Rolling Torture Thread

vimothy

yurp
Off we go, back to the caves

Just noticed this -- a very powerful account from a victim of Soviet torture, "Torture's Long Shadow":

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.
 

vimothy

yurp
The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom....

David Glazier, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has written about the commission system, said: “This unfortunately strikes me as an effort to get rid of the problem in the easiest way possible, which is to have those people plead guilty and presumably be executed. But I think it’s going to lack international credibility.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/us/politics/06gitmo.html
 

vimothy

yurp
Result! Great post by Horton as well:

In seeking dismissal, Yoo argued that the case asked the courts to look at the president’s exercise of his war-making powers, and that the courts should butt out. But his principal argument was utterly predictable: state secrets. “Yoo contends that the Court should abstain from reviewing the alleged constitutional violations presented in this matter because the claims necessarily would uncover government secrets, thereby threatening national security.” The “secrets” here, of course, are of two sorts: first, the torture techniques used to turn Padilla into the human equivalent of an eggplant and second, the legal voodoo employed by Yoo in his efforts to justify Padilla’s torture and thus promise the torturers legal protection from criminal prosecution. But neither of these “secrets” are actually secret. Padilla was subjected to 21 months of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation that left him in a state of “post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.” Detailed descriptions of the regime applied are actually in the public record. Similarly, over Yoo’s vehement objections, his memoranda were already released—and indeed, we learn they had even been repudiated by Yoo’s Bush Administration colleagues, in further secret memoranda filed just as they were packing to leave.

So just what sort of “government secrets threatening to national security” are implicated in the Yoo suit? Why, that would be the sort of “secrets” that reflect criminal conduct on the part of those involved in them and which would prove embarrassing and damaging to the reputation of their authors. In other words, they are not “secrets” at all, and the government’s claim has certainly been put forward–as usual–in bad faith.
 
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