Ooh, I'm sorry. "Interrogations." Maybe even "harsh" ones. Times:
The C.I.A. has said that the two interrogations shown in the videotapes occurred in 2002, and that the taping of interrogations stopped that year. On Monday, however, a lawyer representing a former prisoner who said he was held by the C.I.A. said the prisoner saw cameras in interrogation rooms after 2002.
Just one of those little bloopers you might miss while the kuroko are rushing in a new set of props. And just when everybody had agreed that the grand total was two. What a shame.
The former prisoner who reported seeing cameras, Muhammad Bashmilah of Yemen, was seized by Jordanian intelligence agents in 2003 and turned over to the C.I.A., according to an investigation by Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy organization. He was flown from Jordan to Afghanistan in October 2003 and held there until April 2004, when he was flown by plane and helicopter to a C.I.A. jail in an unidentified country, Amnesty found. Mr. Bashmilah and two other Yemeni men held with him were flown to Yemen in May 2005 and later released.
Meg Satterthwaite, a director of the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University who is representing Mr. Bashmilah in a lawsuit, said Mr. Bashmilah described cameras both in his cells and in interrogation rooms, some on tripods and some on the wall. She said his descriptions of his imprisonment, in hours of conversation in Yemen and by phone this year, were lucid and detailed.
Hey, reminds me of Vegas--or the Village
. Cameras everywhere!
And here's a real beaut:
In a message to C.I.A. employees on Thursday, General Hayden said “videotaping stopped in 2002,” after officials “determined that its documentary reporting was full and exacting, removing any need for tapes.”
So, we don't have to use cameras because we've got really fast stenographers? Good to know.
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Cheney likely has a "greatest hits" collection.
He, Li'L Boots, and Abu Gonzales probably all swap their favorite files as they find them.
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I never posted on this
since it's totally unsourced, but I do have a tech contracting world, and from that world I heard that indeed all torture was taped and yes, it went to the West Wing. (As of course it would, starting with the fact that they're all 24 fans in the West Wing, and ending with the fact that torture corrupts everything it touches, and they like that, partly because they're evil, and partly because making people complicit in their evil helps their policy objectives.)
The "investigators" really should be talking to the A/V and networking techs on this. ("Alexander Butterfield" flashback, here). Playing Kremlinologist, the signature is exactly the same as in the Rovian email fiasco, where data was also conveniently lost, and the techs could say when and where, and the (Coptix) backups could have been sought. That never happened, and that's the sign that the email investigation wasn't serious--though I imagine there were some Sternly Worded Letters, I forget, there have been so many. Talking to the techs will be the acid test of whether this investigation was serious as well.
And the signature is also the same as at Abu Ghraib, where whistleblower Samuel Provance, though the administrator of the top secret Abu Ghraib network, was never asked what data moved across the network, and where it went, and who had the privileges to access it.
So why not ask Provance? Either they don't want to know the answer, or they already knew the answer. Gee, it's almost like they're begging that the evidence be destroyed, isn't it?
It would be great if the torture tape hearings weren't kabuki, and actually held someone other than a couple of "bad apples" like Rodriguez accountable, but at this point, I fear we have very little hope of that.
After all, we've all been carefully directed to look at the tapes, and not at the torture.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
They should look at Fort Huachuca
There was a trial balloon briefly floated that these Abu Guantanamo tapes were intended as "educational materials." Where do they train interrogators, from which 450 more were just shipped off to Iraq a couple of days ago?
Fort Huachuca. Where they funnelled money off-the-books via the Department of the Interior's Army Corpf of Engineers budget, since Huachuca is also a historic site administered by the National Park Service. So not that we don't have reason to suspect that serious naughtiness might be going on quietly there.
Although they assured several protestors that they don't do naughty stuff any more at a nice meeting they held several days before, sigh, arresting the protestors for trespassing:
“That affronts me,” Jennings said, adding it apparently doesn’t matter what he would tell the priest. “We’ve put in safeguards.”
When a detainee is to be questioned, documents are provided, including a medical screening to indicate any medical conditions, including small abrasions, the commander said.
When the questioning, which is video-taped, is completed, if there are any additional marks that could lead to legal problems for the interrogator, Jennings said.
And if during the questioning a supervisor thinks something may be getting out of hand, “it is immediately stopped,” Jennings [s]aid.
Not the greatest copy editing at the Sierra Vista Herald, alas. But they are quite straightforward about the videotaping.
Excellent catch, Xan
The Army is videotaping but the CIA is not?
I wonder what the Army manuals say about video, and why the CIA might have a different policy....
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi