The Fifth Estate on the CBC recently aired an indpeth look into those personally accused of the torture/abuse at Abu Gharib...
It's available online and is pretty interesting, in that they have interviews with some of the soldiers invovled, the commander, and people in the Administration.
Link to website:
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/badapples/index.html
Also includes some transcripts of interviews with one of the legal eagles that authored the memos on what constitutes torture...
Excerpt:
Quote:
Gillian Findlay: WHEN YOU WERE ASKED TO LOOK AT THIS QUESTION, YOU ENDED UP WITH A DEFINITION OF TORTURE EQUIVALENT IN INTENSITY TO THE PAIN ACCOMPANYING SERIOUS PHYSICAL INJURY SUCH AS ORGAN FAILURE, IMPAIRMENT OF BODILY FUNCTION OR EVEN DEATH. DO YOU NOT THINK WHEN YOU SAY THINGS LIKE THAT, YOU WRITE THINGS LIKE THAT IN THE CONTEXT THAT YOU WERE WRITING, THAT THAT OPENS THE DOOR TO THE KINDS OF ABUSE THAT WE HAVE SEEN?
John Yoo: You have to figure out what the law says and again, I think there is an important difference between law and policy. And so I think there is a legal question that has to be answered and I think it's a hard question. Don't get me wrong. What the word "torture" means when it's undefined by federal statutes is a hard question. It's never, that statute had never been interpreted by the executive branch, by courts, prosecutors, by anybody.
So I think it's a hard legal question. That's a different question in my mind than about whether, what kinds of policies ought to be drafted and shaped within the law. And I think factors like, will there be likely abuses to occur or not are certainly things policy makers should think about when they decide what policies to adopt. But it should not, it seems to me, change the legal analysis or the legal conclusion about what Congress has and has not prohibited.
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Also
please be warned that some images and video may be disturbing... and that some of the images and video shown in the documentary were never released or shown on US media outlets.
Hybrid Mode
