or suffering". Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat "suffering" as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe sufering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.Ambinder breaks it down, Greenwald rants.
In addition to using the confinement boxes alone, you also would like to introduce an insect into one of the boxes with Zubaydah. As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order to not commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death. [Redacted section] so long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect's placement in the box would not constitue a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his position.Yeah, the Assistant Attorney General's crucial contribution to the war effort was advises how to scare an already insane prisoner with bugs. Especially valuable, he painstakingly tells our brave
I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it? Tell me, and don’t lie!Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
If Obama truly believes that prosecuting unknown CIA operatives would constitute some kind of disturbing disunity that the country could not bear in the present situation, then how likely is he to pursue the even more "disturbing" prospect of investigating and indicting a former president and his top officials? ...Greenwald quotes three seperate sources saying that this does not mean no prosecutions.
Jameel (a) calls for a Special Prosecutor on behalf of the ACLU and (b) emphasizes that nothing said by Obama or Holder today should be understood to foreclose criminal prosecutionsGiven this, I take Obama's stance as trying to appear non-partisan and non-vindictive. Slate's political gabfest was also making a similar point in January; the Administration's position seems to be that they'll "open-source" what went wrong, leaving the possibility of independent prosecutors to pursue justice.
We also conclude that the CIA interrogation program, subject to its careful screending, limits, and medical monitoring, would not violate the substantive standards applicable to the United States under Article 16 even if those standards extended to the CIA interrogation program. Given the paucity of relevant precedent and the subjective nature of the inquiry, however, we cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion, though, for the reasons explained, the question is unlikely to be subject to judicial inquiry.After reading as much of these memos as I could stomach, I'd very much like to see that final bit of hedging put to the test.
A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos “unbelievable.”
“It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake."
“I don't believe Obama would intentionally endanger the nation, so it must be that he thinks either 1. the previous administration, including the CIA professionals who have defended this program, is lying about its importance and effectiveness, or 2. he believes we are no longer really at war and no longer face the kind of grave threat to our national security this program has protected against.”
No. 0068 April 4, 1953
Top Secret
The USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs has determined that the investigative work of the MGB [Ministry of State Security] authorities has involved grave perversions of Soviet law, arrests of innocent Soviet citizens, uncontrolled falsification of investigative materials, and widespread use of various methods of torture--brutal beatings of arrestees, round-the-clock use of handcuffs with the arms twisted behind the back, in some cases for several months, long periods of sleep deprivation, the incarceration of unclothed prisoners in cold cells, etc.
By order of the administration of the (former) USSR Ministry of State Security, beatings of arrestees took place in rooms specially fitted out for the purpose in Lefortovo and the internal prisons, and were assigned to a special group of selected individuals from the ranks of the prison employees, with the use of various torture devices.
These monstrous "interrogation methods" led to many of the innocent arrestees being driven to a condition of physical collapse, moral depression, and sometimes loss of human likeness by the investigators.
Making use of the arrestees' condition, the falsificationist investigators slipped them "confessions," fabricated ahead of time, about anti-Soviet and espionage-terrorist activities.
Such vicious methods of investigation led the efforts of the agency staff down a false path, and the attention of the state security authorities was distracted from the fight against the real enemies of the Soviet State.
I order:
1. All use of any methods of coercion and physical pressure against arrestees to be categorically forbidden in the Ministry of Internal Affairs; during investigations all norms of the code of criminal due process are to be strictly observed.
2. Rooms fitted out at the Lefortovo and internal prisons for the purpose of applying methods of physical pressure by the (former) USSR MGB are to be liquidated, and all devices which were used for purposes of torture are to be destroyed.
3. This order to be distributed to the entire agency staff of the MVD authorities; they are to be warned that henceforth not only the immediate culprits but also their superiors will be held strictly responsible, including facing trial.
L. Beria
USSR Minister of Internal Affairs
Let's have some fucking spine in us, and hold Obama accountable to what we all thought and hoped he would do.Well, let's hold him accountable to what he's said he'd do, and agitate for what we've hoped he'd do. Not the same. And recognize as we go that this isn't yet the End Times, and there'll be chances to get Bush's bastards in time to come.
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.
While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority… To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority's demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself… I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious Objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscienceNobody was _forcing_ the subject, for instance by pointing a gun at their head.The presence of an authority (a white lab coat scientist, but could have been a priest or any figure recognized as authoritative by the subject) and the belief that all of that was being done for a "greater good" was basically enough to make people become callous torturers, at least for the duration of the experiment.
The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration—by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. ...New York Times:
In June, the focus settled on Detainee 063, Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi national who had been refused entry to the United States just before 9/11 and was captured a few months later in Afghanistan. [Michael] Dunlavey [in charge of military interrogations at Guantanamo] described to me the enormous pressure he came under—from Washington, from the top—to find out what al-Qahtani knew. The message, he said, was: “Are you doing everything humanly possible to get this information?” ...
The lawyers in Washington were playing a double game. They wanted maximum pressure applied during interrogations, but didn’t want to be seen as the ones applying it—they wanted distance and deniability. They also wanted legal cover for themselves.
The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum. ...For "CIA headquarters", I would read "the White House". See Thomas Powers, The Failure:
Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”
C.I.A. officers adopted these techniques only after the Justice Department had given its official approval on Aug. 1, 2002, in one of four formerly secret legal memos on interrogation that were released Thursday.
A footnote to another of the memos described a rift between line officers questioning Abu Zubaydah at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand and their bosses at headquarters, and asserted that the brutal treatment may have been “unnecessary.”
A long book might be written on this subject, but for our purposes here it is enough to say that no one can understand, much less predict, the behavior of the CIA who does not understand that the agency works for the president. I know of no exceptions to this general rule. In practice it means that in the end the CIA will always bend to the wishes of the president, and as long as the director of central intelligence serves at the pleasure of the president this will continue to be the case. The general rule applies to both intelligence and operations: what the CIA says, as well as what it does, will shape itself over time to what the president wants. When presidents don't like what they are being told they ignore it. When they want something done they press until it happens. As a disciplined organization the agency does not complain about the one, or long resist the other. In a word, it is responsive.
On July 16, 1982, things changed… three hemophiliacs had acquired the disease. …By March 1983, the situation got so bad that the CDC warned that blood products "appear responsible for AIDS among hemophilia patients."That would be non-pasteurized concentrated blood plasma clotting products, contanimated with HIV. Pasteurization was soon the standard. Bayer-Cutter sold raw product to the bitter end.
The United States Food and Drug Administration helped to keep the news out of the public. In May 1985, the FDA's regulator of blood products, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr.… asked that the issue be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public"The company continued to sell HIV infected blood plasma until July, 1985 — a solid two years after it was solidly known that it would, absolutely without doubt, kill people.
In early 1995, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago decertified the lawsuit, saying it might bankrupt the industry.Too big to fail. So we let them get away with killing people. Though granted many of the rights of humans, corporations are allowed to get so big that we "can not" (we could) give them the death penalty.
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posted by empath at 4:50 PM on April 16