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Sunday, October 5, 2008 12:00 AM

Porn producer invokes the Bush/Yoo defense -- unsuccessfully

Citizens who produce fictitious films depicting "humiliation" and "degradation" will be sent to prison. Government officials who do that in reality will be immunized.

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  • Sunday, October 5, 2008 01:05 PM

    Ummm...Shooter, please do some homework:

    This report by Human Rights Watch details the kind of 'pampering' you are perhaps referring to?

    http://hrw.org/reports/2008/us0608/us0608web.pdf

    It's called "Locked Up Alone: Detention Conditions and Mental Health at Guantanamo".

    When you're done, if you are still eating your meals well, and could take another, perhaps you want to expand your knowledge to what really has happened at Abu Ghraib and Bagram. This report, by the Physicians for Human Rights, should help:

    http://brokenlives.info/?page_id=69

    The pictures of the people that Glenn put up, at Abu Ghraib, are kind of a before and after of someone being threatened, and then having been bitten, by a police dog, while handcuffed and naked (it's two different people but that is what all the blood is about). The use of dogs was approved by Donald Rumsfeld when he signed the memo prepared for him by William J. Haynes II. It is well documented in Phillippe Sands' The Torture Team, and both Sands and Haynes testified about it in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

    I have read all three in their entirety, Shooter, and I would warn you to be prepared, especially if you've never read medical (Istanbul Protocol) style descriptions of extremely abhorrent acts, like those detailed in the PHR document. Rush Limbaugh must not have read them, because this stuff never happens at frat hazings. The Skull and Bones club is not known for dislocating shoulders, having doctors reset them, and then dislocating them again. Neither is Max Hardcore.

    Maybe you'd prefer poetry? You can try Marc Falkoff's Poems from Guantanamo. The author (I should say compiler) has trouble speaking about the book without tears welling up at points. I don't think he thought his client was being 'pampered', one doesn't normally attempt suicide after pampering.

    Anyone who believes that what takes the government a great deal of difficulty to prosecute, and then only on grounds of local community taste, holds so much as a candle to the total destruction of psyches and lives recently perpetrated on prisoners under U.S. control, is woefully naive. Anyone who could call the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo "pampering" is either deluded, delusional, or must be referring to the 30 odd charges of torture leveled at the U.S. prison system itself (by the U.N.Committee Against Torture, 2006), outside of the treatment of so-called enemy combatants.

    Shall I give you the benefit of the doubt that you meant pampering by comparison to Georgia prison guards who smash prisoners faces against concrete walls and supermax prisons the ruin the neural connections in brains with multiyear extreme solitary confinements? That you were comparing it to the seven prosecutions for sexual abuse in seven years at the Federal Pen for women in Fort Worth?

    I thought so.

    But even so, you're wrong.

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