Silencing the Tortured

Liberal Candy gives the proper analysis of a Washington Post article "U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons" in post "Bush Admin. wants to silence the tortured regarding secret CIA prisons and methods".  WP link is there.

One wants to turn around and ask the Bush administration what could they do that's worse than what they've already done to a prisoner?

Like the Monty Python Guy to be stoned when told he was only making things worse by arguing.

The old guy retorts:  "Worse.  How could it possibly be worse?"

But then the Bush administration could keep up the torture so I guess it could be worse or, at least, not mitigated.

Much of the coercive pain has already been revealed by US sources leaking anyway.

The torture isn't as bad as the living spaces that aren't big enough to either stand up full, nor lie down and rest and are devoid of any kind of padding, are very cold and sometimes wet.    This, I guess doesn't qualify as torture, but  geez.

The Bush adminstration has apparently revived the horrendous tiger boxes of the corrupt South Vietnamese regime in a new form.  Under such living conditions every day, every minute is torture.

Is this good for extracting information?  Well, one guy held under such conditions spewed most of the lies that go us into the war in Iraq to get out of them.  People will say anything to make the suffering stop.  Of course, then if we had a competent administration, they would have checked things out or waited for comfirmation or something.

Excerpt from the Washington Post article:

Government lawyers also argue in court papers that detainees such as Khan previously held in CIA sites have no automatic right to speak to lawyers because the new Military Commissions Act, signed by President Bush last month, stripped them of access to U.S. courts. That law established separate military trials for terrorism suspects.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is considering whether Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts. The government urged Walton to defer any decision on access to lawyers until the higher court rules.

The government filing expresses concern that detainee attorneys will provide their clients with information about the outside world and relay information about detainees to others. In an affidavit, Guantanamo's staff judge advocate, Cmdr. Patrick M. McCarthy, said that in one case a detainee's attorney took questions from a BBC reporter with him into a meeting with a detainee at the camp. Such indirect interviews are "inconsistent with the purpose of counsel access" at the prison, McCarthy wrote.

The New York Times offers:

But lawyers for the suspects say the government’s insistence on secrecy is an effort to “conceal illegal conduct,” including the torture of the 14 accused Qaeda suspects who were moved from C.I.A. custody to the military’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in September.

In article "Detainees’ Access to Lawyers Is Security Risk, C.I.A. Says". 

Report also says:

The Justice Department and C.I.A. raised their objections in documents filed Oct. 26 with Judge Reggie B. Walton.

The idiots in the Bush administration finally caught onto the idea of distracting the opponents, or at least the news media.

 John Kerry had them tripping over shoe laces that they tied themselves with his distraction last week. 

The Bushies are so stupid that they thought a man who graduated from Yale and then volunteered for Vietnam twice, considered soldiers to be dumb and uneducated.  Geez, no wonder our nation is in so much trouble.

Someone get them the book.  "Governing for Dummies". 

Or maybe they can borrow Scwarzenneger's copy.

tags: torture  bush  election  detainees  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit