Sunday, June 13, 2004

Houston Chronicle: The March memo asserts that interrogators could inflict severe pain on a detainee with impunity as long as the intent was something other than to torture. An interrogator would be culpable only if he knew his actions would inflict suffering that is severe enough to induce "prolonged" physical or mental effects. [Talking Points Memo via Dan Gillmor's eJournal] I grew up in Portugal under the Salazar regime. Its political police PIDE/DGS rarely killed or maimed in Portugal itself since the late 50s until their demise in 1974 (They had no such restraint in the colonies). Instead, their tools of choice were sleep deprivation, the "statue" (forcing someone to stand still for very long periods), beatings that didn't leave external marks, starvation, sensory deprivation, environmental extremes, threats against family members, and various forms of humiliation. I knew a young woman, a few years older than me, who was arrested because she was involved in student activism against the dictatorship. Sleep deprivation so unhinged her that she broke her glasses and swallowed the shards to try to kill herself. She suffered serious digestive tract perforations that took her to a hospital (still under arrest). She was eventually released, but had chronic physical and mental problems as a result of her experience. Following the "logic" of the March memo, her torturers might successfully argue they were not culpable, since they could not have predicted she would swallow her glasses. Thousands of others had long-term physical or psychological impairments as a result of their "short term" treatment. As former torturers argued after the April 74 revolution, the treatment wasn't intended to cause long-term damage, just to encourage cooperation of anti-war activists in the midst of a "war against terrorism." 11:18:59 AM