Thu Jan-06-05 "WE ARE ALL TORTURERS NOW."

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x95449

95449, "WE ARE ALL TORTURERS NOW."
Posted by rodeodance on Thu Jan-06-05 06:27 AM

Very sobering.


http://slate.msn.com/id/2111886 /

.......

The NYT mentions and the Post stuffs a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine that Army doctors helped interrogators carry out abusive interrogations. The WP has previously reported that the doctors had Gitmo gave interrogators detainees' medical files. But according to this latest report, which is based on interviews with doctors as well as those ACLU papers, the docs did the same in Iraq. (In other words, though the papers don't seem to mention it, this seems to be another instance of Gitmo techniques "migrating" to Iraq, where the Geneva Conventions were supposed to apply.)

Everybody mentions the military's announcement that it's launching an investigation into the abuse allegations detailed by the FBI, which the ACLU docs originally revealed last month. Question: Was the military given copies of the FBI memos back when they were written, and if so, why did it wait to investigate? Also, doesn't the FBI itself have the authority to investigate if any civilians might have been involved?

In a NYT op-ed, Mark Danner says there's something different about how the torture scandal has unfolded:



The traditional story line in which scandal leads to investigation and investigation leads to punishment has been supplanted by something else. Wrongdoing is still exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents, and then we listen to the president's spokesman "reiterate," as he did last week, "the president's determination that the United States never engage in torture." And there the story ends.

The headline: "WE ARE ALL TORTURERS NOW."





http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2910320





http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/opinion/06danner.html

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

By MARK DANNER

Published: January 6, 2005


AT least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety.

When Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for hearings to confirm whether he will become attorney general of the United States, Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line. The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to one that practices torture routinely. Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land....