MORE TORTURE

Yet another harrowing account of a terror detainee tortured in a secret prison by Pakistani and American soldiers. Money quote:

The next night, he said, the Pakistanis took him to an airport where he saw 15 or 20 beefy men wearing masks, black T-shirts and combat boots. From their voices, he said, he knew they were Americans. Mr. Habib started to fight with the Pakistanis, he recalled, and “then the Americans came and started beating me.” They beat him quiet and stripped him naked, he said. Men in black masks came into the room. One had a still camera, the other a video camera. “They make picture of everything in my body,” he said. He said he was handcuffed and shackled and put on a plane. Then, he said, the men put duct tape over his mouth, a bag over his head and goggles over the bag.

There’s more along the same lines that we have seen time and time again, at the hands of American interrogators:

In Afghanistan, he said, female soldiers “touched me in the private areas” while questioning him. “They was swearing at me, ‘you criminal,’ ‘you terrorist,’ ” he said. Interrogators also put a helmet connected to wires on his head, Mr. Habib said. When they did not like his answers, he said he would feel a jolt, and his body would start shaking.
He spent only a week at Bagram before being flown to Guantánamo in May 2002. He arrived sick and faint. “I was really scared,” he said. “I don’t know who I am.”
When his interrogators asked about his treatment in Egypt, he said, he told them about the psychological abuse using his wife and children. Soon, he said, his Guantánamo interrogators were doing the same.Three or four times, he said, when he was taken to an interrogation room, there were pictures doctored to make it appear that his wife was naked next to Osama bin Laden. “I see my wife everywhere, everywhere,” he said.
He said that during one interrogation session, a woman wearing a skirt said to him, “You Muslim people don’t like to see woman,” he said. Then she reached under her skirt, Mr. Habib said, pulling out what he described as a bloody stick. “She threw the blood in my face,” he said.

These are now the values of the United States of America. The president continues to lie about what he is sanctioning and has sanctioned. The least we should demand is an honest public debate: what techniques are now permissible for the CIA and other agencies? Do they constitute torture? What is in the second Bybee memo that explicitly details these approved techniques? Who has approved the use of religious abuse as part of anti-Muslim interrogation practices? We are in a surreal situation where reports of torture come in every day, where the administration denies what is patently true and where the Congress and even the blogosphere is deliberately looking the other way. One final question: how can this president ask Egypt to liberalize while he is depending on its security forces to torture American-captured inmates?