This isn't the big torture post I mean to get to one of these days, but there is a point that doesn't get as much play as it should. When we first started collecting high value prisoners in Afghanistan, the military and CIA had to decide what they could do with them, interrogation wise. On the one hand, these prisoners had (potentially) lots of information we could use. On the other hand, and contrary to what you've heard, they were under orders to treat the prisoners humanely. So it was left up to the interrogators, in the first instance, to figure out what they could do.
The rule of thumb they came up with is that they could do to the high value prisoners those things that are done to American troops. They figured that the fact that we do it to ourselves means that it is not inhumane by definition. That's where almost all of the high-pressure "torture" techniques, including waterboarding, come from.
1 comment:
David:
I have experience all but "waterboarding."
Given what I have read, it is essentially no different from all the other stress positions -- there is no danger of even the slightest physical injury; even immediately after the event, a physician would be unable to distinguish the waterboarded from the unboarded, except through testimony.
While I am sure some of what went on at Abu Graib was inexcusable, the vast majority of Islamist prisoners have not been tortured, unless one is willing to drain the word of all meaning.
It is worth noting, and repeating, that those captives who are in fact Islamists can claim absolutely no Geneva Convention protection. We would be well within the Convention to have summarily executed them.
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