by Andrew
It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.
by Hanna Rosin
Google Trends today provides an entirely different version of the Kennedy obituary than do the morning papers. Mary Jo Kopechne shows up first, followed by several illiterate incarnations of her name. Chappaquiddick comes up once, correctly, and then many times in butchered form. I provide all my theories about the discrepancy between our respectable and our tabloid selves here on DoubleX.
by Hanna Rosin
Chris, I know it's late summer and all, but there are more important things going on than the cats. That said, I'll indulge myself this one more. My daughter and husband are cat lovers. My son, however, is on my team. After a night of the cat walking all over his head while he was trying to sleep, he put up this sign in his room. Exhibit 2, in the Cat Chronicles:
President Obama is embarrassed at having to call out his own employees. Eric Holder is embarrassed at having to embarrass his boss. The CIA is embarrassed that a few of its agents and contractors mindlessly followed Dick Cheney over to the dark side. And most Americans are embarrassed to read that in the darkest days after 9/11, the government threatened prisoners with power drills and the rape of their families in order to elicit bad information. It's all shameful. But somehow, America is going to have to make its peace with its flirtation with prisoner abuse. That may mean doing what we're doing: airing our dirty laundry one sweat sock at a time or appointing a commission or special prosecutor to do the job right. Or perhaps it just means joining Dick Cheney in his conviction that the laws against torture are now obsolete. Pretending we are investigating and curtailing a torture program isn't all that different from pretending we didn't torture in the first place.
by Hanna Rosin
The New York Times spin on the CIA revelations usefully recalls Hannah Arendt's on the Eichmann trials
The first news reports this week about hundreds of pages of newly released documents on the C.I.A. program focused on aberrations in the field: threats of execution by handgun or assault by power drill…
But the strong impression that emerges from the documents.. is by no means one of gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of overwhelming control exercised from C.I.A. headquarters and the Department of Justice — control Bush administration officials say was intended to ensure that the program was safe and legal.
"Safe and legal." Under control. Perfectly normal. The judges in the Eichmann trial, Arendt wrote, "missed the greatest moral and legal challenge of the whole case" because they refused to believe that a person who was "neither feeble-minded not indocrinated nor cynical" could be capable of such evil. A warning to future investigators.
by Hanna Rosin
I'd forgotten how passionate Dish readers, and Andrew, are on the subject of circumcision. Andrew once published a photo of this "gruesome procedure" which has the feel of one of those pro-life placards – after which I probably rescinded his invitation to my son's bris. To make things worse, my post defending circumcision taps into the current fears about "big government trying to mandate certain types of medical procedures," as one reader wrote in.
The objections to my post fall into three basic categories:
1. How can we do this to a child without his consent? There are so many things we do to children without their consent – change their school, banish their friends, give them drugs, abandon and neglect them. Removing a foreskin should not even fall in the top 20 ways to ruin your child's life.
2. "Foreskins are, well, fun," writes one gay reader. My authority here is obviously limited. That said, all that research of specific areas of male sensitivity (Andrew cites some here) has always struck me as dubious. Erotic pleasure is a rich and complicated thing. Specific percentages of sensitivity can't possibly sum up the experience.
3.Preventative surgery is a "bizarre notion." This is somewhat more convincing. But for one thing, "surgery" is a bit of an exaggeration. We certainly cause infants minor pain for the greater public good many times, in the form of vaccines. It depends, I suppose, whether you consider HIV and STD's a widespread public health crisis, or something affecting only a very few. I could get into the specifics of the research here, but I won't.
There are obviously strong, visceral emotions here which I confess, I don't really understand.
by Chris Bodenner
Long long overdue:
HBO is considering a show based on "Savage Love," the sex advice column syndicated in alternative weeklies. […] Savage said the possible show "will focus on current events and cultural trends with sex as the filter." He added: "I'm hoping to bring a new kind of conversation to TV about sex — an honest conversation, one that's informed without being (too) wonky, funny without being (too) cruel, sexy without being (too) cheesy. Basically, my sex advice column — but on the teevee!"
Judy Berman shares my excitement.
by Andrew
Greg Sargent notes another document secured by the ACLU. (Yes, Greenwald is right that it's bizarre the media in this country are second to the ACLU in demanding information from the government.) This document gives a detailed account of the torture techniques used by the Bush-Cheney administration in the elite CIA program. This is the most professional version of the widespread torture authorized by Bush and conducted in every theater of combat, by every branch of the armed forces, directed that all prisoners could be potential terrorists and therefore outside civilizational norms of humane treatment.
The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the 
Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if you can. It is a distressing document. Here's what the "CIA pros" did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president's directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance "the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody". Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That's what Cheney did to America. He's proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.
This is what the neocon right believe in, even as they prattle on about extending human rights as an American value. They say they believe in democracy. What they also believe in is what we saw done to innocent human beings at Abu Ghraib:
Nudity. The HVD's clothes are taken from him and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.
Sleep deprivation. The HVD is placed in the vertical shackling position to begin sleep deprivation. Other shackling procedures may be used during interrogations. The detainee is diapered for sanitary purposes, although the diaper is not used at all times.
The diapers are necessary because when you shackle someone in the same position for hours and hours on end and feed him Ensure, he will shit himself. All torturing regimes deal with shitting torture victims. The US followed other regimes in both diapering prisoners or, better still, forcing them to lie in their own excrement, as was discovered by horrified FBI agents at Gitmo. Other torture regimes capture piss and shit in bowls beneath the torture victims. Various forms of nude shackling, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (all barred under Geneva and the UN Convention) are then supplemented by constant bombardment with light, loud noise, water-dousing and walling. These techniques can be used in combination. Some more details:
An HVD may be walled one time to make a point or twenty to thirty times when an interrogator requires a more significant response to a question. In an interrogation designed to be intense, an HVD may be walled multiple times in one session…
Current OMS guidance on cramped confinement limits confinement in the large box to 8 hours at a time for no more than 18 hours a day and confinement in the small box to two hours…
Interrogators will often use one technique to support another. As an example, interrogators would tell an HVD in a stress position that he [HVD] is going back to the walling wall for walling if he fails to hold the stress position until told otherwise by the HVD. This places additional stress on the HVD who will typically try to hold the stress position for as long as possible to avoid the walling wall.
John McCain will remember these techniques and variants of them from his time in the Hanoi Hilton. If this is not torture, then torture does not exist. And if this is America, and there is no accountability for these war crimes, then core American values have ceased to exist as well.
by Patrick Appel
Julian Sanchez counters Jonah Goldberg:
We had better hope fiction isn’t a reliable guide to our moral intuitions, because with a tub of popcorn and some Milk Duds in hand, we routinely cheer thieves, thugs, and murderous sociopaths provided they’re kind to children and puppies or make a habit of mostly killing or victimizing mean people, or seem like maybe they’re sorry about that whole “lifetime of causing mayhem and suffering,” or frankly just dress stylishly and seem kind of badass.
Radley Balko piles on.
by Andrew
More evidence that the entire notion of "bad apples" improvising the torture techniques at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is a massive, self-interested lie by Cheney and Bush. Money quote from today's NYT:
Waterboarding might be an excruciating procedure with deep roots in the history of torture, but for the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services, recordkeeping for each session of
near-drowning was critical. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” said medical guidelines prepared for the interrogators in December 2004.
The required records, the medical supervisors said, included “how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”
When the doctors gauged what a drenching in a cold cell might do to a prisoner, they did their research, consulting a textbook entitled “Wilderness Medicine,” in particular Chapter 6 on “accidental hypothermia,” as well as a Canadian government pamphlet, “Survival in Cold Waters,” according to footnotes.
Yes, they studied very carefully how far to freeze a human being to avoid killing him. So when we hear about Navy Seals using rectal thermometers to determine how far they could go in freezing prisoners in iced baths (if you recall this as a Gestapo technique, you are not wrong), we know they were acting on guidance from the White House.
The real war criminals are in the political elite. And the same political and media elite is intent on protecting their own. Even now.
The Dish 