>>I just hesitate to believe any of that, without seeing it from a source I trust. The news media is NOT one of those sources I trust. (Think the Gitmo Koran flushing thing.) It’s not a slam on you, just a statement that I choose to believe the absolute best about our military unless presented with irrefutable proof to the contrary.<<
I didn’t take that as a slam - you point out a serious problem - our information comes through the media.
And I don’t want to believe we would use the techniques described in the GST program. But there is enough indication that the techniques were approved at least up through Donald Rumsfeld that I don’t think the government will accept 18 hour interrogations as overly harsh.
Here is a page that allegedly has links to documents with Rumsfeld’s signature authorizing pain and feigned drowning.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/
There is also the problem of the Attorney General’s statement that “The Office of Legal Counsel concludes that physical pain constituting torture “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Indicating that lesser pain for coercion was legal.
Again, I take this all with a grain of salt but I hope the Haditha lawyers have some other defense planned.
This Electronic Briefing Book includes a comprehensive listing of available records relating to U.S. interrogation policies, including records officially released by the White House and the Department of Defense on June 22, leaked documents that have not been officially released, and a description of 17 records that have not been made available to the public. In addition, this posting includes the text of a congressional subpoena proposed by Senators Leahy and Feinstein that was defeated on June 17, 2004 by the Senate Judiciary Committee and a copy of the "Taguba Report" detailing the findings of a Department of Defense investigation into the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq.
The website is George Washington University. My uneducated guess would be that the vast majority of poly-sci profs from that campus that would be into this thing would most likely be liberal, and have an axe to grind. IOW, I don't really give the source a lot of credit for being completely truthful. That's just me though - I am VERY hard to convince that our military is in the wrong. :-)