Is it Torture if the President Orders it?
Here’s an astounding article by Scott Horton in the latest issue of Harper’s magazine. In it, he describes an effort by the American Bar Association to lead Congress to become more assertive in denying this president the extreme degree of latitude he has taken (and been given by a complaisant Congress) in the area of torture and interrogation. Horton writes:
The Bush Administration has finally achieved something unprecedented. The organized bar–with a vote just one short of unanimity–has declared one of Bush’s executive orders illegal and vowed to seek Congressional action to override it. And psychologists appear poised to join their legal colleagues in an equally harsh denunciation. It’s about torture. Remember Bush’s claim, “We do not torture”? Except, of course, we do, and on Bush’s personal orders.
Horton quotes from a recent article by Jane Meyer in the New Yorker magazine, where she describes some of the tactics your government is using to detainees both here and abroad:
A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the ‘takeout’ of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to ’sodomy.’ He said, ‘It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.’ The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, ‘because it’s demoralizing.’
