"But the doctors are there so that they don't die, so as to be able to torture them one more day," and torture is fully supported by our president

juan cole posts a bone-chilling interview with former u.s. army interrogator, damien corsetti, translated from the spanish newspaper, el mundo...

"In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them". And the fact is that at times the torture had no other goal that "to punish them for being terrorists. They tortured them and didn't ask them anything". That is the case of the practice known as "the submarine": to simulate the drowning of the prisoner. "They have them hooded and they pour water on them. That makes it very difficult to breath. I think you can't die with the submarine. I certainly never saw anyone die. However, they do cough like crazy because they are totally submerged in water and that gets on their lungs. Perhaps what it can give you is serious pneumonia". The civilians who took part in the interrogations used the submarine whenever they wanted. They gave it to them for five or 10 minutes and didn't ask anything".

Other torture included using extreme cold and heat. "I remember one of my prisoners trembling with cold. His teeth wouldn't stop chattering. I put a blanket on him and then another, and another, and his teeth never stopped chattering, never stopped. You could see that man was going to die of hypothermia. But the doctors are there so that they don't die, so as to be able to torture them one more day".

here's corsetti talking about his experience...



this is what is being done in my name and the name of my fellow citizens of the united states of america... ours is a country, after all, where the power of government supposedly springs from "we, the people"... and our president, the individual that "we, the people" chose to represent us among the peoples of the world, to work for our common good, and to be a shining example of the principles upon which our nation was founded, is always fully prepared to show us how it's done...

The House approved legislation [Thursday] that would bar the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, drawing an immediate veto threat from the White House and setting up another political showdown over what constitutes torture.

The measure, approved by a largely party-line vote of 222 to 199, would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow Army rules adopted last year that explicitly forbid waterboarding. It also would require interrogators to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. The rules, required by Congress for all Defense Department personnel, also ban sexual humiliation, "mock" executions and the use of attack dogs, and prohibit the withholding of food and medical care.

[...]

Limiting the CIA to interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual "would prevent the United States from conducting lawful interrogations of senior al Qaeda terrorists to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.

beam me up, scotty, there's no intelligent life here...

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