Yesterday, we were in New York, and a copy of the Times arrived with the morning coffee. On the front page was an article about the following…

National Security — The Torture Memos:
In response to a longstanding American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Obama administration yesterday released four Bush-era legal memos dating back to 2002 and 2005 that provide legal justifications for the CIA to torture al-Qaeda detainees.

The chart that was included with the article was both mind-numbing, and strewn with bits of unintentional absurdity. I mean, what about

Medical and psychological personnel are physically present or otherwise observing whenever this technique is applied (as they are with any interrogation technique involving physical contact with the detainee).

does not imply the mindset of Josef Mengele? No, the CIA was not behaving with the same intensity of depravity that Mengele was behaving with, but it was on the same spectrum. These doctors in the CIA certainly broke their Hippocratic Oaths: In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing…

For many of the years that this was occurring, I believed what the administration said about the interrogation techniques being little more than speaking harshly to the prisoners. The ringleaders of 9/11: I am not losing sleep over them yet. But you can’t start this kind of “interrogation” without sliding down the rest of the slippery slope.

I wonder how those CIA doctors rationalize this to themselves?

I am cutting out the paper articles, and have put up lots of links in this article so I can find them again. This post is as much for me as for you reading this.