Quote:I think the administration painted the grey area about as far as you can go without being definitely illegal.
They went far beyond that (e.g. in claiming that in order to qualify as torture: "When the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the moment of infliction but it also requires lasting psychological harm" and it's not even clear they stayed within their own bounds) into things that were clearly illegal. Of course, one can always choose to place the goal posts one inch further that wherever the US went (and ascribe anything beyond that to "bad apples").
Quote:I'm specifically thinking of the Stanford Prison Experiment. [i]"What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?
In some cases, I think this happened (e.g. my guess is at Abu Ghraib, the prison guards who were supposed to be abusing and humiliating the prisoners at the behest of the miltary intelligence officers, went completely over the top in the absence of any external control).
But --- to repeat again --- that is a side issue. The main point is that this was the result of official policy, and most of it went exactly as intended.
Quote:one mans torture is another mans cold shower.
Or, to return to the CIA black prisons, in Khalid Sheik Mohammed's case, one man's torture is another man's torture (including yours --- I guarantee it).