Posted by Orin Kerr:
Important Article on Torture Practices:
Heather MacDonald has a fascinating article in [1]City Journal about
alleged torture practices and the war on terror. Her take is that
there has been a big misunderstanding, and that the real story is how
little interrogators can do, rather than how much. I've generally
found MacDonald's work to be quite reliable and accurate in the past,
which makes this article all the more interesting. An excerpt:
It is worth scrutinizing the final 24 techniques Rumsfeld
approved for terrorists at Gitmo in April 2003, since these are the
techniques that the media presents as the source of "torture" at
Abu Ghraib. The torture narrative holds that illegal methods used
at Guant�namo migrated to Iraq and resulted in the abuse of
prisoners there.
So what were these cruel and degrading practices? For one,
providing a detainee an incentive for cooperation--such as a
cigarette or, especially favored in Cuba, a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish
sandwich or a Twinkie unless specifically approved by the secretary
of defense. In other words, if an interrogator had learned that
Usama bin Ladin's accountant loved Cadbury chocolate, and intended
to enter the interrogation booth armed with a Dairy Milk Wafer to
extract the name of a Saudi financier, he needed to "specifically
determine that military necessity requires" the use of the Dairy
Milk Wafer and send an alert to Secretary Rumsfeld that chocolate
was to be deployed against an al-Qaida operative.
Similar restrictions--a specific finding of military necessity
and notice to Rumsfeld--applied to other tried-and-true army
psychological techniques. These included "Pride and Ego
Down"--attacking a detainee's pride to goad him into revealing
critical information--as well as "Mutt and Jeff," the classic good
cop-bad cop routine of countless police shows. Isolating a detainee
from other prisoners to prevent collaboration and to increase his
need to talk required not just notice and a finding of military
necessity but "detailed implementation instructions [and] medical
and psychological review."
Marty Lederman offers a critical take on some of MacDonald's argument
[2]here.
References
1. http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_terrorists.html
2. http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/01/heather-macdonalds-dubious-counter.html
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