Accidental Blogger

Whenever I hear about torture, I inevitably think of this conversation with this psychopath:

Doug Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody,
including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no
law that can stop him?

John Yoo: No treaty.

Doug Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

John Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that. [read: "correct."]

Frightening, no?

But speaking of torture, CNN is reporting that the DOD wants to (eventually) try the Guantanamo detainees by using coerced statements as evidence.

 Defense Secretary Robert Gates is
submitting to Congress a manual for trials of detainees being held at
Guantanamo Bay that would allow the admission of hearsay evidence and
coerced testimony, a Pentagon official told reporters Thursday.

The
manual was drafted to comply with a law passed last year that restored
the Bush administration’s military commissions created to try terrorist
suspects.

The Supreme Court had struck down the commissions as unconstitutional. * * *

The rights of the accused are "very much the same" as those in a court-martial, [Dan Dell’Orto] said.

About 400 detainees are being held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. * * *

Brig.
Gen. Thomas Hemingway, a legal adviser to the Office of Military
Commissions, told reporters that the manual provides for a "clear
prohibition of evidence obtained by torture" if it was obtained after
December 30, 2005.

But if it was obtained before that time, and if the judge determines that it is reliable, it may be admitted, he said.

Some city upon a hill we’ve turned out to be.

So imagine this: I punch you.  "Tell me!"  I punch you again.  "Tell me!"  Perhaps you have the knowledge I am trying to extract; perhaps you do not.  You respond–lying, telling the truth, it does not make a difference.  I put out a cigarette on your skin.  You tell me what you think I want to hear.  Eventually I send you away, but you know I’ll be back.  For three days you are forced to stand in your cell, naked, with no light, no concept of time, no food, and absolutely no sleep.  Maybe house music plays the entire time–loudly.  Eventually you’re brought back.  "Mr. Anderson," I say, "we meet again."  (Anderson is not your name, though you can be forgiven for being unsure.  It may not have helped that I forced you to watch as I followed Professor Yoo’s… suggestion.)

And then you confess.  You confess everything: things you have done and things you haven’t.  You confess to everything you think I want to hear, just please make it stop please make it stop.  You name names: real names, false names, the name of your pet goat when you were seven years old, the name of that girl you used to have a crush on.  Please make it stop.  You tell me that they did it, whatever "it" is about which I want to know the details and the culprits.  Please.  You tell me their future plans, even though you probably don’t know their future plans, even the ones who are really terrorists, because after all you are just a peon.  Why won’t I stop, you want to know, though you are well beyond being able to articulate that; you whimper, now, or yelp.

Maybe you were the person we decided was unfit to stand trial (the torture made you that way, of course, but it really did and you are unfit).  Maybe you were the person we decided couldn’t have access to counsel because you came into possession of classified information about our torture techniques by being tortured by us.

But maybe we’ll just go ahead and give you a trial.  It will be substantially similar to a court-martial, it will be a regularly constituted tribunal–insofar as by "substantially" we mean "not at all" and by "regularly" we mean "Kafkaesque."  And then you will be convicted and punished, perhaps sentenced to death.  The evidence supporting the conviction?  Those coerced statements.  The torture-product.  The things I forced you to say, the things I did not even believe at the time, the confessions and allegations of a broken human being.

Is this what will happen?  Who knows?  CNN isn’t exactly forthcoming with the details.  I don’t know the content of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s manual; I don’t know how the DOD intends to try people.  What I do know is this: the Bush Administration has turned the world into a nightmare.