From the DOJ document dump yesterday, a little true-life horror from the overseas CIA dungeons:
F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners "manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock," and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including "How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw,’ " according to hundreds of pages of partly declassified documents released Friday by the Justice Department.
The documents include handwritten notes, apparently prepared by Justice Department officials, discussing the possibility of prosecuting some employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. The notes reveal that the Justice Department considered prosecuting a C.I.A. interrogator for a previously reported incident in which a detainee was threatened with a gun and a power drill, but it says department officials declined to prosecute the case.
FBI agents arrived at the CIA jail to question Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the 9/11 plotters:
The F.B.I. agents helped C.I.A. officers prepare questions for Mr. Binalshibh but "were denied direct access to him for four or five days," the report said. Then an F.B.I. agent, identified as "Thomas," was allowed to see him and found him "naked and chained to the floor."
Maybe it's the fact that I just finished reading TrueBlueMajority's beautiful diary, "a true story about giving away food," but it seems to me that whatever we did to that man chained to the floor, we did worse to ourselves, and that we had a choice in how to act then, just as we have a choice in how to act now to set the balance of justice straight.
As TBM says:
For those who believe in an all-knowing God, God knows whether that person is lying or not, and whether it was a righteous lie or a scam is on that person's soul, not mine. A person who "gets away with" deceiving me has only had a temporary "victory" because God cannot be deceived and everyone eventually has to answer to God, or karma, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or their own conscience. A lifetime of deceit generates its own punishment. In the meantime, I get to benefit from a lifetime of love and generosity.
Or the opposite. Does karma accrue to an entire country?
But in any case this is of course old news. The NYT deems it only important enough to appear on tomorrow's page A28, because as we've been told, it's time to look forward and not back.