Pat Roberts thinks that the CIA only tortures “the worst of the worst”:
Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his vote against the ban doesn’t mean he favors torture. He rejected Durbin’s comments as ”not really relevant to what we are trying to do to detain and interrogate the worst of the worst so that we can save American lives.”
That is certainly wrong — we are not just dealing with the worst of the worst. Death penalty trials are the most scrutinized trials in this country. There is generally a very stringent set of procedures that must be followed, and a conviction is subject to numerous automatic appeals. The discovery process is generally very drawn out. And yet, with all the safeguards and all the scrutiny, one hundred twenty-one people have been wrongfully sentenced to death since 1973.
So it is inconceivable that the CIA — working with less scrutiny, fewer procedural safeguards, and under greater time pressures — is not arresting innocent people. And that means that if the CIA is allowed to torture people, they are allowed to torture innocents. it follows as night follows day. Whatever fairy tales Roberts and his ilk tell themselves and the press, a vote for torture is a vote for torturing innocents.
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
Considering that we already know of the innocent taxi driver in Bagram who died by leg-pulpefication, it’s not even a theoretical question.
How do you “know” that?
Fuck epistemology.
Brillant response. Is middle school already out for the day?
“The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, about 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
An interrogator told Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.
Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen.
It would be many months before army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Dilawar was an innocent man who had simply driven his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”
We get newspapers in our middle school.
Hey, Doofus. I was talking about your middle-school childish language.
BTW, something written in a newspaper is not proof.