Details emerged on Sunday about the seven interrogation techniques the CIA is seeking to be allowed to apply to terror suspects. Newsweek magazine reported that a New York lawyer, Scott Horton, who has acted as an adviser to the US senate on interrogation methods, had acquired a list of the techniques. The details were corroborated by information obtained by the charity Human Rights Watch.
The techniques sought by the CIA are: induced hypothermia; forcing suspects to stand for prolonged periods; sleep deprivation; a technique called ”the attention grab” where a suspect’s shirt is forcefully seized; the ”attention slap” or open hand slapping that hurts but does not lead to physical damage; the ”belly slap”; and sound and light manipulation.
Several of those techniques chime with information gleaned about interrogation methods used against some serious terror suspects. The New York Times recently reported that Abu Zubaydah, the first al-Qaeda member captured after the September 11 attacks, was kept in a freezing cell until he went blue, and later assailed with loud Red Hot Chili Peppers music.
The debate on how far the CIA should be allowed to go in aggressively questioning suspects has divided the Republican party after prominent senators led by John McCain of Arizona rebelled against the administration’s plans to change Geneva Convention to meet the CIA’s demands. McCain told ABC television on Sunday that ”there is a war we are losing in some ways and that’s our standing in the world because of our treatment in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo”.
The British attorney general warned the US that its plans would face international condemnation. Speaking to lawyers in Chicago at the weekend, Lord Goldsmith said he had thought hard about interfering in a ”sensitive, domestic political debate”, but had concluded that the Geneva Convention was ”an international standard of very considerable importance and its content must be the same for all nations”. Guantánamo Bay had become ”a symbol” which ”the long American tradition of justice and liberty deserves to see removed at the earliest moment”. – Guardian Unlimited Â