The Bush/Cheney Torture Legacy Still Being Whitewashed

[Time for change]

Even as the convening authority of the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Susan Crawford, finally comes forward with revelations of torture at Guantanamo Bay against suspected terrorist Mohammed al-Qahtani, our corporate media and others continue to whitewash the Bush/Cheney torture legacy.

In the first place, this is not new information, by any stretch. Almost three years ago, in February 2006, Jean Mayer wrote in the New Yorker about the General Counsel of the U.S. Navy, Alberto Mora’s attempt to put a stop to the torture. Mayer’s article describes a 22-page memo by Mora, released in July 2004, which showed that in 2002 Mora tried to put a halt to what he saw as “a disastrous and unlawful policy of authorizing cruelty towards terrorism suspects”. Mayer writes that:

Mora learned, to his horror, that the administration was engaged in high-level efforts to construct a legal rationale for torture and cruelty toward detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere…. Mora was appalled by the reasoning among Pentagon and administration lawyers who were clearly trying to carve out a policy condoning authorization of such acts.

The article is littered with phrases from Mora like "wholly inadequate analysis of the law," "serious failures of legal analysis", "extreme and virtually unlimited theory" of the President's authority as Commander-in-Chief, "profoundly in error," "a mockery of the law" and "catastrophically poor legal reasoning."

Furthermore, a meticulously researched book describing the chain of torture authorization at Guantanamo Bay in great detail was published several months ago. Authored by international lawyer Philippe Sands, “Torture Team – Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values”, is described in its jacket as follows:

Torture Team uncovers the real story behind Rumsfeld’s notorious memo, a tale of fear and abuse, deception and ideology that reveals how the path leading to torture began with Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. bush, and their lawyers… Sands delivers a scathing and timely indictment that resurrects the specter of war crimes charges for the decision-makers and their lawyers.

Yet with all that, here we have an article just two days ago titled “How the Susan Crawford interview changes everything we know about torture”, as if Susan Crawford had some big new revelations to tell us. But what Susan Crawford had to say added absolutely nothing to our collective knowledge about the Bush/Cheney torture legacy – that is, unless our attitude is that only what current Bush administration officials have to say is important, and that widely acclaimed international lawyers and former Chief Counsel whistleblowers from the U.S. Navy should rightfully be ignored. But I guess that’s the point: Only when current Bush administration officials admit to Bush administration crimes should those crimes even be publicized, let alone prosecuted.


Defense of the Bush administration

Notwithstanding Crawford’s “revelations”, much of her language was couched so as to cleanse the Bush administration actions and make them sound acceptable. For example:

The interrogation of Mr. Qahtani, public military documents show, included prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, exposure to cold…

Crawford maintained those and other techniques were all authorized and legal… Crawford instead opted for a medical definition of torture. "It was the medical impact" – Qahtani was hospitalized twice with a life-threateningly low heart beat – "that pushed me over the edge," she told Woodward to explain her ground-breaking word choice… “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent.”

Authorized and legal? That makes it sound as if no war crimes were committed at the highest levels of the Bush administration. And the statement that the application of the techniques was “overly aggressive and too persistent” makes it sound as if the fault lay in lower level interrogators rather than with those who created the policy.

Corporate news media coverage of this, as always, has been of little value. They have failed to emphasize the extent to which Bush administration torture at Guantanamo Bay was blatantly illegal. They have failed to point out the origins of the Bush administration torture policies at the highest levels of the Bush administration, thus leaving open the possibility that torture at Guantanamo Bay was merely the work of “a few bad apples”, as was claimed for the torture at Abu Ghraib. And, they have utterly failed to describe the extent of the torture, leaving open the possibility that the admitted torture of al-Qahtani was the exception, rather than the rule. All of these things deserve much more emphasis than they have been given.


The blatant illegality of the Bush administration torture policies

Shortly after George W. Bush proclaimed his “War on Terror”, he solicited legal advice from lawyers on the limits of “aggressive interrogation” that could be used on terrorism suspects. Aside from the fact that he and Cheney cherry picked lawyers to provide them with the advice that they wanted to hear, there was a major limitation put on the legal advice that Bush administration lawyers could provide. Philippe Sands explains:

The President had decided that none of the detainees would be able to claim any rights under the Geneva Conventions… No alternatives were offered to the Geneva rules.

George Bush’s determination that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to his prisoners was made on February 7, 2002. All further policies in his “War on Terror” were developed under that crucial constraint.

The responsibility for providing legal advice on the first specific torture policies proposed by the Bush administration in Bush’s “War on Terror” was given to Lt. Colonel Diane Beaver, a junior lawyer at Guantanamo Bay. Sands explains how Bush’s proclamation that the Geneva Conventions do not apply tied her hands:

She was stuck with the President’s decision on Geneva, which required her to proceed on the basis that Geneva provided no rights for the detainees. She said “It was not my job to second-guess the President.”… She proceeded on the basis that “no international body of law directly applies.” The President had set aside Geneva; moreover, she concluded that the Torture Convention and various human rights treaties didn’t apply, either, because the United States had entered reservations that gave primacy to U.S. federal law… All that was left was U.S. law…

Sands describes his discussion with Beaver about the policy memo that she produced, and his assessment of it:

The assumption was that none of the techniques (proposed by Rumsfeld and company) crossed the line. I pointed out to Beaver that under international law the pain threshold was set far lower. “I know”, she countered, “but the President decided those rules didn’t apply.”…

Diane Beaver should never have been put in that position: a more confident individual would have refused. Beaver struck me as honest, loyal and decent. She did what she did in difficult circumstances, under pressures from her commanding officer at Guantanamo and against the background of even greater pressure from Washington.

This was not the work of “a few bad apples”

Sands describes how torture became standard procedure for U.S. conduct in its “War on Terror”, on the first page of his book:

With a signature and a few scrawled words Donald Rumsfeld cast aside America’s international obligations… Principles for the conduct of interrogation, dating back more than a century to President Lincoln’s famous instructions of 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty” were discarded. His approval of new and aggressive interrogation techniques would produce devastating consequences.

Sands explains how Rumsfeld had been presented with a memo for his signature detailing 18 new techniques of “aggressive interrogation”, along with legal advice in favor of those techniques, from Lt. Colonel Diane Beaver. As noted above, Beaver had provided her advice in the context of intense pressure from high levels of the Bush administration, and with the explicit instructions that the Geneva Conventions do not apply.

The memo that Rumsfeld was being asked to sign “went far beyond what the U.S. Army Field Manual 34-52, the military interrogator’s bible, allowed”, “were inconsistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, prohibiting cruel or inhumane treatment”, and had already been strongly objected to by many of the professional interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. Furthermore, in contrast to standard procedure, the memo had not been signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor been subjected to anything remotely resembling standard consultative procedures from the administration’s experts in interrogation techniques.

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld signed the memo, which was subsequently prominently distributed to all personnel who had responsibility for interrogating prisoners.

Sands provides details from the interrogation logs of Mohammad al-Qahtani, the subject of Susan Crawford’s recent “revelations”. The interrogations were a direct result of Rumsfeld’s memo approving the 18 techniques. None of these logs indicated that the techniques allowed in Rumsfeld’s memo were exceeded.

The logs that Sands describes include the use of white noise, pouring water on the detainee, and making him stand in order to deprive him of sleep; not allowing him to practice his religion; constantly attacking his self esteem by such means as yelling at him, calling him a homosexual, calling his mother and sister whores, and teaching him dog tricks in order to “elevate his social status up to the of a dog”; strip searching and stripping the detainee naked; hooding; exorcism; and the detainee reacting with severe agitation, crying, and dehydration.


Scope of the Bush/Cheney torture program

Our corporate news media coverage of revelations of Bush administration torture always gives the impression of isolated events that are the exception rather than the rule. But when we consider the prisoners at Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, secret CIA prison sites throughout the world, plus prisoners that we have sent to countries to be tortured through our policy of “extraordinary rendition”, estimates of the number of our “War on Terror” prisoners have varied from 8,500 to 14,000 to 35,000.

How many of these men and boys have been tortured? Rush Limbaugh and other right wing idiots have belittled evidence of torture by claiming, even when the photographic evidence at Abu Ghraib was publicized, that U.S. treatment of its prisoners is no different than fraternity “hazing” of pledges.

However, a 2005 analysis of 44 autopsies reported by the ACLU, of men who died in our detention facilities, exposes those claims for the lies that they are. That study found 21 of the 44 deaths evaluated by autopsy to be homicides:

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions.

Keep in mind that that study involved only a small fraction of the total number of detainees dying in the U.S. prison system since September 11, 2001. We will probably never know for sure the full extent of these barbaric homicides.


A few words about the Obama administration’s approach to Bush administration war crimes

President-elect Obama has expressed the following with regard to the possibility of prosecuting Bush administration officials for war crimes:

Obama said “… Obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. ... My orientation is going to be moving forward.”

Obama explained that he doesn't want CIA employees to "suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering."

I agree with him.

We should be looking forward towards the future. More specifically, we should strive for a future where American leaders understand that they are not free to commit war crimes with impunity. By way of example, we need to send a message to future American leaders that war crimes – or other crimes against humanity or against our Constitution – will be met with appropriate punishment.

Because if we don’t do that, this is almost certainly going to happen again – in the future. And when it does happen, and when those responsible leave office, our new President will say, “Well, that was in the past. We need to think about the future and move forward”.

With respect to the CIA employees, I agree that they shouldn’t have to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders”. For those who are suspected of participating in war crimes, suspend them from service, indict them where appropriate, and in appropriate cases give some of them immunity for testifying about where there orders came from.

Holding those responsible for war crimes fully accountable for their actions will also send a very important message to the rest of the world that will go far towards restoring our moral standing in the world. It will send them the message that the American people are serious about atoning for the crimes against humanity of their leaders, and that the tragedy of the past eight years is unlikely to be repeated any time soon.

As was made quite clear at the time the Nuremberg Tribunal was created, international law applies to ALL the nations of the world. As much as George Bush, Dick Cheney, or certain members of Congress or the U.S. public may not like it, those laws apply to our country now just as much as they applied to the Nazis for whom the Nuremberg Tribunal was created in 1945. Robert Jackson, the Chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg Tribunal, made that quite clear. He said:

If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

[madfloridian]

1. Thank you for posting this. It can't be ignored.

[Time for change]

17. I think it's a terrible moral stain on our country

I realize that it would be an act of substantial political courage for Obama to vigorously prosecute the Bush administration for their war crimes (or, rather, allow his AG to do so). There is a reasonable possibility that it could impair his popularity. There is a very good chance that the corporate media will turn against him with a veangence. It will take great political skills to get through it. Yet, I believe that most Americans, at some level, believe that this needs to be done, and once the information begins to be made public in the course of the relevent investigations (actually, virtually all of the evidence is already available), the corporate media IMO will be forced to go along.

In summary, he could simply go with the flow, be a very average president, thereby allowing the moral stain on our country to remain, allowing us to stay on our present course, and greatly increasing the odds that the Bush administration crimes will occur again (probably some time in the not very distant future, and almost certainly if a Republican president gets elected in 2012 or 2016. Or, he could go down as one of our greatest presidents if he does the right thing, though with some risk of being a one term president.

[TahitiNut]

2. Anyone doing such things to dogs would be imprisoned.

Michael Vick was more lenient with his dogs. :puke:

[Time for change]

20. It's because of this kind of stuff that when I hear Bush talking about how he's brought freedom to

the Iraqis, I want to ring his neck.

And so few Americans are aware of this stuff. It's so sad.

[mmonk]

3. K&R

for the major issues everyone wants to ignore. Torture is always a tell tale sign that a democracy is ending and you'd better fight to bring it back.

[Time for change]

25. Absolutely

I hope the Obama administration understands that.

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

Also, Susan Crawford used that loathsome phrase, "mistakes were made" - which really said it all.

[Time for change]

26. Yeah -- "mistakes were made"

The phrase that avoids admitting war crimes, while pretending to be acknowledging what was done.

[slipslidingaway]

5. K&R :)) n/t

[bottomtheweaver]

6. Do we really need the CIA and 15 other US intel agencies brainwashing

and spying on us? Do we need them at all? And if we do need a permanent peacetime surveillance apparatus, and I don't see why we would, do we need to give it the unlimited and unaccountable power to conduct crimes that the CIA and other subrosa angencies we haven't yet learned about enjoy? For example, do we really need the NSA, which was launched in 1952 but whose existence we knew nothing about until 1990, eavesdropping on soldier's phone conversations?

New York Times: "Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in U.S. After 9/11, Officials Say"
http://cryptome.org/nsa-spied-us.htm

Perhaps that's where we should start, or at least end, the coming investigations. In any case, Jane Mayer reports in The Dark Side that CIA interogators who carried out the Bush-Cheney torture regime were meticulously micromanaged, for example in this interview with CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, so looking over their shoulders wouldn't be anything they're not already used to:

"Before you could lay a hand on him, you had to send a cable saying, 'He's uncooperative. Request permission to do X.' And permission would come, saying 'You're allowed to slap him one time in the belly with an open hand . . . or keep him awake for forty-eight hours.'" The program, Kiriakou said, "was extremely deliberate." (page 167)

[Time for change]

16. I feel similarly about the CIA

It has committed numerous crimes in our name.

Especially egregious are its covert actions -- the interference in sovereign nations to overthrow their democratically elected governments, solely because to do so would be in the "best interests of the United States". That is imperialism, pure and simple, and we have been doing it for a long time, even before the CIA, but the CIA facilitates the process enormously.

Yes, that needs to be looked into big time. When Truman created the CIA, he did not have the covert overthrow of the governments of sovereign nations in mind.

[glitch]

18. No, we don't. But somebody does.

And they are spending lots of their time and our money on it.

[bottomtheweaver]

29. Yes, exactly.

And we keep wondering how we wound up as a banana republic. Well, now that the other banana republics have figured out how to get chimp and the gang off their backs, maybe we can learn a lesson from them.

[glitch]

31. Good analogy, Chimp and the Gang. nt

[pnorman]

7. I'm listeming to Jane Mayer's book right now, and am more than halfway through it.

Here it is at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Inside-Terror-American/dp/0385526393/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232291625&sr=1-1

From Publishers Weekly
This hard-hitting expose examines both the controversial excesses of the war on terror and the home-front struggle to circumvent legal obstacles to its prosecution. New Yorker correspondent Mayer (Strange Justice) details the battle within the Bush Administration over a new anti-terrorism policy of harsh interrogations, indefinite detentions without due process, extraordinary renditions, secret CIA prisons and warrantless wiretappings. Fighting with memos and legal briefs, Mayer reports, hard-liners led by Dick Cheney, his aide David Addingtion and then-Justice Department lawyer John Yoo rejected any constraints on the treatment of prisoners or limitations on presidential power in fighting terrorism, while less militant administration lawyers invoked the Constitution and international law to oppose their initiatives. As a counterpoint to the wrangling over the definition of torture and the Geneva Conventions, the author looks at the use of techniques like waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation against prisoners by the American military and CIA; her chilling account compellingly argues that this "enhanced interrogation" regimen constitutes torture. The result is a must-read: a meticulous behind-the-scenes reconstruction of policymaking that demonstrates how legal abstractions became an ugly reality.

Get it and give it a good read. It covers much of what is currently making DU glow white hot.

pnorman

[bottomtheweaver]

8. The part about the SERE program is really revealing.

Who knew that the whole point of the torture operation was to gin up false intelligence? I didn't, but it makes perfect sense, because I'd already figured out that the entire Bush-Cheney terra narrative including 911 was a big fat mindfuck, and the SERE business pretty much confirms it.

[pnorman]

10. "SERE" didn't come to mind. Appaerently, I hadn't listened that far yet.

But I also have the eReader e-text of that same book in my cell-phone! And the "FIND" function just now brought me to the right place in the book: "SERE: (Survival, Evasion, Resistance,and Escape)"

It looks to be about 3/4 of the way through the book, so I should be getting to it later in the day. It's a bit extravagant buying both versions, but it is sometimes very useful. And I was always a sucker for having a bookshelf that fits in my shirt-pocket! I also have the M/W Unabridged dictionary there (~38MB), as well as many other useful books.

pnorman
On edit: My error! I had searched "SERE" from the book: "Angler: The Cheney Vice presidency", which I also have in my cell-phone. I had bought the e-text of that Jane Mayer book a week or so earlier, but hadn't gotten around to downloaded it yet! (Busy, busy, busy!)

On further edit: I just dowmnloaded that Jane Mayer book, and was able to search: "SERE". It's about 40% into the book, so I must have overlooked it. My confusion can be explained that I heard that "Angler" book the other day, and had been discussing it earlier today on another thread! So I now have BOTH books in my shirt-pocket, and in audible and e-text format!

[bottomtheweaver]

13. LOL.

In my copy it starts on p. 157. Basically SERE a program originally developed by the CIA, then taken over by the military, to train soldiers not to break under torture by torturing them. The torture techniques, like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and so on supposedly came from Russia and Korea.

Well, the Bush-Cheney CIA took the techniques -- all the stuff we're now familiar with, highly refined mental torture with lots of psychologists hovering in the wings -- and applied them to detainees in order to get them to say whatever they wanted them to say. In some cases it worked, like the KSM "confessions," but apparently it mostly didn't, even when they tortured the poor guys to death, as often happened.

[pnorman]

14. Yes, my screw-up!

Please read the SECOND edit of my original posting!
:dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce:

And I recall it now. In any event, BOTH books are well worth reading!

pnorman

[bottomtheweaver]

30. Thanks for the tip!

I'm going to look for the Cheney book.

[Time for change]

15. Jane Mayer's book has a lot of very important information in it

I summarize it in this post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4751593

The Dark Side -- The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals – by Jane Mayer

Of the many crimes of the Bush administration, none terrifies me more than how it treats its prisoners – Kidnapping them all over the world, throwing them into dungeons and labeling them as “illegal enemy combatants” with almost no concern for determining their guilt or innocence, keeping them there indefinitely with no opportunity to challenge their detention, stripping them of all human rights, and repeatedly torturing them. Hitler and Stalin come to mind.

I have often asked myself why the Bush administration feels the need to do this. Mayer’s book answers many questions surrounding that issue. Here are just two examples:

Why strip our prisoners of all legal and human rights?
The case of John Walker Lindh answers this question. Lindh was an American citizen who converted to Islam as a young man. As a Muslim, he felt it his duty to go to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban – at a time when the Taliban was considered an ally of our country. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Lindh turned himself in to the U.S. Army.

He was the first prosecution of our “War on Terror”. While in U.S. custody awaiting trial, Lindh was denied access to an attorney and consistently treated inhumanely, bordering or crossing the line into torture. Because of all the procedural misconduct, the Bush administration was unable to pursue the most serious charge against him, and it was embarrassed when his treatment became public. Mayer describes the lesson that the Bush administration learned from its first prosecution of its “War on Terror”:

What John Walker Lindh taught the Bush Administration was that open criminal trials under the strict rules of the American legal system were not worth the risk (of embarrassment to the Bush administration that is). In the future, enemy prisoners would have to be held safely outside the reach of U.S. law, where they could by questioned without legal interference and tried under rules more favorable to the prosecution – if they were tried at all.

Why all the torture?
One major clue to the purpose of the Bush detention and torture program is its use of a program called SERE, an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. The theoretical purpose of the program was that by subjecting U.S. soldiers to near torture-like conditions, they could be programmed to resist breaking under torture by the enemy and revealing national security secrets. But in actual practice, the program was “reverse-engineered” to become a blueprint for torture of our prisoners. Mayer explains the significance of that:

The SERE program was a strange choice for the government to pick if it was seeking to learn how to get the truth from detainees. It was founded during the Cold War in an effort to re-create, and therefore understand, the mistreatment that had led thirty-six captured U.S. airmen to give stunningly FALSE CONFESSIONS during the Korean War.

In other words, the major purpose of Bush administration systematic torture of its prisoners was to obtain false confessions – as it did with Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who confessed to the non-existent close ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

[pmorlan1]

9. War Crimes Can't be Ignored

Thank you for posting this piece. It's beyond me how anyone could seriously advocate that we ignore war crimes. All of those who engage in downplaying what was done in our names need to examine their own values. Whether it's an attempt to protect the war criminals themselves or a misguided view that protecting war criminals will somehow help Obama matters not. The law demands that prosecutions occur for these egregious crimes and our own country's values demand it as well. Indeed, for anyone who is an Obama supporter they must understand that allowing beltway insiders to convince Obama to ignore the law harms Obama's presidency by linking him forever with the worst president in our history. Anyone that truly supports Obama will do everything in their power to let him know that he must follow the rule of law that he will swear to uphold on Tuesday. To do anything less is to doom his presidency as a lawless presidency as soon as he takes office.

[Time for change]

22. I agree

Putting pressure on Obama to prosecute these crimes will is necessary, and will make it easier for him to do the right thing.

Welcome to DU, pmorlan :toast:

[Usrename]

11. The horror and shame that was the Bush presidency.

Obama should not turn his back on these crimes. Period.

[lonestarnot]

12. Torture, slavery, he can't turn his back to 'look forward.'

[chill_wind]

19. Outstanding OP. K & R.

eom

[puebloknot]

21. "Authorized and legal?" By what authority.? We are a nation of laws ...

... or we are a rogue nation, equipped with more hubris and more weaponry than any nation in the history of the planet.

[Raster]

23. Oh no, we should let bygones be bygones and just move on.

Investigating cheney*/bush* and their illegal actions would just be divisive.
:sarcasm::kick:

Throw the bastards in prison!

[wiggs]

24. Great post. As you point out, anytime -- ANYTIME -- this administration hints

that it has done something questionable, the purpose is to cover up much worse, much more extensive wrongdoing.

Don't let the torture question be narrowed down to whether or not sleep deprivation on Mr. Qahtani is torture, representing the sum of the administration torture efforts.

24 deaths at Abu Ghraib...rendition...Geoffrey Miller....secret prisons....this is much, much more than abuse of one man. But having said that, I'm willing to have our nation draw the line regarding the torture or abuse or ONE MAN, anywhere, anytime and send those responsible to jail. At stake are rights of future victims, the constitution, the geneva conventions, dignity, assurances that own troops will be treated humanly, and our place in the world as a leading power.

[Time for change]

27. Thank you -- I feel the same way about this

[Ani Yun Wiya]

28. Once again, thank you for your important writings.

The crime of torture is one among many of the crimes against humanity which * and crew have comitted.
It is a most egregious aspect of their greater crime, wars of aggression.

These violations of law and treaty can NOT be swept under the rug.

Obama has only a small window of time in which to allow Justice to be applied in this case.

If these crimes continue for even one day beyond Tuesday, he will find the right path ever more difficult and soon enough nigh impossible to trod.

All who participated in these crimes should pay a steep price, from top to bottom of the chain of command.

Consider that if the Military is willing to subject it's own members to "torture lite" (and with this I am personally acquainted) WHAT is it willing to do to an "enemy".