Hiding Torture

The Bush Administration continues to throw its veil of secrecy over its practice of torturing detainees, by not even allowing detainee's lawyers know what "alternative interrogation methods" have been used on them.

The Administration justifies their methods and secrecy as necessary tools --dare we say "necessary evils" -- in the war on terror. Yet most interrogation experts say torture doesn't work.

We don't know for certain what techniques are being used. We do know that the vice president thinks "dunking" is okay and we know that waterboarding has been used. We know that sexual humiliation, sexual abuse and stress positions have been used -- we've seen the photos. And we know the CIA has shipped detainees off to countries who do use torture. That's what we know. The larger truth concerning facts the government doesn't want us to know is usually a lot worse.

What is torture? Here are some methods being used today as cited in Wikopedia:

Some medieval techniques of torture remain in wide use today. For example, tearing out the nails of the fingers and toes with pliers sometimes after first driving sharp needles into the extremely tender flesh underneath is still in common use. Slowly roasting the soles of the bare feet over hot coals was updated by the Russian KGB by using the flat, hot surface of an everyday clothes iron. Methods of confinement that take advantage of modern medical knowledge are also quite common. The prisoner, —suitably bound to deter the expected range of reactive motion, may be connected to an electrical apparatus, where wires are wound around his fingers and toes and an electric probe is used to deliver current to his genitals. A signal generator and attached voltmeter precisely control the intensity of the pain so inflicted. Modern torturers also avail themselves of pharmacological techniques that were unavailable in the past: an example is the injection of drugs that heighten the human brain's perception of, and reaction to, pain before any physical torture is actually employed.

Who knows if any of these techniques are being used. The Administration just locks people up, denies them basic cannons of Western civilization, such as habeas corpus, and says "trust us." When all the known empirical evidence shows that we can't.