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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOwning Up to Torture
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/opinion/sunday/owning-up-to-torture.htmlI dont know what drives a man to say such things. I just know that when they do, men like Ferdinand and me will be forced to shoulder the consequences.
In my role as a civilian contractor for the Department of Defense, I spent the first three months of 2004 torturing Iraqi prisoners. At the time, we were calling it enhanced interrogation, but thats a phrase I dont use anymore. Stress positions, slaps to the face and sleep deprivation were an outrage to the personal dignity of Iraqi prisoners. We humiliated and degraded them, and ourselves.
Ferdinand and I spent the early months of 2004 implementing the countrys interrogation program, we struggled to contain the growing sense that we had shocked our consciences and stained our souls. Our interrogations used approved techniques. We filed paperwork, followed guidelines and obeyed the rules. But with every prisoner forced up against a wall, or made to stand naked in a cold cell, or prevented from falling asleep for significant periods of time, we felt less and less like decent men. And we felt less and less like Americans.
Rex
(65,616 posts)we do. Glad to read they felt their humanity slipping away...so many don't give it a single thought. Torture has always been known to be unreliable, so the real question is why do it?
You are much more likely to get the truth if you brainwash someone...torture just means they say whatever you want to hear after you cross their pain threshold.
Bush and Cheney and Rummy sure as hell loved to torture people. I guess they are the modern standard bearers.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)I would submit, however, that the humiliation and degradation was all in one direction, and it wasn't at the prisoners.
It is devoutly to be wished that our nation would look backwards to the past and punish these crimes against humanity, because we can't look forward to the future until we do. We will continue to pay in myriad and untold ways while the perpetrators, architects, and authors of these crimes go unpunished.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)to make waterboarding easier.
Har har har.
Wounded Bear
(58,636 posts)on the perpetrators and on those who perform the actions. This person has PTSD, no doubt.
Would that Cheney and Bush and their ilk could feel just a small part of that. But they don't. Like Trump, there is no empathy there for those they destroy.
noretreatnosurrender
(1,890 posts)for torture is a MUST. That it has not already happened is a national disgrace.
Solly Mack
(90,762 posts)I seriously hope no one is paying a war criminal to tell other people not to become war criminals.
I'm sorry. Sure, he's got a good message - Torture is wrong. But if this is supposed to be a case of speaking from experience as an appeal from an authority on the subject, then this is also a case of his words carrying more weight if those words were spoken behind prison walls - where he belongs.
What is that but another way of saying "I was just following orders"?
They were forced? They were contractors who willingly took the job.
Fair, in other articles over the years, has called his nightmares and depression a "fitting punishment" for his war crimes. He has written a book called "Consequences" where restates the same.
Owning up to torture? Not in America. Until there are prosecutions and convictions for torture, America (and Americans) isn't owning up to anything.
malaise
(268,903 posts)Time for Judgement at wherever
Solly Mack
(90,762 posts)the fact remains, he still got away with them.
My sympathy is with his victims.
Thanks, malaise.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)After all, this guy was "just following orders". Where do you think the orders came from?