And yet you still belittle whatever is described. As if the only alternative to torture is to put people on the four seasons all expenses paid...
Sensory deprivation included being kept in the absolute dark for months at a time, and using blacked out goggles whenever the prisoner had to be moved elsewhere.
With regards to waterboarding "just for a few seconds," once again you've shown you haven't even read the memos.
The memos have said that for a very long time waterboarding exceeded all limits established.
And I don't need to pass a law to ban torture. The US has already signed and ratified the treaties that ban them.
And whatever "good faith" the actual CIA interrogators had, the same certainly cannot be said about those who crafted these memos. Here is part of the "legal justification" provided by Steven Bradbury:
"By its terms, Article 16 [of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment] is limited to conduct within "territory under [United States] jurisdiction. We conclude that territory under United States jurisdiction includes, at most, areas over which the United States exercises at least de facto authority as the government. Based on CIA assurances, we understand that the interrogations do not take place in any such areas."
In other words: it's torture, but it's not really happening in the US...
Keep in mind, the point is not whether these things would get a conviction in a court of law, but I don't see how ANYONE can deny it's torture. Even the memos don't try to deny it, and simply try to find a loophole applicable. So if even you admit that the former administration had to "stretch the law" to make its torture program conform in some way with the treaties the US had ratified, I think that my point is made: that this wasn't a good faith effort to determine what they could do, but a bad faith effort to find all technicalities to make torture legal, and that things that even these people consider torture took place, and that it was significantly more than "slaps."
As far as the mental state of the prisoners:
Jose Padilla might not have been considered incompetent to stand trial, but his sentence took into account the "extensive mental anguish" he was suffering.
Zubaydah might have been already insane before, but that is not certain, and in any case it is clear by now that the Bush administration willingly overestimated the intelligence obtained from him, and especially the role of torture in obtaining that information. According to the released memos, the people who interrogated him thought they had everything they could have from him but were ordered to torture by people at the CIA headquarters! As the memo states"“although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within C.I.A. headquarters still believed he was withholding information.”"
And then we have Al Qahtani, which according to the FBI ""was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma" due to torture.
And Omar Khadr, who now exhibits "delusions and hallucinations, suicidal behaviour and intense paranoia" and from whom the only known piece of intelligence obtained was the fingering of an innocent Canadian as a member of Al Qaeda, who then was sent to Syria and tortured for a year.
And the whole "ticking time bomb" scenario is shown as patently false, as the memos talk about the limits of torturing someone who has been under custody for 2, 3 years.
---------- Post added at 09:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:21 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slims
Will, the police shouldn't be allowed to drop bombs on the houses of suspected criminals...The Military can and should when it is at War.
Water boarding does not involved pain, only panic. The Memo tells me so.
Also, I have passed out underwater several times, once in a full blown panic as I was trying to get back to the surface and could not. I can honestly say I was not in pain.
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The definition of torture is not bound by pain. As we've covered already, even the US has prosecuted the Japanese for waterboarding. There is a very good reason why the declaration against torture uses "pain OR suffering."
And the memos also explicitly say that the goal of waterboarding is for the subject to feel his life is in imminent danger, and that he could die from it.
The memos even admits that some of the techniques described there were described by the state department as torture when other nations did it.
Heck, it was a staple of Khmer Rouge torture practices...