Letters to the Editor
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"Simulated drowning"?
Waterboarding is not "simulated drowning", it is real drowning cut a little short.
I don't expect to see neocon euphemisms in Salon, please be more careful with your wording in the future.
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Do Americans Ever Rebel?
Do Americans ever refuse to torture? Do they ever refuse to "render?" I'm an old midwestern boy, and I just can't imagine some other old midwestern boy actually torturing somebody, even when the boss says, "Torture him."
Before G.W. Bush/Cheney, I believed this was a strength of America. I believed Americans would laugh and resign rather than do all this Nazi stuff.
What do you know about this? What do the refuse-to-torture people say?
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Buy Mr. Grey's Book
you can find his book at amazon here http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Plane-Story-Torture-Program/dp/0312360231 - Extraordinary rendition and attendent torture must be stopped - click this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e88ncBiTR9c for a video on Extraordinary Rendition
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"Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted"
This quote from Hassan i Sabbah (1090 AD), leader of the Persian cult of the Hashishim (assassins) applies to the finer points of this well-meant article. For instance:
"It is not true, as the movie depicts, that CIA officers stand by in some Egyptian or Syrian torture room while a prisoner is electrocuted. Most CIA officers would find that abhorrent, and it would breach the CIA's own rules and be a clear violation of U.S. law."
This statement from Grey would once have reverberated with the ring of truth. No longer, not today, not under the rule of the thugs who run our nation and plague the world. Agents are unlikely so empathetic as to refuse to permit an occasional electrocution or other, even more unspeakable atrocity. It's the job, first, perhaps even the Bushit second. There are too many factors at play in these totally illegal and amoral events. We know nothing and can assume nothing, but especially we cannot assume the innate altruism of CIA agents who are kidnapping foreign nationals abroad, disappearing them, holding them in secret sites and torturing them up to the brink of death. Why would someone who could be implicit in any such activity flinch from actually killing some of their "suspects"? How do you prove a negative? Especially how do you do it in a moral low-pressure zone?
I appreciate the article, but it falls short of believability in this respect.
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Contract it out
I don't doubt that actual CIA agents won't stand by and watch actual torture, that's why we now contract so much of the job out.
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Timbuktom
You wrote: "Do Americans ever refuse to torture? Do they ever refuse to "render?" I'm an old midwestern boy, and I just can't imagine some other old midwestern boy actually torturing somebody, even when the boss says, "Torture him.""
Hey midwestern boy. I take it you haven't ever read about the famous Milgram experiment? Here is the Wikipedia page -- be sure to check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Basically they brought it one group of people and told them that they were helping the experiment. There was another group who were alleged to be the actual experiment subjects, but they were actors. This 2nd group were on the other side of a one-way window for observation. The "helper" group was told to administer shocks to the (fake) subjects whenever they performed a task wrong. They would turn a dial to administer different levels of shock. The person running the experiment told them to administer higher and higher levels of shock. The people turning the knobs could see that the shocks were hurting the subjects more and more. As they were told to up the voltage, the subjects writhed in pain more and more. Yet the authority-figure director of the experiment kept telling them to administer shocks. The majority of the people did so, without refusing. Some of them questioned why they should keep applying electric shocks to people when they were clearly so hurt by them, but even many of those kept doing it because they were told it was OK.
Basically, humans will do some pretty rotten things if you put them in the right situation and have a bunch of authority figures telling them it's OK.
"Before G.W. Bush/Cheney, I believed this was a strength of America. I believed Americans would laugh and resign rather than do all this Nazi stuff. What do you know about this? What do the refuse-to-torture people say?"
The Bush/Cheney people have created a situation where being an asshole is supposedly "OK" and questioning it is "unpatriotic." It is doubly difficult to take a stand in the face of these twits, especially since so many people have been trained to respond to you as if you're anti-American just for stating the obvious.
The 9/11 incident was exploited as fully as possible to keep people in a state of fear, confusion and obedience. The "authorities" played us all like a piano. One minute we're freaking out over anthrax (we still don't know who was behind that). The next minute they have us buying extra rolls of duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect ourselves from bio-agents for reasons we still haven't ever been told. Then they come up with a stupid color-coded system for how freaked out we're supposed to be -- they never actually tell us what it's good for. But it's orange! Oh no!
Now, little by little, we've found out that the entire Iraq war was a sham. Tonight on 60 Minutes they did an excellent report on "Curveball," the Iraqi informant on whose testimony all of the "mobile biological weapons labs" testimony of Colin Powell's was based. It turns out the guy was a total huckster, everybody at the CIA knew he was full of it, even a rudimentary check of his background and where he lived turned up all sorts of contradictions with his testiomony.....and STILL it ended up as the basis for Colin Powell's WMD presentation!
The same was true for the claims of Saddam wanting yellow-cake uranium from Niger. Joe Wilson checked up on this, flew to Niger, talked to all sorts of officials and insiders, and determined that it was a bogus claim. The documents on which the claim was made were examined by intelligence agents and determined to be totally forged. Even the seal on the document was wrong. They were forgeries, everybody knew it, case closed. And yet what happens? Bush STILL makes that the centerpiece of his March 2003 State of the Union address! Why? To scare us!
The U.S. public has a short attention span. We have found all of this out and it seems like nobody cares. "It's over and done with....get over it" is the prevailing attitude among some. Apparently these people don't mind being lied to and manipulated. Now we're finding out about torture and rendition. Yet people aren't up in arms at all. Instead we're completely caught up in "Hey, isn't 'Pushing Daisies' a good show?" and "Oprah Winfrey is ruining marathons!" crap. Meanwhile the authorities who are still in power and haven't had to face any tangible consequences of their actions are plotting Round 17 of Using Fear to Trick Everybody Into Pulling the Wool Over Their Own Eyes.