Video from Crooks and Liars via Where's The Outrage?.
What is so hard to remember in these examples is that with real torture the torturers are indifferent to your life. Death is a possibility. You are not in control of your own body and have no idea what they will do next except knowing their specific goal is to break you.
Voluntarily standing for eight hours may be easy as Rumsfeld so horribly noted, but being made to stand is an entirely different thing. Fear changes everything. Those who torture are also changed and we will be bringing these people back into our society without question.
Update: David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo quoting a reader talking about his Air Force training:
"Imbued within this training during the Cold War was the sense that part of what set us apart from our communist adversaries was our adherence to the Geneva Conventions, and that the inhumane tactics used by those adversaries was part and parcel of the totalitarianism that we were combating. There was also the sense--a point of pride really--that we could and would prevail despite holding ourselves to a higher standard. It was, in fact, the higher standard that we were fighting for.
[snip]
"Our trainers were careful to instruct us on the Geneva Conventions and which interrogation techniques were covered and which were illegal. I have a very clear memory of what they said about waterboarding. As I recall, water boarding was classified as torture and was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. They told us about the technique for the simple reason that the North Vietnamese used it on American Forces. They wanted us to know about that technique in case we were ever captured by "scumbags who didn't respect the Geneva Conventions." There were no demonstrations; it was considered too traumatic."
Update: David Kurtz:
"Incoming Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has asked the Justice Department to release two documents setting forth U.S. policy on how terrorism suspects are detained and interrogated."
2 comments:
Your last sentence is one of the biggest points of the whole torture and prison thing. To be a torturer a man has to be a real monster, and I don't see how it's possible for them to simply turn that off when they go home to their families at night or whenever. They're aberrant beings, and every society seems to have them and is damaged by their presence.
We are looking at decades of troubles and pain just from this alone. Not even addressing the mental problems already seen in the soldiers coming home. Not even thinking about the exposure to depleted uranium by our soldiers which will appear in the DNA of the children they will have.
We will have a generation at least where people in pain will remember Bush and his cohorts with every intake of breath.
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