Frontline ran a very detailed story of how secretary of defense Rumsfeld and his jack-booted Gestapo lackey General Geoffrey Miller “Gitmoized” the interrogations of detainees in Iraq. Their website has great backround, such as “Examining the Paper Trail“, video of Camp Delta, lawyers defending torture with make-believe TV timebomb senarios and many interviews including the groundbreaking story of US Army interrogator Spc. Tony Lagouranis (Ret.) who admits he tortured the hell out of Iraqis and tells us:
“Well hypothermia was a widespread technique. I haven’t heard a lot of people talking about that, and I never saw anything in writing prohibiting it or making it illegal. But almost everyone was using it when they had a chance, when the weather permitted. Or some people, the Navy SEALs, for instance, were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn’t die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. That was a pretty common technique.
A lot of other, you know, not as common techniques, and certainly not sanctioned, was just beating people or burning them. Not within the prisons, usually. But when the units would go out into people’s homes and do these raids, they would just stay in the house and torture them. Because after the scandal, they couldn’t trust that, you know, the interrogators were going to do “as good a job,” in their words, as they wanted to.”
A couple of bad apples, huh? Oh, well, go ahead and freeze ’em solid, as long as their organs don’t explode.
The entire show is to replay on the Frontline website Wednesday at 12 noon EST.
Oh, yeah, and don’t forget as you read and watch that the DoD eventually admitted to the Red Cross that “70-90 percent” of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were entirely innocent.