Article is here.

In which the CIA has another episode of carelessness and clinical amnesia.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/cia_interrogation_tapes_found_under_desk.php?ref=fpa

From Talking Points Memo:

Not all of the CIA torture tapes were destroyed as the CIA has claimed, according to a new Associated Press report. In fact, the agency is in possession of two videotapes and one audio tape that it discovered under a desk back in 2007. ……Durham is now also investigating why the two videotapes and one audiotape discovered under a desk in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in 2007, believed to the the only remaining recordings made within the secret prison system, were never disclosed. The government twice told a federal judge that such tapes did not exist.

AP article  

Today I responded to Alex Berenson, novelist and sometimes writer of the television series “24”.  I sent a response to his article “The Writer’s Room at “24” which appears in today’s Week In Review section of the New York Times.  Here is a link to the article.  Should you wish to respond to him – here is a link to page to contact Mr. Berenson.  Click on the link that says “send an email to Alex Berenson.

Here is my response to Mr. Berenson:

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Dear Mr. Berenson,

I am appalled but unsurprised at your blithe article, The Writer’s Room at “24” , which occupies major real estate in the Week In Review section of today’s New York Times.

Although I am unsurprised to hear that the writers of “24” are a scotch drinking, cigar smoking, Maserati driving group of men in their 40’s and 50’s (according to the cliché grande” in your article), I will take issue with only one thing - the most important statement in your piece.  It is this paragraph:  “This real-time approach is also the reason that Jack so often resorts to torture.  He doesn’t have time to develop a rapport with the terrorists he captures.  He has to break them immediately.”

Torture is very effective at “breaking people”; people talk all the time when they are tortured – it is not very effective at eliciting accurate information and seldom does and certainly not immediately.  Regardless of the “Ticking TV Show Scenario” or any other of the sanctimoniously violent bedtime stories that the writers of “24” have invented, the reason that Jack Bauer so often resorts to torture is ratings, which have been achieved at the expense of the facts and the larger truth.  Torture is ineffective at eliciting accurate information – a fact which the Dean of West Point, General Finnegan, and a group of professional military interrogators unsuccessfully tried to communicate to the writers and producers of “24” when they met with them in November of 2006.

The unfortunate, non-artistic problem with your contention that “like most of life, “24” is best served unironically, at full speed ahead” is the fact that “24” has had a huge and morally corrosive effect on American opinion about torture and American actions in the use of torture.  That is not true of “every television show”, but it is true of “24”. 

“Spitball” that.

This deeply disturbing article by Mark Benjamin is the definitive riposte to the often heard :”but it’s only a dunk in the water” and the” but they do the same thing to US soldiers in training” argument for waterboarding. Benjamin reveals what the official memos say and it is unnecessary to exaggerate or paraphrase them. They speak for themselves, in an antiseptic and oddly phlegmatic way – and they could hardly sound worse.

The behavior of medical personal, most specifically doctors and psychologists, in facilitating torture and assisting in the design of torture, is well documented. Their actions are certainly unethical and illegal, but not unprecedented. The Nuremberg Trials are famous for the Trial Of Major War Criminals but they were actually a series of trials, comprising several categories of crimes including crimes of medical professionals. These trials are known as The Doctors Trials. “The Medical Case, U.S.A. vs. Karl Brandt, et al. (also known as the Doctors' Trial), was prosecuted in 1946-47 against twenty-three doctors and administrators accused of organizing and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the form of medical experiments and medical procedures inflicted on prisoners and civilians.” (From Harvard Law School’s Nuremberg Trials Project, http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/docs_swi.php?DI=1&text=medical )

This article is short and devastating and I urge you to read it. It provides the best and clearest and most clearly documented picture of the reality of America’s official  method of waterboarding. Here I must point out that Attorney General Holder’s prospective investigation will, if it ever happens, only focus on those who exceeded the instructions found in these documents.