Tortured to Death: New Details On Detainee Abuse Prove Bush Officials Are (Literally) Getting Away With Murder

Today, several prominent bloggers are writing about detainees who died in U.S. custody, using documents released through the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. We’re not talking suicide, or death by "natural causes." No, this is death as a result of torture and abuse while in custody. This effort comes on the eve of the release -- we hope -- of the CIA Inspector General’s report on waterboarding. (You might’ve heard last Friday that the release was delayed.)

At Salon, Glenn Greenwald writes:

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody -- at least. While some of those deaths were the result of "rogue" interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that’s one reason we’ve always considered those tactics to be "torture" when used by others -- because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions -- that we Look to the Future, not the Past -- are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.

Now I’m no doctor -- and I definitely can’t make sense of the cardiac findings. But it sounds like "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," "walling," and "water dousing" are all leading candidates to have caused the death of 04-309. Or, to use the terms used for techniques approved for use by one Special Forces group in Iraq until May 18, 2004, about a month after 04-309’s death, "safety positions," "sleep adjustment/sleep management," "change of environment/ environmental manipulation," and "mild physical contact." It doesn’t really matter what you call the techniques, though, because they amount to torture that -- in the case of an apparently healthy 27 year old man -- appear to have killed him in three days time.

A lot of people -- from the CIA to Cheney to the torture apologists -- want this debate to be about waterboarding, a technique they’ve only admitted to using with three detainees, and a technique that -- as far as we know -- did not kill anyone in U.S. custody. But that distracts from the other techniques that just as much torture, the ones that were killing Iraqi civilians in a matter of days.

zeroes in on one detainee, known as Habibullah, and the circumstances of his death: