The long-suppressed CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogations will be released tomorrow but Newsweek has a preview:
A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency’s post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned.
According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri’s interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. “The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up,” said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with “imminent death.”
Now, if we can’t define the people responsible for this as criminals and put them in jail then we are no better than some penny-ante dictatorship. And if the people responsible are Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush, so be it. How many times did they tell us that Saddam Hussein used power drills on people?
I just finished reading Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes for the umteenth time. The Bush Administration is our “Stain” and we’ll never remove it.
The only thing we can do is hold these evil people to account.
How awful.
The Bush administration was nothing but a group of petty thugs who gained power thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. And like all petty thugs they used any justification to allow for there policies to exist.
Now hold on there. We didn’t actually use them, we just implied we WOULD use them, about as plausibly as you can imply something.
See, that’s the difference between a despicable dictator who deserved to have his country invaded with the ensuing slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his subjects, and an enlightened democracy, the last great hope of mankind. We don’t actually DO awful things. Except when we do, of course, but that’s different.
We used them. We used them to terrify people.
Wasn’t Governor Sanford’s wife the heiress to some power tool fortune? I wonder if her company had some deal to sell power tools to the CIA.
According to Wikipedia her great grandfather co-founded Skil Corporation which manufactured the first portable electric saw… a logical next step once you are using power tools on prisoners.
Is Mitch McConnell’s family connected to the folks who make Louisville Sluggers?
Just asking.
Wouldn’t the people who did these things be covered under Panetta’s assurance that they won’t be prosecuted because they were acting under legal authority?
No.
The American Dream in the incompetent and immoral hands of Bush and company has become a nightmare. How did this sociopathic personality ever rise so high? Evidence, perhaps, of the pernicious power of pure evil. Borrowing a phrase from Scott Peck (People of the Lie) GWB was, IMO, such a person. And as the noted psychiatrist (Peck) observed such people are basically narcissistic personality types who care nothing about other people, only themselves.
His ascent to the highest office in the land marks a significant change in the fortunes of all of us. Sad to say.
Bush rose to power as a useful tool, involved in an Oedipal psychodrama that it pleased him to play out. His narcissism made him easily manageable.That’s all.
Tell me again the difference between the USA and the Soviet Union. Oh, right. The USSR had universal health care. CIA/KGB two horns on the same goat.