I remember just after 9/11 how torture was not only accepted but cheered on by a number of people I know personally. Most of these folks are active upstanding church goers... but much of the essence of their argument was that they deserve it and we have to kill them all (whoever these all are).
Luckily cooler heads are prevailing. And hopefully we will start seeing prosecutions into Bush Administration officials as well as investigations into all known acts of torture on the part of U.S. Military and/or CIA operatives.
But we still find some absurd rationalizations
Via Steve Benen:
THIESSEN RATIONALIZES MUSLIM TORTURE... Just 48 hours after President Obama was inaugurated, former Bush chief speechwriter Marc Thiessen said Obama "is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office." With a record like this, it's probably unwise to expect much in the way of reasoned, sensible political insights from this guy.
Nevertheless, despite the vitriol and the fact that his claims haven't withstood scrutiny, Thiessen has managed to become a regular contributor to the Washington Post's op-ed page. Today, this former Bush speechwriter -- the Post now features two -- seems to argue that torturing Muslims is acceptable because they're Muslims.
Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.
Scientists are up in arms about their findings being used to justify torture
In the past week, at least three scientists have come out and objected to their work on sleep deprivation being used by the CIA and Justice Department to justify torture. In one of his 2005 memos, the OLC's Steven Bradbury said that sleep deprivation causes "at most only relatively moderate decreases in pain tolerance." But one of the scholars, Dr. Bernd Kundermann from the University of Marburg, pointed out that that he was "working with healthy volunteers and didn't deprive them of sleep for more than one day without allowing them to recover." Similarly, from Dr. S. Hakki Onen from the Hôpital Gériatrique A. Charial:
"[The study subjects] were distracted from sleeplessness by playing different games, or watching soccer matches. They could eat, drink, read, and move about as they wished. [From] the American documents we learn that sleep deprivation spanned from 70 to 120 hours -- and set maximum limits of 180 hours for the hardest resisters, which is over a full week without sleep," Onen said. "In other words, they discuss starting the sleep deprivation process at nearly double the maximum we set for ethical reasons."
Onen compared the CIA's use of his study results to the overdosing of medication. "In a manner, it's like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic -- and can even kill them," he said.
As Onen notes, the Justice Department determined that "the maximum allowable period of sleep deprivation allowed under the CIA interrogation program was 264 hours, though no detainee was actually deprived of sleep for more than 180 hours, or seven and a half days."
Now we have a newly declassified report on the Military's torture methods, which "outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military’s use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration," according to today's New York Times:
The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities.
The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times; a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed the report at the time as “unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation.”
Go figure, they never even did any background into how these techniques originated:
In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.
This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.
According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.
They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.
The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.
"A perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm" that could be a good description of the Bush, his administration, and supporters during the Bush years. Our children will ask us how it happened, and why we let it... it was on our watch by the by...
Leaked to the news media months after they were first used, the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods would darken the country’s reputation, blur the moral distinction between terrorists and the Americans who hunted them, bring broad condemnation from Western allies and become a ready-made defense for governments accused of torture. The response has only intensified since Justice Department legal memos released last week showed that two prisoners were waterboarded 266 times and that C.I.A. interrogators were ordered to waterboard one of the captives despite their belief that he had no more information to divulge.
But according to many Bush administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and some intelligence officers who are critics of the coercive methods, the C.I.A. program would also produce an invaluable trove of information on Al Qaeda, including leads on the whereabouts of important operatives and on terror schemes discussed by Al Qaeda. Whether the same information could have been acquired using the traditional, noncoercive methods that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military have long used is impossible to say, and former Bush administration officials say they did not have the luxury of time to develop a more patient approach, given that they had intelligence warnings of further attacks.
Stalin, among other thugs from history, used the same "there isn't enough time" argument... you can't make an omelette without breaking any eggs.
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