By Robert Scheer, Truthdig. Posted May 29, 2008.

The Justice Department has issued a report on torture,
citing testimony by scores of FBI officials outraged over our treatment of
prisoners.
Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality,
and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It's a
question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page
report on U.S.
complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department's inspector
general.
Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a
pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who
remain ignorant of the extent of their government's commitment to torture as an
official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing
conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by
our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that
American way of life that we celebrate.
But that troubling assessment of moral indifference is contradicted by the
scores of law enforcement officers, mostly from the FBI, who were so appalled
by what they observed as routine official practice in the treatment of
prisoners by the United States
in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo
that they risked their careers to officially complain. A few brave souls from
the FBI even compiled a "war crimes file," suggesting the unthinkable
-- that we might come to be judged as guilty by the standard we have imposed on
others. Superiors in the Justice Department soon put a stop to such FBI efforts
to hold CIA agents and other U.S.
officials accountable for the crimes they committed.
That this systematic torture was carried out not by a few conveniently
described "bad apples" but rather represented official policy
condoned at the highest level of government was captured in one of those rare
media reports that remind us why the Founding Fathers signed off on the First
Amendment.
"These were not random acts," The New York Times editorialized. "It is clear from the inspector general's report that this
was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following
the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an
American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other
top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse,
humiliation and torture of prisoners."
One of those top officials, who stands revealed in the inspector general's
report as approving the torture policy, is Condoleezza Rice, who in her
capacity as White House national security adviser turned away the concerns of
then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as to the severe interrogation measures
being employed. Rice, as ABC-TV reported in April, chaired the top-level
meetings in 2002 in the White House Situation Room that signed off on the CIA
treatment of prisoners -- "whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived
of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called water boarding. ..."
According to the report, the former academic provost of Stanford University
came down on the side of simulated drowning.
As further proof that women are not necessarily more squeamish than men in
condoning such practices, the report offers examples of sexual and religious
denigration of the mostly Muslim prisoners by female interrogators carrying out
an official policy of "invasion of space by a female." In one
recorded instance observed by startled FBI agents, a female interrogator was
seen with a prisoner "bending his thumbs back and grabbing his genitals
... to cause him pain." One of the agents testified that this was not
"a case of a rogue interrogator acting on her own." He said he
witnessed a "pep rally" meeting conducted by a top Defense Department
official "in which the interrogators were encouraged to get as close to
the torture statute line as possible."
That was evidently the norm, according to FBI agents who witnessed the
interrogations. As The New York Times reported, "One bureau
memorandum spoke of 'torture techniques' used by military interrogators. Agents
described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to
24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear
women's underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and
cold."
In the end, what seems to have most outraged the hundreds of FBI agents
interviewed for the report is that the interrogation tactics were
counterproductive. Evidently the FBI's long history in such matters had led to
a protocol that stressed gaining the confidence of witnesses rather than terrorizing
them into madness. But an insane prisoner is the one most likely to tell this
president of the United
States what he wants to hear: They hate us
for our values.