More Evidence On The Use of Torture

As news leaks out about the use of torture by the United States, the details become more and more appalling and the net is spread wider and wider. First the administration was forced to admit that the CIA had used waterboarding on several of the detainees now held in Guantanamo. Now we learn, that among other techniques, female guards pressed on the genitals of detainees gradually increasing the level of pain.

The administration claimed that the pictures at Abu Graib represented the work of low level soldiers acting on their own, now documents reveal that prisoners on Guantanamo were forced to parade nude before female guards. Some were held close shackled in the nude in cells under conditions of extreme cold.

The information was disclosed by the Office of Inspector General after the ACLU filed an appeal for disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

The New York Times reporting the disclosure indicates that lower level FBI officials protested against the use of torture by the CIA on the grounds that it was both illegal and ineffective. Their memos reached the upper levels of the FBI and the White House including Condoleezza Rice but no effort was made by those in authority to stop the CIA's activity. Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project said, "It's unacceptable that, four years after the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs, no senior official has been held accountable. Most of those who ought to have been held accountable have been nominated and confirmed to higher posts instead." At least one high FBI official, Spike Browman, the head of the national security law unit at the FBI protested at the time in an e-mail message, "Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don't know th extent of it) would be unlawful were these enemy prisoners of war." The message fell on deaf ears. But now we surely know that any claims of ignorance by higher officials are disingenuous.