What's in a Word? Torture

[Robbien]

. . .

Pentagon officials doubtless have their own versions of that general's loose-leaf notebook to show to human rights investigators. Obviously, no coded orders, suggestions or hints given to the Abu Ghraib prison guards will appear in them. And, no, these were not orders for deaths — but they were for actions similarly beyond the law. What the paper trail will have, however, are the euphemisms for what was actually done:

• "Sleep management." This apparently benign term — doctors use it in discussing insomnia — disguises a form of torture that has long been popular because it requires no special equipment and leaves no marks on the body. Widely used in the Middle Ages on suspected witches by inquisitors, it was called the tormentum insomniae. Hundreds of years later, in the interrogation rooms of Stalin's secret police, it was known as the "conveyor belt," because relays of interrogators would question a prisoner, day and night, until he or she signed the desired statement and named enough co-conspirators.

. . .

•"Stress positions." What is a stress position? Mike Xego, a former political prisoner in South Africa, once demonstrated one for me. He bent down and clasped his hands in front of him as if they were handcuffed, and then, using a rolled-up newspaper, showed me how apartheid-era police officers would pin his elbows behind his knees with a stick, forcing him into a permanent crouch. "You'd be passed from one hand to another. Kicked. Tipped over," he explained. "The blood stops moving. You scream and scream and scream until there is no voice."

This begs an obvious question: when the Abu Ghraib detainees were in "stress positions," were they then kicked, tipped over, rolled around like soccer balls? We do not yet know, but chances are that if the guards were told to create "favorable conditions" for interrogation, the prisoners were not lectured politely about the benefits of human rights and the rule of law that the United States is supposedly bringing to Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/opinion/23HOCH.html?ex=1085889600&en=6cae4c1146208561&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE