infamous second son paper trail part one question

#Infamous second son paper trail part one question full#

In addition, the destruction of evidence and the squelching of internal reports only expanded that seemingly bottomless abyss that still, in part, confronts us. And for 20 years, attempts to keep that blindfold in place in the name of “national security” have helped sustain darkness over light.įrom the beginning, the torture program was enveloped in a language of darkness with its secret “black sites” where savage interrogations took place and the endless blacked-out pages of documents that might have revealed more about the horrors being committed in our name. For 20 years now, the hunt for its perpetrators, the places where they brutalized detainees, and the techniques they used has been underway. We’ve been groping for the facts surrounding the torture program created and implemented by the administration of President George W. We’ve been left to search in the dark for what so many of us sensed was there. Think of us, the American public, as that blindfolded child when it comes to our government’s torture program that followed the 9/11 disaster and the launching of the ill-fated war on terror. Finally, that child does succeed, either by bumping into someone, peeking, or thanks to sheer dumb luck. The sightless child knows the other children, all able to see, are there but is left to stumble around, using sounds and knowledge of the space they’re in as guides. In the Blindman’s Buff variation of tag, a child designated as “It” is tasked with tapping another child while wearing a blindfold. In a world in which the Supreme Court ruled (in a split decision) in 2022 that a detainee at Guantánamo could not obtain information from two former CIA contractors involved in torturing him at a black site in Poland for fear of revealing state secrets, all too sadly, a story still remains to be told.

#Infamous second son paper trail part one question full#

Today, TomDispatch regular Greenberg puts her years of devotion to uncovering the nightmare that has long inhabited the very heart of this country’s disastrous war on terror in context and considers when, if ever, we’ll truly know the full story of the horrific global torture regime the American government established in these years. In that long-ago piece, Greenberg and Dratel posed 37 - yes, 37! - questions to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the Bush administration’s torture policies, starting with “Does torture work?” More than 18 years later, we certainly know two things, as reflected in Greenberg’s latest TD post: first, torture most distinctly does not work and second, despite all the efforts of Greenberg (including her 2010 book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days), Dratel, and others like them, the horrific American record of torture at CIA “ black sites” across the planet and at Guantánamo Bay has yet to be fully revealed.

Bush and crew had established at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for those it captured in what was then called the Global War on Terror as “our Bermuda Triangle of injustice.” I added that “the paper trail already made public on torture, abuse, and other crimes against humanity is unprecedented.” The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, a groundbreaking book by Greenberg and Joshua Dratel (who co-authored that 2005 dispatch), was, in fact, just about to be published. In January 2005, I began my introduction to the first piece Karen Greenberg ever wrote for TomDispatch this way: “Pick a week, any week, and you can now be guaranteed that yet more gruesome news will seep out about the global torture regime the Bush administration has set up around the world.” And I described the prison President George W.