More details of torture have emerged from Guantanamo Bay. From a New York Times article:
Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East.
After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the base’s brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives.
The account of Mr. Kahtani’s treatment given to The New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the military’s longstanding public version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo operated.
Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment.
Recently, the Justice Department rewrote a legal memo “on what constitutes torture, backing away from its own assertions prior to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal that torture had to involve ‘excruciating and agonizing pain.’”
The document, again directly contradicting the previous version, says torture need not be limited to pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
Instead, the memo concludes that anti-torture laws passed by Congress equate torture with physical suffering “even if it does not involve severe physical pain” but still must be more than “mild and transitory.” That can include mental suffering under certain circumstances, but it would not have to last for months or years, as the previous document said.
The timing of the revised memo is convenient. The author of the original legal memo, Alberto Gonzales, is due before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week to be considered as Bush’s pick to replace Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Yet none of this is stopping the government from planning on keeping suspected terrorists imprisoned for LIFE at Guantanamo Bay “even if the government lacks evidence to charge them in courts…” Senators on both sides of the aisle are publicly denouncing the plan as a bad idea. It’s getting harder and harder to maintain the story that prisoner abuse is the result of a few rogue soldiers. When will those responsible be held accountable?
It clearly goes all the way to the top:
After officials at Guantánamo asked for more leeway in dealing with Mr. Kahtani, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved a list of 16 techniques for use there in addition to the 17 methods in the Army Field Manual. He suspended those approvals the next month after some Navy lawyers complained that they were excessive and possibly illegal. But after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy in April 2003, approving 24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used. [ link ]