Cry For Your Country

After the disclosure of photos from Abu Ghraib early in 2004 it was only a matter of time for the other shoe to drop. It has been clear for the whole time that the orders authorizing torture had to come from high up in the Department of Defense or the White House.

Well. The FBI thinks so, too.

Today the ACLU released redacted copies of internal emails from the FBI that point directly back at the Deputy Secretary of Defence, the Secretary of Defence and the President himself.

FBI officials had been concerned about the cases of clear torture they were witnessing in Guantanamo Bay and with the fradulent use of FBI identities by DOD employees during interrogations. A flurry of emails over these subjects with clear descriptions of torture witnessed by trained FBI agents is now publicly available.

If you are living in the United States, this is being done in our name:

"Here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO. On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand a foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. . . ."

And this:

"REDACTED stated that he had been beaten unconscious approximately three or four weeks ago when he was still at Camp X-Ray. According to REDACTED, an unknown number of guards entered his cell, unprovoked, and started spitting and curing at him. . . . REDACTED rolled onto his stomach to protect himself, REDACTED state a soldier named REDACTED jumped on his back and started beating him in the face REDACTED then choked him until he passed out. REDACTED stated that REDACTED was beating him because REDACTED was a Muslim . . . ."

Oh - so who signed the order to allow these interogation tactics? The FBI Site Commander in Baghdad quotes an executive order signed by none other than the Time's Person of the Year, the President of the United States.