I briefly skimmed over the torture memos, which are available online now. The description of torture techniques is chilling enough -- to realize that this was done in our name.
But, for me, it was doubly shocking and shameful to read that a physician and a psychologist were required to be present when the waterboarding took place. Not only that, but medical and psychological consultants advised about the procedures in the first place.
This is completely unethical for a physician or a psychologist to participate in torture. Both professional organizations have strict rules against it.
Ralph
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The memo says that they were just trying to "… dislocate his expectations regarding the treatment he will receive" - perhaps one of the more absurd formulations of all time. It's as if they knew that what they were doing was so wrong that they involved the legal, medical, and mental health communities in a mammoth c.y.a. operation that only served to make their program more bizarre. It seems like the same logic al Qaeda applied in the 9/11 attack - "dislocating" our "expectations."
ReplyDeleteIn the momos themselves, there's a "tortured" argument about the meaning of "severe physical pain" and long commentary on the mindset of Abu Zubaydah [their practice hostage] - a commentary that makes clear his expectations and his preparations to resist this kind of interrogation - yet they went ahead with it, almost admitting their full knowledge that it wouldn't work. Like al Qaeda, the goal seems to be to inflict pain rather than to get anything useful. The game of sadistic checkers between bin Laden [et al] and Cheney [et al] points out how thinly the veneer of civilization covers human power dynamics.