torture

2. Photos from Abu Ghraib Warning: These are disturbing.

23. What the photos show: sexual humiliation, prisoners kept naked, hooding, beatings, stress positions, deaths, stitching of wounds. Abuses chronicled in Taguba Report on Abu Ghraib: breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees, pouring cold water on naked detainees, beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair, threatening male detainees with rape, allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell, sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

24. Abuses in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay: beatings, hypothermia, extreme heat, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, dogs, prolonged isolation The ordeal of Omar Khadr The ordeal of Mohamed al-Qahtani Other accounts….

28. “ Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”: Authorized for use by the CIA, many have been adopted by the military as well. Stress positions, longtime standing, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, loud music, controlled drowning aka “water-boarding” The misleading quality of these labels What do these techniques entail?

29. Longtime standing : Cornell medical study, studying Stalinist practices, reported: making a victim stand for 18 to 24 hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

30. Stress positions: Cause swelling, pain, sleep deprivation. Have led to death. Often combined with beatings. Adam Hochschild: “What is a stress position? Mike Xego, a former political prisoner in South Africa, once demonstrated one for me. He bent down and clasped his hands in front of him as if they were handcuffed, and then, using a rolled-up newspaper, showed me how apartheid-era police officers would pin his elbows behind his knees with a stick, forcing him into a permanent crouch. ‘You'd be passed from one hand to another. Kicked. Tipped over,’ he explained. ‘The blood stops moving. You scream and scream and scream until there is no voice’”

31. Sleep deprivation: Darius Rejali, torture scholar: “Sleep deprivation reduces a body's tolerance for physical pain, causing deep aches first in the lower part of the body, followed by similar pains in the upper body. Sleep-deprived people are also highly suggestible (a condition not unlike drunkenness or hypnosis), making sleep deprivation ideal for inducing false confessions.” Menachem Begin (former Israeli prime minister) on his own experience of sleep deprivation in Stalinist Russia: "In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it."

32. Waterboarding , as described by Malcolm Nance, a retired navy officer and counter-intelligence expert: “Waterboarding is a torture technique, period…. Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

33. Nance, cont. “Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.”

34. Nance, cont. “Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.” Used by Spanish and Italian Inquisition, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Called “torture” by the US tribunals that judged Japanese officers following WWII. Called “torture” by the Mississippi State Supreme Court in the 1920s. Rear Adm. John D. Hutson: "Other than perhaps the rack and thumbscrews, waterboarding is the most iconic example of torture in history. It has been repudiated for centuries.”