During World War 2, Hitler and his pals liked nothing so much as have a nice little torture film after dinner, recordings made during Gestapo interrogation sessions. Would it go too far to believe Bush and Cheney may have done the same with videotapes from Guantanamo Bay, for example this video of the interrogation by Canadian intelligence agents of Omar Khadyr:
TORONTO—Burying his face in his hands, a 16-year-old captured in Afghanistan sobs and calls out “Oh Mommy!” in a hidden-camera video released Tuesday that provides the first look at interrogations inside the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
[…]
The seven hours of grainy footage, recorded over four days of questioning by Canadian intelligence agents in 2003, shows Khadr breaking down in tears. At one point he pleads for help and displays chest and back wounds that he says had not healed six months after his capture.
Peeling off his orange prisoner shirt, he shows the wounds and complains he cannot move his arms, saying he has not received proper medical attention, despite requests.
“They look like they’re healing well to me,” the agent says of the injuries.
“What you see in the video is a teenager begging for help and what you see is an interrogation that violates U.S. law and any international law concerning the rights of children,” said Wells Dixon, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantanamo prisoners.
“If this is the way a teenager in Guantanamo has been treated, you can just imagine how anyone else has been treated.”
It honestly would not surprise me at this point if Bush, Cheney et all collectively popped a stiffy over videos like this. There seems to be a deep sexual perversion at the root of the War on Terror, ever so often surfacing in e.g. the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Supposedly the naked pyramids and forced simulated fellatio of prisoners is done to soften them up for interrogation “because Arabs are uniquely shamed by sexual matters”, but you do wonder whether the incessent fascination with sexual humiliation isn’t much more present in the minds of the interrogators themselves…. As if 9/11 gave a certain part of America carte blanche to force its power fantasies on an unending supply of helpless victims.
Meanwhile the treatment of Omar Khadr is justified on him supposedly being a murderer, but as Eli notes:
George Bush (and Barack Obama and the Congress and the media and etc.) insist the U.S. is at “war” in Afghanistan, and they don’t mean that metaphorically as in the “war on drugs,” they mean it literally. Well, if the U.S. is at “war,” then Omar Khadr is a prisoner of war and has to be treated as such. If every single person captured by the U.S. in such a “war” is an “illegal combatant” and not a prisoner of war, then the U.S. can’t possibly be at war, since there is no opponent in this war. You can’t have it both ways.