More details on how much torture was used and how people were kept alive so they could be tortured some more

as i sit here in kabul, the day after the mess at the un guesthouse across town and the horror just over the border in peshawar, and several days after the terrible carnage in baghdad, it's sickening to read about the atrocities perpetrated by my own people, the very people who were all over the news yesterday, decrying the bloody actions of terrorists...

According to human rights lawyer John Sifton, the CIA tortured some of its detainees in the War on Terror so severely that it had to take measures to keep them alive so they could continue being tortured.

Sifton, who the executive director of One World Research, told an interviewer for Russia Today that there was both a CIA detention program and a military detention program and that "The CIA program was by far the most secretive. ... That's the one that only had a few dozen detainees at any given time -- but it's the one that saw the biggest abuses, the most serious forms of torture."

"In the military, there was actually a larger number of deaths than with the CIA," Sifton continued. "The CIA engaged in some horrendous abuses, but they appear to have taken precautions to have actually prevented people from dying -- which might sound humanitarian, but in fact was kind of sickening."

"The military wasn't so careful," Sifton added. "The military subjected a lot of people to the same techniques, but without the precautions, and as a result a large number of detainees in military custody died. ... While they didn't use the worst forms of torture, like waterboarding, they often used sleep deprivation, forced standing, stress positions. ... When you combine these techniques ... they cause excruciating pain ... and the military used them on thousands and thousands of detainees."

Sifton commented that what he found most shocking was "the cold, clinical fashion in which they went about designing the program. They didn't want to commit outright physical torture ... so they went to psychologists and lawyers and they tried to design a program which was, in their minds, legal. ... They tried to make it legal and safe, but they just made it even more grotesque."

don't think for one second the afghans i work with aren't tuned in to what's happening in the world... they are just as horrified as you and i about the havoc their very own people are wreaking in their country but they're also very well aware of what we, the american people, are allowing to go on in our names...

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