But was it torture?

It was "unacceptable" and "un-American", but was it torture? "My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture," said Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence on Tuesday. "I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word."

He confessed he had still not read the March 9 report by Major General Antonio Taguba on "abuse" at the Abu Ghraib prison. Some highlights: " ... pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomising a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick ... "



Sidney Blumenthal the Guardian

Complete Text: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=16066

they just can't bring themselves to say it

They were just stripped naked, had their genitals laughed at or chased at by dogs. Just everyday goodwill spread by the Bushies. It was the welcome wagon from the country who invaded and occupied their country. I'm sure each was given a photo of Laura.

I fear they did not take pictures of men that needed new skin.If that is true.

it is not only torture, but these are WAR CRIMES

you see there's torture then there's mistreatment, and then there's torture of the mistreated and treatment of the tortured, so what Im getting at is that if youre asking me if those people were tortured can one be mistreated but not be tortured, or does mistreatment imply torture - i answer I dont know - we just don't have all the facts yet.

The Red Cross says 90% of the detainees were innocent of any wrongdoing but the Bushies made them suffer anyways.

I'd like Herr Rumsfield to define his idea of torture...just so we can all be square on the definition of his war crimes.

Not letting him make a vast clean-up profit on his donors. Nothing could be more cruel. He can't promise and guarantee his grandchild a position on Exxon's board and an ambassodorship to Kuwait.

The Republican elitists have no idea what the rest of America suffers.

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Would showing them Shrubs newsconferences count as torture or just abuse? They fall into the torture category for me.

Iowa Democdrat

children????????

Remember the mileage the pubbies got out of Clinton's line about the meaning of is? Well now the tables are turned and the Pubs are showing themselves to be hypocrites. Where is the moral outrage from the RW Christians? Why aren't they asking, "what will we tell the children?" BTW, what will we tell the children?

They've been working since the end of World War II to find ways of breaking people that weren't exactly physical torture.

In the early 50's, they were looking for methods of "mind control" -- truth serum, LSD, stuff like that. None of it worked, at least not in the sense of being able to feed someone a drug and having them instantly tell you anything you wanted to hear. But they did come up with various means of destabilizing people psychologically, like sensory deprivation.

Then after the Korean War, they became very interested in brainwashing and the question of why US prisoners had been so susceptible to it. They analyzed accounts of what the Russians had done under Stalin to make political prisoners confess for their show trials and extracted a number of basic principles.

From all these studies, they put together a basket of techniques for breaking people without the use of overt torture -- isolation and sensory deprivation, humiliation and shame, low-level physical abuse and threats, sleep deprivation and lack of food or medical care. All the stuff we've been hearing about.

These may not amount to torture in the classic sense of excruciating physical pain. But in a moral sense, they may be even worse, because they are directed against the personhood of the victim and not merely their body. In the long run, they may even have more potential to traumatize and destroy people's lives.

I don't know that there's a simple word to describe all this that has the immediate emotional impact of "torture." I suspect that if it weren't for the lurid sexual antics, most Americans would be prepared to endorse the rest of the package as clever "softening up" techniques. That is why we need to define exactly what is going on and how incompatible it is with any notion of a free society.

Problem is that most Americans think of torture as the infliction of excruciating pain during interrogation -- slicing, piercing, electrocuting, etc. Placing people under duress and humiliation is not how the word is casually used.

That's what Rumsfeld is hiding behind. No point in fighting a word game -- just get all the pictures out in the open and let American draw their own conclusions about the "abuse."

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rape to me = torture!