Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Bybee and Yoo decided to circumvent the law by defining torture in an extremely narrow way. According to the memo, torture consists of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” that produces a near occasion of death.47 It then concluded that in order for pain to be “severe,” it must be “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”48 The memo stated that “prolonged mental harm” is harm that must last for “months or years.”49The memo also declared that the president had the power to authorize torture, regardless of the federal statute criminalizing it.50 Additionally, the memo advised that interrogators could escape liability for engaging in torture by utilizing expanded versions of the doctrines of “self-defense” and “necessity.”51

The second August 1st 2002 memo, which was not released to the public until April 2009, approved all of the CIA’s proposed “interrogation” techniques, including: attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and water-boarding.52 The OLC claimed that none of the techniques were severe enough to constitute its own tailor-made definition of torture.53

The OLC concluded, for example, that waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever.”54 Yet, the Justice Department did not do its own independent research to analyze the various proposed tactics. Rather, it simply accepted the CIA’s positions on these methods.55 The memo states that “[the CIA has] informed us that . . . [waterboarding] . . . does not inflict actual physical harm.”56 So, basically, the OLC under Jay Bybee took the advice of those who asked for its advice on interrogation tactics to determine the lawfulness of those tactics. Does this make any sense? Bush, believe it or not, later appointed Bybee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Furthermore, on December 2nd 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed off on a memo, known as the “Haynes memo,” which blatantly condoned torture.57 That memo was drafted by William J. Haynes II, the General Counsel at the Defense Department, and was addressed to Rumsfeld.58 Haynes sought Rumsfeld’s approval of various new interrogation techniques, including isolation for up to thirty days, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and waterboarding, to name a few.59 Rumsfeld approved, but questioned a technique in which interrogators forced detainees to stand for a maximum of four hours.60 At the bottom of the document, Rumsfeld wrote, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”61

The Bush administration, therefore, had managed to sidestep the law, and through the Haynes memo, had more recipes for torture. The horrific incidents at Abu Ghraib, a prison located in Baghdad, Iraq, seem less and less like isolated incidents, despite no hard publicly known proof that they were ordered. During the summer of 2004, photos were released of American soldiers brutalizing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners. These soldiers forced Iraqis to masturbate and sexually assaulted them with chemical light sticks. American military personnel were also captured laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies were disfigured. Another picture that surfaced was of a hooded Iraqi man standing naked on a box, with his arms outspread, and wires dangling from his fingers, nose, and penis. This is an arcane method of interrogation called “the Vietnam.” Many said that the soldiers had to have been taught how to do this, which could lead one to believe that they were ordered to do it. According to Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), “The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and mistreatment went far beyond what I expected . . . It seems to have been planned.” Planned by whom, Senator?

We know for sure that the Bush administration planned, condoned, and continues to defend a procedure known as waterboarding, and used it against prisoners Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubayda, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri on multiple occasions. Waterboarding is a “stress-and-duress” procedure consisting of immobilizing a person on his back, with his head inclined downward. The “interrogator” then pours water over the face and into the breathing passages. Through forced suffocation, and inhalation of water, the subject experiences the process of drowning. Waterboarding does not always cause lasting physical damage, but it causes extreme pain, damage to the lungs, brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation, physical injuries due to struggling against the restraints, and even death.

Waterboarding nevertheless constitutes torture, even under now-Judge Jay Bybee’s narrow definition of the term. As stated above, under the United States Code, torture is defined as “an act . . . specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. . . .” The Code defines severe mental pain or suffering as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from” a predicate act. One qualifying predicate act is “the threat of imminent death.” Bybee wrote in the memo that “waterboarding constitutes a threat of imminent death,” but found no evidence that the procedure caused prolonged mental harm. Thus even by his own perverse, twisted logic, now life-tenured federal Judge Bybee conceded that waterboarding is torture because it always brings the victim to a near occasion of death.

Allen Keller, M.D., however, found evidence of prolonged mental harm.62 Dr. Keller, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine, and the Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 25th 2007.63 He stated, quite clearly, that waterboarding causes prolonged mental harm.64 According to Dr. Keller, “[l]ong term effects include panic attacks, depression and [post traumatic stress disorder].”65 Dr. Keller, who treats torture victims at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, described one patient who “would panic and gasp for breath whenever it rained, even years after his abuse.”66 Another patient panics every time he showers, and yet another victim “panics every time he becomes the least bit short of breath, even during exercise.”67 It is clear, then, that waterboarding does constitute torture, and the Bush administration broke the law.

President Bush, Vice