Democracy for Vancouver

We went through the marked-up document slowly, pausing at each blue mark. Detainee 063’s reactions were recorded with regularity. I’ll string some of them together to convey the impression:

Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah.

The blue highlights went on and on.

Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times. Trembled uncontrollably.

From Philippe Sands’s piece in Vanity Fair, outlining BushCo’s approval of and intimate involvement in the decision to bring the tricks of the Inquisition and a fictional teevee show to bear on suspects in the Global War on Terror.

Not surprisingly, all the usual suspects were sunk deep in the decision-making. ABC paints a picture of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush sitting around a table, choosing from a restaurant menu of “enhanced interrogation techniques” like gluttons choosing appetizers at Commander’s Palace, with CIA director George Tenet as their unctuous, simpering waiter:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
…
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
…
According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them.
…
“It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,” said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. “They’d say, ‘We’ve got so and so. This is the plan.’”
…
Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.
…
According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department’s own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC News.
…
A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo — the Golden Shield — that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

This is your baby.

This is your baby.

What the fucking fuck?!?!

They are not human. And here’s further proof:

Diane Beaver, [military interrogations chief at Guantánamo Mike] Dunlavey’s staff judge advocate, was the lawyer who would later be asked to sign off on the new interrogation techniques…

During September [2002] a series of brainstorming meetings were held at Guantánamo to discuss new techniques… “I kept minutes. I got everyone together. I invited. I facilitated,” she told me. The sessions included representatives of the D.I.A. and the C.I.A. Ideas came from all over…

The first year of Fox TV’s dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. “We saw it on cable,” Beaver recalled. “People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular.” Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. “He gave people lots of ideas.”

…The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even. “You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas,” Beaver recalled, a wan smile flickering on her face. “And I said to myself, You know what? I don’t have a dick to get hard—I can stay detached.”

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

Thom Hartmann was on my radio this morning talking about his absolute certainty that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al. would be charged in the Hague with war crimes once Bush’s term ends. Before reading the above pieces from Vanity Fair and ABC, I thought Hartmann was overly optimistic: after all, so much of what BushCo has done illegally has hewed closely enough to the penumbra of U.N. and Congressional mandates as to arguably fall within the margins of error, making prosecution unlikely.

And those illegal acts have all been related to an unjust war, and illegal wars are difficult to prosecute under the best of circumstances.

Torture, on the other hand, has been condemned and prosecuted by courts including the Hague with much more success in the past 60 years. It is much easier to nail a sadist with crimes that would be prosecutable either inside or outside the context of politics, war and interrogation.

But holding those who order the torture accountable has proven to be much more difficult, as has been tying that principal authority to specific instances - and specific victims - of torture. Few monstrous dictators are dumb enough to put the actual instructions for torturing specific subject under their own signature.

But in this one, small way, we may have gotten lucky with this cabal of power-mad and self-righteous psychos. Their belief in their own infallibility may bring them down yet.

Bonus question for Congressman and psychologist Brian Baird: Are these the people you want to continue to give free reign to in Iraq?