More appallingness

My mother sent me a link from the Washington post about this little wonderful part of the war on terror that our country is engaged in.

The short version is that the CIA and the administration want to prevent detainees in various secret (and no longer quite so secret) prisons in various places from being able to tell anyone (including their lawyers) about how exactly they were interrogated and questioned (read tortured). The supposed reason is that we have such super-secret techniques that we can’t risk anyone finding out about lest they train their operatives in defending themselves against them. So, apparently these are super-effective techniques, but if you were to know what they were, you could defeat them by practicing beforehand. So they’re not really too super-effective. I guess they must be some sort of secret new technique that no-one else has heard of, as well.

Another potential interpretation would be that the administration doesn’t want these people saying that they’ve been tortured. This is particularly relevant now that the US has greatly expanded the list of allowed methods of interrogation for use on detainees. Anything that doesn’t cause organ failure or risk of death is pretty much alright, so you’re allowed to beat someone black and blue as long as you don’t mess up their internal organs too much. Similarly, I believe we’re quite all right with the idea of strapping electrodes to genitals now as well (although I’ll have to double-check to be sure), if I’ve read the new law properly and how it modifies the Geneva Conventions. To be sure, the exact reading the Geneva Conventions is up to the President, of course.

I guess it might be seen as a bad thing if people were to be telling stories of how they were tortured in US prisons, and so the government is trying to stop that. One way of preventing it from happening would of course be to… not torture people in US prisons… but apparently that’s not an option. It’s sort of like the situation with the Abu Ghraib scandal and the revealing of the secret CIA prisons overseas when the administration’s position was: “Shame on you journalists for sullying the image of the US by revealing that these terrible things have been going on.” Clearly the problem lies with the people revealing that things have been going wrong, not with the people who have been doing the bad things.

I really hope that we’ll see some changes after Tuesday.