PARANOIA

As science fiction writer Eileen Gunn put it on Twitter, "This is where the authentic Nazi analogies lie -- in the bureaucratization of evil." From an August 25, 2009 New York Times report by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, "Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations" (free registration required):

Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs — no more, no less — illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels. A prisoner could be doused with 41-degree water but for only 20 minutes at a stretch. The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy. [...]

Managers, doctors and lawyers not only set the program’s parameters but dictated every facet of a detainee’s daily routine, monitoring interrogations on an hour-by-hour basis. From their Washington offices, they obsessed over the smallest details: the number of calories a prisoner consumed daily (1,500); the number of hours he could be kept in a box (eight hours for the large box, two hours for the small one); the proper time when his enforced nudity should be ended and his clothes returned. [...]

“The interrogators’ objective,” the background paper says, “is to transition the HVD [high-value detainee] to a point where he is participating in a predictable, reliable and sustainable manner.” The policy was to use the “least coercive measure” to achieve the goal. The harsh treatment began with the “attention slap,” and for three prisoners of the nearly 100 who passed through the program, the endpoint was waterboarding.

Waterboarding might be an excruciating procedure with deep roots in the history of torture, but for the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services, recordkeeping for each session of near-drowning was critical. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” said medical guidelines prepared for the interrogators in December 2004.

The required records, the medical supervisors said, included “how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.” [...]

But defenders of the program say the tight rules show the government’s attempt to keep the program within the law. “Elaborate care went into figuring out the precise gradations of coercion,” said David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “Yes, it’s jarring. But it shows how both the lawyers and the nonlawyers tried to do the right thing.”

Satire is becoming impossible nowadays. Rather, one looks for any remaining trace of humanity and humility, such as Spencer Ackerman's "I was an Early-20s Torture Advocate" (commenting on the CIA's 2004 Inspector General Report on Torture):

I bought into an untenable distinction between "torture" and "torture-lite" and it led me to sadistic places that I just didn't think through. [...] I wrote the repugnant line that we didn't have to torture Khalid Shaikh Mohammed because we could just tell him that we'd harm his children if he didn't tell us what we wanted to know. My friend Julian Sanchez has a typically precise account of what's so morally obscene about this:

"I guess what especially turns my stomach here is that the idea wasn’t just to inflict mental anguish on a presumably odious man in order to extract information. It was to inflict that pain by exploiting, as a weakness, whatever flicker of nobility or love remained in an otherwise wretched soul. It was a method of torture that would have been effective only because and to the extent there was something human left in him."

Sanchez's linked blog post concludes, "Actually, the more I think about it, it’s hard for me to imagine that the physical suffering is any worse than holding a sincere belief that a group of soldiers are going to rape and murder your family."