The CIA’s Denial of Torture Wrongdoing Rises to Laughable Hot Air Balloon Heights — with an Apparently Out of Control Government Like This, Who Needs Stalinists?

15 September 2015

Dark humor as a Band-Aid^® against despair

While [Senator Dianne] Feinstein and her Senate colleagues said the agency had "slammed people's heads into walls,"

[Former CIA Director and retired Air Force General] Hayden wrote that walling involved "pushing a detainee's shoulders into a false plywood wall, all the while protecting their necks with braces or at a minimum towels."

I can visualize it

Cervical collars implemented to prevent the spinal cord damage that would permanently interrupt torture’s intended pain:

According to the CIA's own documents, interrogators used the towels as a tool for propelling people's heads toward the wall.

Illustrating our national penchant for kindness:

According to emails cited in the study, CIA interrogators used the technique against al Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah.

“Interrogators placed a rolled towel around his neck as a collar, and backed him up into the cell wall (an interrogator later acknowledged the collar was used to slam Abu Zubaydah against a concrete wall),” according to the Senate report.

In a footnote, an email between two redacted parties says that interrogators present during the time of the incident confirmed the walling had happened, and that a more flexible plywood wall was installed afterward.

The moral? — If only Hayden and Ilk could listen to themselves outside Group Think’s echo chamber

With well-intended autocrats like former CIA Director/General Michael Hayden — and his numerous Think-Alikes — in charge, the United States seems to have devolved into a caricature of America’s evil twin.

Stalinism by degrees.

PeteFree.com

The CIA’s Denial of Torture Wrongdoing Rises to Laughable Hot Air Balloon Heights — with an Apparently Out of Control Government Like This, Who Needs Stalinists?