Blog | Media: It’s time to reclaim the language. What we did was torture - not enhanced interrogation techniques.
We forced people to undergo medically unnecessary rectal feedings, i.e. anal rape.
We beat some people so badly and for so long they essentially forgot who they were.
We forced people to stand on broken limbs for hours on end.
We beat and froze a man to death.
We waterboarded people hundreds of times.
And that’s only what we know. Only about 10 percent of a more than 6,000-page report exposing what we did is public.
Make no mistake about it: what we did was torture.
It didn’t amount to torture. It wasn’t an enhanced interrogation technique or an EIT.
It was torture.
If what was revealed in the U.S. Senate intel report wasn’t torture, that word no longer has any meaning.
Debate all you like about the necessity of torture in the name of protecting the homeland.
Pretend it was the only way to get useful information.
Get angry if you believe front-line guys are being left out to dry by politicians who want to deflect blame from their own culpability about the horrors we inflicted in the name of American ideals.
But one thing there is no debate about. What we did was torture. Period.
If you don’t believe that’s a stain on our nation, fine. I’ll disagree and we can debate that point.
There is no debate that what we did was torture, no matter what former Vice President Dick Cheney says.
Cheney’s response is full of crap:
Here’s the truly revealing part. Cheney is told about a prisoner, Gul Rahman, who died after unimaginable brutality – beaten, kept awake for 48 hours, kept in total darkness for days, thrown into the Gestapo-pioneered cold bath treatment, and then chained to a wall and left to die of hypothermia. The factors in his death included “dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to ‘short chaining.” This is Cheney’s response:
3,000 Americans died on 9/11 because of what these guys did, and I have no sympathy for them. I don’t know the specific details … I haven’t read the report … I keep coming back to the basic, fundamental proposition: how nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3000 Americans?
But Gul Rahman had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 plot.
He had engaged in no plots to kill Americans. He was a guard to the Afghan warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, part of an organization that began by fighting the Soviets in occupied Afghanistan. It had alliances with al Qaeda at the time, but subsequently engaged in peace negotiations with the Karzai government. His brother claims Rahman was even involved in rescuing Hamid Kharzai in 1994. To equate him with individuals who committed mass murder of Americans or who were actively plotting against Americans is preposterous. He was emphatically not a threat to the US. Yet we tortured him to death. And the man running the torture camp was promoted thereafter.
To put it more bluntly, Cheney’s response is unhinged.
This story was originally published December 15, 2014 at 10:10 AM with the headline "Blog | Media: It’s time to reclaim the language. What we did was torture - not enhanced interrogation techniques.."