Critics

An AP story today by Pamela Hess:

Senators say no witch hunt aimed at spy agencies

While eager to find out more about the Bush administration's harsh interrogation and detainee policies, Senate Democrats are hinting that spy agency veterans need not fear that the groundwork is being laid for punishing those who carried them out.

Witch hunt, eh...a "searching out and harassing [of] dissenters....," that's all it's about then?

It's hard to know who to feel more contempt towards, those politicians who refer to the prosecution of war criminals and torturers as a 'witch hunt' or those in the media that report that view uncritically.

And speaking of media complicity. In the same story:

Feinstein declined to comment on whether her committee would take specific action to offer legal cover to those involved in harsh interrogations that some critics say amount to torture.

So according to Hess it's only critics -that is, it's only some critics - who refer to the "harsh interrogations" as torture. Like Jeremy Callaway:

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were corralling livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001....

....Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the detainees." He didn't go into detail.

"I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway, who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003.

Some critics.... Hard to get past that...

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation."

I suppose it's like what lawyer Randall Vogt argued when defending a man who had killed his son after leaving the boy with "a brain injury .... a broken neck, broken ribs and as many as 70 whip marks on his legs, buttocks, back and chest that were of various ages

Whether that was abusive or not, that is in the eye of the beholder.

what some critics say....

Mainstream American media. Proudly enabling war crimes.

Comments

[machinegods]

"WASHINGTON (AP) — The incoming Obama administration should launch a criminal investigation of Bush administration officials to see whether they broke the law in the name of national security, a House Democratic report said Tuesday. President-elect Barack Obama has been more cautious on the issue and has not endorsed such a recommendation.
"

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-13-dem-report_N.htm?csp=34

[brian]

I would love to see it. I won't be holding my breath.