A SMALL THOUGHT. It seems we’re now in the part of the argument where people want to draw distinctions between “real torture” and, you know, just a little smacky-face. So it might be useful to link again to this excellent Washington Post op-ed from a Soviet dissident, on “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” as (not) opposed to torture:

…As someone who has been on the receiving end of the “treatment” under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the “Chekist’s handshake” so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is “only” CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s “show trials” of the 1930s. The henchmen called it “conveyer,” when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

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And my small thought is this: Two of the most searing photographs from Abu Ghraib were an American woman with a naked Iraqi man on a leash, and a hooded, shrouded man on a box. According to the makers of fine distinctions, neither of these two photographs depict real torture–just degradation, threats, and “stress positions” (as well as sleep deprivation). It’s easy to use euphemisms and concealing terminology. But when you see the thing, it’s repellent….

Anyway, Balkinization is your source for information about the competing interrogation bills. See recently here.