Patients were brought to us for medical care between interrogation sessions, so that they would be fit for further interrogation. This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.
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28 January 2012
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22 January 2012
Dear Andrew Sullivan: Why Focus on Obama's Dumbest Critics?
It isn’t that I object to Sullivan backing Obama’s reelection if his GOP opponent runs on bringing back torture. Is he the lesser of two evils? Maybe so. But lauding him as a president who has governed “with grace and calm” and “who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name”? If indefinite detention, secret kill lists, warrantless spying, a war on whistleblowers, violating the War Powers Resolution, and abuse of the state secrets privilege don’t fit one’s definition of “scandal,” what does?
If you just have to be better than Bush/Cheney at not openly torturing people and better than Clinton at not getting blown by interns, any of us could be Sullivan’s Great American President.
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18 November 2011
Yet another pain compliance device in use against American citizens. The good news is that the intense pain it causes anyone in the vicinity is “harmless.” Except when it causes permanent damage.
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31 August 2011
Cheney gets away with saying torture is ‘legal’ even though it isn’t because if it were truly illegal, he and those who devised the torture regime would have faced legal consequences—somewhere, somehow. That’s the meaning of the ‘rule of law.’ That, rather than whether America should torture people, is what we should glean from the Cheney book.
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17:09
The tragedy is that it doesn’t matter if we are all Cheneyites now. That there is even one Cheney is enough. He understands and benefits from the fact that the law is still all on his side; that there is only heated rhetoric on ours. As John Adams famously put it, the United States was intended to be a government of laws, not of men. Dick Cheney is living proof that if we are not brave enough to enforce our laws, we will forever be at the mercy of a handful of men.
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3 May 2011
This gives me pause, because the way we obtain intelligence from detainees is, you know, by torturing them and holding them without due process.
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12 April 2011
The United States ignores its own severe human rights problems, ardently promoting its so-called ‘human rights diplomacy’, treating human rights as a political tool to vilify other countries and to advance its own strategic interests.
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15 March 2011
It’s no coincidence that it’s someone from the state department who has gone off-message to speak out about this. When a branch of the US government makes a mockery of our pretensions to honour the rule of law, specifically our obligation not to use torture, the state department bears the brunt of that, as it affects our standing in the world.
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4:00
I’m glad that Obama is finally starting to cut dead weight from these departments ! If you’re not working for the team that hires you then you need to be kicked off the team !
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14 March 2011
The latest outrage in the Bradley Manning situation involves Obama’s direct involvement in the firing of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley — because Crowley committed the sin of condemning the torture and abuse of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, who has been held in increasingly Soviet-esque solitary confinement since his arrest for giving WikiLeaks the diplomatic data that has so far helped topple two Arab dictatorships and launched democratic revolutions in another half-dozen Muslim nations.
