Word: namo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...change in the Administration's rules on torture, was asked to explain himself before the Senators of the Judiciary Committee who are considering his nomination. Three years after 9/11, the question remains: How did we end up abusing prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. naval base at Guant??namo Bay, Cuba--almost 20 inmate deaths are being investigated--and what is our policy...
Within a few months, as the invasion of Afghanistan reached its climax, hundreds of captured al-Qaeda fighters and irregulars fighting for the Taliban regime were shipped to the naval base at Guant??namo Bay for interrogation. Gonzales wrote a memo to Bush in January 2002 that described aspects of the Geneva protocols as "quaint" and "obsolete." A few weeks later, Bush signed an order deeming al-Qaeda combatants "unlawful" and thus not deserving of prisoner-of-war status or the protections Geneva provided. "The war on terrorism," wrote Bush, "... ushered in not by us but by terrorists, requires...
Initially it meant that prisoners at Guant??namo were not going to be spending any time with appointed lawyers or international counselors who might be interested in obtaining their release. They were stuck in Cuba, some indefinitely, literally outside the law. That alone was an incentive for the prisoners to talk. For a time, the military followed Army field manual rules, which allowed for 17 interrogation techniques, such as the use of the good cop--bad cop routine; the we-know-everything gambit; the use and removal of incentives; emotional and psychological pressure; and silence...
...months later, when officers at Guant??namo, frustrated by the lack of usable intelligence they were getting from prisoners, asked Washington to approve the use of more aggressive techniques than the 17 methods in the manual, the legal groundwork had already been prepared for a new age of harsher--and now legal--interrogation. In December 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on 16 additional measures for use at Gitmo, including stress positions, such as standing for long periods; isolation for up to a month; hooding during transportation and questioning; removal of clothing; and "exploiting individual phobias, e.g., dogs...
Democracy seems especially pallid in a year when political drama has had a bracing revival. Plays like Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom'--another British import, about the treatment of detainees at the U.S. naval base in Cuba--have built compelling drama out of real-life interviews and transcripts, while such anti-Bush works as Sam Shepard's new The God of Hell, a caustic parable about a nefarious government agent terrorizing a Wisconsin farm couple, give off the sparks of real political anger. By comparison, the polite, political-science-class dramatics of Democracy seem as outmoded...