Well, it's a quiet Friday afternoon here in America, so that can mean only one thing: it's time for organizations to release whatever news they've been trying to keep quiet for the week. This weeks' big news is that a number of memos authorizing, rationalizing and generally condoning torture and interrogation have been released to the ACLU.

There's a couple of interesting facts here. The first is that very few of the 3,000 or so news articles about this topic seem to link to the ACLU site where the memos are prominently featured.¹ I find this odd, and it gives me plenty of room for speculation. (Bad reporting? Laziness? Suppression? Something else?)

The second interesting thing is the quotes in the memos themselves. I haven't had a chance to read all the memos yet, but I didn't have any difficulty finding some good stuff. The memos begin with a classic "Top Secret" stamp, and go on to say things such as:

...You would like to employ ten techniques...These ten techniques are: (1) attention grasp, (2) Walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard

From a different memo:

Detainees subject to sleep deprivation who are also subject to nudity as a separate interrogation technique will at times be nude and wearing a diaper. If the detainee is wearing a diaper, it is checked regularly and changed as necessary...

They go on from there with great detail about how the interrogations go down, with the conclusion of course being that these things don't constitute torture.

¹ The math was done crudely. Here's a google search that turns up 2,890 hits on the topic, and here's one that searches for sites that link to aclu.org, and that have the words "interrogation memo". The method is crude, but the overlap is sparse.

I was happy to read the news today that Obama plans to close Guantánamo Bay prison camp. This is good news for America, and should be good news for the prisoners there.

As I read up on it though, I was saddened to hear that the prisoners are just being moved to other countries. This is rather frustrating because as Noam Chomsky puts it — and I'm paraphrasing — there's only one reason to have off-site torture prison camps: to go around American law.

I'm really not sure what the point is in closing Guantánamo if it just means moving the prisoners elsewhere. Pretty stupid use of resources.

Here's a juicy quote from the article:

People who have conferred with transition officials said the incoming administration appeared to have rejected a proposal to seek a new law authorizing indefinite detention inside the United States. The Bush administration has insisted that such a measure is necessary to close the Guantánamo camp and bring some detainees to the United States.

In other words, we could bring the prisoners to a camp in the U.S., but that would mean we couldn't hold them in tiny cells indefinitely, and that American law would be necessary. Wow. Can't have that, can we?