Thursday, December 11, 2014

Torture by Any Other Name

Found in the NY Times, which has extensive reporting on the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA interrogations after 9/11:
WASHINGTON — John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, defended the agency’s use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation tactics on Thursday, sidestepping questions about whether agency operatives tortured anyone.
Mr. Brennan, responding to an excoriating Senate report detailing years of brutal interrogation tactics in secret C.I.A. prisons, criticized only those officers who he said went “outside the bounds” of the guidelines established by the Justice Department. Those guidelines allowed for waterboarding, a week of sleep deprivation, shackling prisoners in painful positions, dousing them with water, and locking them in coffin-like boxes.
“I will leave to others how they might want to label those activities,” Mr. Brennan said.
Dude, if you would BOTHER TO READ INTERNATIONAL LAW, you'd find that those "guidelines" allowed what everybody else in the world considers to be torture. 

He then goes on to hope that we'll move past this debate. Fuck you: everybody who participated in or ordered this stuff should go to jail.

1 comment:

OTOH said...

Ya gotta love that "move past" or "move on" trope. I may be wrong, but I first recall hearing it in politics in regard to another icky mess, and that was when Dubya was handed the presidency on his very own personalized silver platter. Well, I haven't moved past that, either. It was wrong, and it is still wrong, and I still hold it against the perps. Sorry, but a request to "move past or on" has become synonymous with "we think we can get away with it" in my mind. And they have.