Cosmic Iguana - Voice of the Evil Doers

Perhaps you thought the McCain anti-torture law, passed overwhelmingly last December banned certain abhorrent practices? Au contraire! Repug loopholes in the law not only allow torture practitioners a legal defense against punishment by the law, but allow "evidence" obtained by torture to be used in court. TOM DISPATCH: .

... Under pressure from the White House, ... senators also loaded this legislation with loopholes that may soon allow coerced testimony -- extracted through torture -- into American courts for the first time in two centuries...

...the White House began lobbying for the insertion of loopholes into the proposed prohibition. First, Vice President Cheney pressed McCain to exempt the CIA from his ban. The senator refused. Next, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley weighed in, urging broad legal exemptions for CIA torturers. Again, the senator stood his ground. Suddenly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon rewrote the Army Field Manual to teach interrogators, as the New York Times reported, "how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogation" -- changes one Defense official termed "a stick in McCain's eye."

To placate the White House, McCain eventually softened his prohibition by adding a legal defense for accused CIA and military interrogators that mimes the extreme exculpatory logic of the Justice Department's notorious August 2002 Bybee memo. Drafted to protect CIA interrogators after 9/11, this now-disavowed document argued that torture, as defined under U.S. law, required that the suffering inflicted "be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." In a section of McCain's amendment called "Protection of United States Government Personnel," the final legislation opened a little noticed but similarly cavernous legal loophole for future torturers. It allowed U.S. officials "engaging in specific operational practices that involve interrogation of aliens" to claim, if charged, that they "did not know that the practices [they used] were unlawful." ... [*]

In the 1950s, as the article points out, the CIA and MI5 "mind control" project jointly perfected "psychological torture", a far more powerful and less visible form that leaves far more lasting damage on its victims than simple physical torture. We saw the tip of the iceberg with the Abu Ghraib photos. Remember that far worse pictures were seen by Congress and then banned from public sight.

Britain has been moving to ban these practices, but the US has been moving to institutionalize them as Presidential prerogatives. With the latest additions to the Court of Supreme Fascism, these moves are all but certain to succeed.

You may want to read this significant article as you ponder how the United States slipped into medieval theocracy while claiming to fight said forces.