I really didn’t want to keep going back to Gaza, but this one gets at me in two directions. White phosphorus is one of the most inhuman weapons out there, and for Israel to hit a UN compound with it, and then to claim it was in defense, is just unthinkable.
I often feel a little pained in writing articles on torture. Not only because I find myself having to write about it at all, but because I realize that there are a significant number of people for whom stories like this aren’t even a problem. People who think if you want to harm the United States, all bets are off for what we can do to you.
This is why I rarely mention “psychological torture” such as:
Qahtani “was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation” and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.” With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room “and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,” the report shows.
We all know the right prides itself on its “tough guy” image and so something like the above would be met with derision and a few loads of “haw haw pussy” type comments. Not to mention the inevitable “oh that ain’t torture, it’s what happens at a Madonna concert” type of quasi-rebuttal that Rush Limbaugh made famous during the Abu Ghraib fiasco. However, if this doesn’t count as torture to you:
The interrogation, portions of which have been previously described by other news organizations, including The Washington Post, was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani’s heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.
Given that some time ago Berty G defined “torture” as that which can cause “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” I don’t think there’s any wiggle room here.
I also want to emphasize that it happened twice. Send a guy to the hospital once for organ failure as a result of “interrogation” and it says you took things too far. Send him twice and it says you nearly killed him, so you sent him to the ER to recover just enough so you could start the torture again. It says you wanted him to survive just because you weren’t done with him, not because torturing a man to death is wrong.
