Bush Administration Approved The Use Of Insects During Al Qaeda Interrogation

Not at all the same, but the first that flashed into my mind was room 101.
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From wikipedia - "Winston, who has a primal fear of rats, is shown a wire cage filled with starving rats and told that it will be fitted over his head like a mask, so that when the cage door is opened, the rats will bore into his face until it is stripped to the bone. Just as the cage brushes his cheek, he shouts frantically: "Do it to Julia!" The torture ends and Winston is returned to society, brainwashed to accept Party doctrine."

[...] Bush Administration Approved The Use Of Insects During Al Qaeda Interrogations [...]

While we're reading the memo's it might be handy to have this open in anotheer window for reference:
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http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cat.htm
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For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
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Of course every document put out by the Bush OLC pointedly ignore the word "mental". It's pretty easy to ascertain why.

Fantastic. So not only did we apply "counter-torture" techniques learned from the Germans and Vietnamese, but we actually cracked open 1984 and REPRODUCED "Room 101".

There were some tweaks made, of course; a box around the whole body instead of just the head, and actual access for the insect rather than the threat of rats. But I'll bet Zubaydah told us all about Julia.

Awful. It's insane how far down that hole the CIA must have been not to see that as a parallel.

hmm, room 101 is way more disturbing than my thought of a bunch of CIA guys singing "itsy bitsy spider" around the prisoners...

So since Cheney doesn't consider any of the above to be torture, we can happily submit him or perhaps his grandkids to these...techniques? Who here would volunteer for it?

As someone who has relinquished my car to a bee while on the road, clearly I think the use of creepy crawlers is crossing a line. But again I blame leadership for going down this road not the operators.

[...] Michael Scherer: The legal memorandum for the CIA, prepared by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, reviewed 10 enhanced techniques for interrogating Zubaydah, and determined that none of them constituted torture under U.S. criminal law. The techniques were: attention grasp, walling (hitting a detainee against a flexible wall), facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and waterboarding. [...]

Dee:
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What if the "operators" are told to crush the testicles of an interrogation suspect's child, and given instructions specifying the legality of doing so?

On December 1, 2005 Yoo appeared in a debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel, a long time human rights legal scholar. During the debate Cassel asked Yoo "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?" to which Yoo replied "No treaty." Cassel followed up with " Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo..." to which Yoo replied "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."[26][27]

Don't you see?
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Someone who accepts the work of torture is guilty of torture. It doesn't matter whether lawyers like Yoo told the President who told the CIA director who told the Deputy who told the operators that they were allowed crush a kid's testicles or to flood a cell with mock flesh-eating insects.
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The end of it is torture. Don't you see where it ends?
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Your point is that these people thought that they were keeping us safe, so they shouldn't be judged as if they didn't have that duty.
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Their duty not to torture is higher than their duty to keep us safe, Dee. We as a country need to remember that.

I want to make another observation for the people who are saying those carrying out the torture should be absolved. If you read through the memos you will find that whomever was requesting guidance on torturing these prisoners evidently provided a mountain of evidence to push their case that it wasn't torture. Included in that is assertations from SERE teachers that waterboarding doesn't produce long term mental health problems. Assertations that Zubadah was fine mentally at that point. All kinds of background information indicating that stress positions weren't really painful etc etc etc.
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Now I still want to go after the people ordering the torture in the first place but it ought to give everyone pause that these torture memos were written in concert with the torturers not completely outside of them.

MS: well, it is so easy to look for a way to continue the work outside US jurisdiction. The person at the other end of the treatment did not suffer less pain because it was inflicted in Poland and not the US. Bradbury just tells me how the US legal beagles were adept at manipulating laws and conventions as, for example, the government of Nigeria. Well are fully fledged members of banana republics of this world. I forgot that we are a nation of laws.....

[...] Bush Administration Approved The Use Of Insects During Al Qaeda Interrogation :: Swampland - TIME.co... [...]

I just saw a stage production of 1984. And it reminded me that the way they broke Winston was by exploiting his terror of rats. The interrogator says Everyone has something they cannot stand. In your case, it is rats. So rats it will be.
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Of course, the goal wasn't to learn anything from Winston. It was to break him, make him compliant, say what they wanted.
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I am so ashamed. But, you know, they aren't. They just want to keep their position among the special, privileged people.

my apologies alaskanturkey. I shoulda read the thread first.

<i."We understand that--for reasons unrelated to any concerns that it might violate the [criminal] statute--the CIA never used the technique and has removed it from the list of authorized interrogation techniques," wrote Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general, on May 10, 2005.
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Besides the immorality and illegality, it was tactically flawed. There are some people - I'm one of them - who just don't mind insects. Also, I suspect that detainees from warm weather developing countries are more likely to be among those people who are fine with insects.
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An incapacitating fear of insects is an unaffordable luxury for most of the world.

Scherer
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I think you misread the memo. Bradbury talks in the memo about the fact of how a specific provision of the Convention of Torture specifically applies to Zubadah because the torture happened outside the US when the party was in our custody. I read it 3 times to make sure so you might want to reread again unless there is a memo other than the pdf that you linked to above.

rose83
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If your read the memo Zubaydah was deathly afraid of insects which is precisely why the wanted to employ that particular form of torture. It wasn't pulled from the sky.

Thank you so much for your clarifying response to commentary, Michael Scherer.

And Bybee is on the 9th circuit. Others in CA have been disbarred for far less than this man has done.

All sorts of unhinged (yet excruciatingly sanitized and euphemized) excuses for lawbreaking -- and you focus on the caterpillars, Michael? Of course, you do.

MS-
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Can I take a moment to note the accuracy of your update? You did NOT say that this technique was not employed, but rather the footnote says so. Would that more reporters were as careful to distinguish what the government said happened and what may have happened.

Scherer
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Well doesn't that mean that Bradbury clearly contradicted himself in the diferent memos?

[...] UPDATE AGAIN: The Bush Administration approved the use of insects in interrogation. See here. [...]