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Forever

The Memo by Jane Mayer: How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted. [ via The New Yorker, outlining retired General Counsel of the U.S. Navy Alberto J. Mora's struggle to stop torture by American agents ]

Unbelievable. I'm so tired of well-meaning jackasses accepting the morally deluded ticking timebomb argument when people in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have been held for months and years and there is in fact no ticking timebomb. But, I guess, you could say that with terrorists you never know if there is a ticking timebomb so every captive and every citizen must be treated as if there is, and we're in a continual state of emergency. Finally, now I can imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Some quotes:

[David] Brant [ former head of the N.C.I.S.] informed Mora that he was disturbed by what his agents told him about the conduct of military-intelligence interrogators at Guantánamo. ... Speaking of the tactics that he had heard about, Brant told me, “Repugnant would be a good term to describe them.”

Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days. Ten days before Brant and Mora met, Qahtani’s heart rate had dropped so precipitately, to thirty-five beats a minute, that he required cardiac monitoring.

...

Between confessing to and then recanting various terrorist plots, he had begged to be allowed to commit suicide.

Lawrence Wilkerson, whom Powell assigned to monitor this unorthodox policymaking process, told NPR last fall of “an audit trail that ran from the Vice-President’s office and the Secretary of Defense down through the commanders in the field.” When I spoke to him recently, he said, “I saw what was discussed. I saw it in spades. From Addington to the other lawyers at the White House. They said the President of the United States can do what he damn well pleases. People were arguing for a new interpretation of the Constitution. It negates Article One, Section Eight, that lays out all of the powers of Congress, including the right to declare war, raise militias, make laws, and oversee the common defense of the nation.” Cheney’s view, Wilkerson suggested, was fuelled by his desire to achieve a state of “perfect security.” He said, “I can’t fault the man for wanting to keep America safe, but he’ll corrupt the whole country to save it.” (Wilkerson left the State Department with Powell, in January, 2005.)

And Rumsfelds glib idiocy continues to repulse:

Mora drew Haynes’s [William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Department of Defense] attention to a comment that Rumsfeld had added to the bottom of his December 2nd memo, in which he asked why detainees could be forced to stand for only four hours a day, when he himself often stood “for 8-10 hours a day.” Mora said that he understood that the comment was meant to be jocular. But he feared that it could become an argument for the defense in any prosecution of terror suspects. It also could be read as encouragement to disregard the limits established in the memo. (Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired military officer who was a chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, had a similar reaction when he saw Rumsfeld’s scrawled aside. “It said, ‘Carte blanche, guys,’ ” Wilkerson told me. “That’s what started them down the slope. You’ll have My Lais then. Once you pull this thread, the whole fabric unravels.”)