welcome everybody my name is rob crawford i'm the co founder of the washington state religious campaign against torture so the underlying methods of tonight's program is the trial of the travesty of u s torture authorized i remind you at the highest levels of the us government is not behind us not least behind us there are grave questions of what should be done in response to what clearly clearly amounted to war crimes by our own political security and military leaders if the government decides not to hold itself accountable the people need to judge the wisdom of that decision what for example are the consequences for the rule of law or for government law breaking with regard to matters of national security but there are many reasons many reasons why torture won't just vanish from the political present why it is important that we continue to grapple with guantanamo remains open defenders and proponents of so called enhanced interrogation continue to advocate their cause and in the united states we are still faced with the problem of torture and our own prison otherwise known as solitary confinement we are in short i was going to start with the story which crawford took out of my mouth i offered the amendment in the house to the intelligence authorization bill that would codified what the president had put in is executive order politically at atomic bomb went off in the house of representatives and suddenly it was pulled from the bill and never was ever voted  it created so much consternation that members didn't want to have the opportunity to vote for or against it the issue that has always troubled me most about that whole question of torture and it's very idiosyncratic in some senses because i am a physician and a psychiatrist and very often physicians and psychiatrists are intimately involved made about what is torture and what is not what is waterboarding what when is it not enough all these questions in which middle health professionals and other physicians get involved in my view is against old as a physician that is to protect life and to take care of people or and not to torture them we vilified number and nazis mentally and others who were accused of using their medical profession as torture and certainly we don't want to think of ourselves in those lights but in fact when we participate in one of those events we're doing i  come from a tradition i'm irish there is an old tradition in law that goes back to the ancient gayle's that when your enemy has put you in a position where you have nothing left you can do what you do is you go to his front doorstep and lie down on the front steps and starve yourself to death so that your enemy has to come out every day and step over your body and go but his or her business and come back at night and step over that body and you continue that until you die you saw this in action in a long cage prison in northern  where where bobby sands and ten other irishman starve themselves to death we have that situation going on today in guantanamo and rather than let them starve themselves to death we are foreseeing them using doctors and the medical profession as a means of keeping them alive somehow that's humane i mean we've tortured for twelve years in a place with  no hope of ever seeing a judge never getting out nothing and when they decide they've had enough and their go on we then are going to save them for more of it think about that when you when you think about what torture really use and i think that we this issue is continuing to ferment in our society the reason get mo is such a very difficult vote in the house of representatives is because everybody really thinks about it knows there are fifty or sixty people that we've said are no problem but we will let him go we keep them and you have to ask yourself who are we because we're the ones that are allowing that to happen and that's why these kind of events in my view are very very important because they continue to raise the awareness in the society of the fact that our government and behalf of us does things for which we ourselves would never agree and we have to make our voices heard and so i'm i'm pleased that you're having this meeting tonight and i sorry can't stay and hear the bulk of the discussion i have i know of the generals work and i am pleased by it and i think that it's important that people be will ing to speak up so thank you all for coming i'm david ervine i'm very happy to be here with you this evening i appreciate very much having had a chance to listen to congressman mcdermott and appreciate so greatly his commitment to doing the right thing in this very difficult situation that i'm going to be as brief as i can be because we want to leave time for you to ask questions if you would care to and we can respond that we would like the discussion to be guided by what you are interested in let me just say preliminarily that i'm a lawyer and i practice in salt lake city i spent eighteen years as an army intelligence officer holding down an assignment with the army intelligence school teaching a prisoner of war interrogation and military law over a fairly long period of time to a fairly large number of soldiers marines and airmen and i think that's why i was invited to participate in this task force as well because i have been part of a group of some fifty to sixty retired admirals and generals who have been very active since two thousand and five in trying to make the case that as a nation we are safer if we respect the geneva conventions and if we hold prisoners who are in our custody in accordance with the standards that geneva requires we have been and happy and working hard to try to get the united states out of the torture business we have tried and still try to get the president at guantanamo closed and to either try those who are held there or release them we believe strongly that indefinite imprisonment without charges and without a trial is absolutely contrary the values of the united states so the task force that the constitution project put together was a bipartisan effort and let me just introduce the two co chairs of the project one was a former member of congress who is a republican hutchinson and some of you may remember congressman hutchinson from arkansas as one of the house managers in the clinton impeachment hearings another co chair the other co chair i should say was a former congressman a democrat former congressman james jones who also was i was interested to learn chief of staff for president lyndon johnson both of these individuals were diligent they are distinguished they are men of integrity they are men who while having different political positions on many many things found it important to be a participant in this bipartisan effort dealing with this significant subject in our history we produced this report it's a six hundred page report it is in our judgment the most comprehensive report and look at what the united states did with those in our custody from two thousand and one how we treated them have we interrogated them and in very importantly what we did or did not receive from them by way of strategic  made twenty four separate findings and recommendations and i should state that twenty three of those twenty four were unanimous decisions and i'm not going to read these slides but i would just call your attention to a couple of things the events that we examine this report are truly unprecedented in our history there have been many wars in which we have been involved there has never been an instance before where the kinds of detailed discussions took place at the very top echelons of our government as they took place here dealing with the wisdom the propriety and the legality of deliberately inflicting unspeakably severe pain and anguish mentally on people in our custody and we proceeded from a belief that having as thorough an examination as possible of what occurred during this period really only strengthens the nation and better equipped to deal with the next crisis when it comes along as a crisis will surely come along and if we if we fail to do that we risk weakening our ability to claim our place as an exceptional and exemplary practitioner of the rule of law the first unanimous finding that we reached as a task force and we think this is enormously significant is that united states forces in many instances and across several theaters of war used interrogation techniques that constitute torture we debated long and hard about what to how to use the language that would describe what we found and what we observed and what we concluded we recognized that  in any conflict truth is the first casualty of war and one of the truths that was the first casually this war it was the way we used language and we used it in a couple of significant ways we changed the terminology for referring to prisoners and started referring to them as d to them as detainees and this was done for a couple of reasons number one if they were prisoners then maybe they were entitled to certain protections under the geneva conventions for various reasons the government did not wish to observe but that was an important distinction and many things flowed from that i will tell you that the guys at guantanamo are prisoners they're not detainees they're not held there they have not been there for ten years because they violated a stop sign and ran a red light they are there because we have put them there on charges and allegations that they were were criminals although very few have been charged with anything and forty six are still there who are slated for indefinite detention for who knows how long the second unanimous finding that we made was that the nation's most senior officials through some of their actions and inactions bear ultimate responsibility for  some of the conduct that we found was in fact torture the third significant finding this is really important we believe is that as far as the public record is concerned and that was all that we had access to we had no access to classified information there is no firm or persuasive evidence that the widespread use of harsh interrogation i like to call it what it is brutal interrogation by u s forces produced significant information of value we found no clear or persuasive evidence in the public record that torture produced more useful information than conventional met methods of interrogation or that it saved lives let me expand on that for just a second one of the claims that is made by proponents of enhanced interrogation that was the second switch in language it's just not politically correct to say we torture people because we don't torture people we're americans we don't do that  the president the vice president spent years telling us we don't torture we treat people humanely so we used the term intense and enhanced interrogation to walk around the  very strict and pretty specific requirements of federal law and international law that prohibit the kinds of things we intended to do the reason that we we say no connection can be made between enhanced interrogation or torture and useful intelligence is that there's only one instance that we've been able to find in the public record where anyone and their various people have made this claim but they all cite back to the library towers plot and that was the plot that in that was represented involved the hijacking of airplanes and flying them into the library towers building in los angeles the problem with that claim is that you can't connect the dots in a time sequence between the dates of capture and interrogation and events as they occurred in many instances the interrogations that were claimed to have taken place at a at an earlier point in time did not take place until several months later or weeks later the timeline that would support a finding that interrogation a  of information b which led to the arrest of person j which ultimately led to information contained in p q r and s that thwarted the plot cannot be established from the public record another significant unanimous finding was that u s officials involved with detention at cia black sites committed acts of torture cruel inhuman or degrading treatment the reason i selected this finding was because the kinds of things that we not you not me but the things that were done in your name and name are the same kinds of things that have been denounced by the united states when they have been practiced by other nations we concluded that lawyers in the department of justice office of legal counsel repeatedly gave erroneous sanction to various activities that amount to torture cruel and human or degrading treatment and that in doing so they really failed to properly serve their clients the president and the american people and as an example of what i'm talking about you probably if you have followed the topic are familiar with what have been called the torture memos and these were the memoranda that were issued by d o j lawyers to sanction the enhanced interrogation techniques that the white house the secretary of defense and others were so anxious to implement we found that in many instances the lawyers who wrote these memoranda were misled as to the actual effects medically and psychologically of the techniques that they were being asked to approve of and that the intentional misleading of those who prepared those memos  was something that unfortunately led to their easier acceptance as proper and as useful we found also that medical professionals as congressman mcdermott described including physicians and psychologists were participating in terror gay sions and in ways that it seemed to us violated ethical standards that they are expected to adhere to as physicians and psychologists and psychiatrists and that they were using the medical information they gained from treating these prisoners to the interrogating teams to more effectively exploiting their medical or psychological weaknesses one of the curious things about torture is that a majority of americans today and a larger majority then  in the history of the last ten years believe that torture in certain instances is appropriate that it's necessary that it's really not torture and that it has produced extremely valuable intelligence that has saved tens of thousands of lives and this is the message that is over and over and over and over again emphasize by those who believe that enhanced interrogation ought to be a regular part of american policy in dealing with terrorist threats or other threats and this claim has largely been and rebutted because those who make the claim then say if you only knew what i know because i was in a position to have access to the classified documents that told me how effective this was and how vital it was that we have the ability to get people who are hardened who are trained to resist conventional interrogation techniques to talk to break to tell us where the next plot was going to take place most americans i'll submit to you have no idea in the world quote enhanced interrogation really entails a lot of people have heard of waterboarding and the president president bush vice president cheney have emphatically stated that waterboarding is not torture waterboarding has been hild as torture by united states military courts by international courts it's the oldest torture preference from the days of the spanish inquisition so i thought i should just share with you a list of some of the kinds of interrogation techniques that we found through the unclassified public record have been used either by united states personnel directly or by our surrogates since two thousand one and these various techniques have been used not only by themselves on a standalone effort but most frequently they have been used in combination and simultaneously so that the psychological and medical adverse effects on the persons they were practiced upon have been ratcheted up to the point that we have we have driven more than a few people in saying that i'll just suggest to you that if these kinds of practices were used by another nation on american servicemen who are kept is who are prisoners of war we as a nation would not tolerate it i became interested in this topic when i saw the pictures at abu ghraib as did many of my colleagues and i'm sharing with you a statement that former secretary of state colin powell made  following abu ghraib i made this statement to foreign government officials in an effort to explain to them why this was an anomaly that should not be considered as representative of america or what we stand for and i will read this with you watch america watch how we deal with this watch al america will do the right thing watch what a nation of values and character a nation that believes in justice does too right this kind of wrong watch challen nations such as ours will not tolerate such actions they will see a free press and an independent congress that work they will see a defense department led by secretary rumsfeld that will launch multiple investigations to get to the facts above all they will see a president our president president bush determined to find out where responsibility and accountability lie and justice will be done well we've had a lot of investigations i'm not sure that that the statement justice will be done was a promise that was ever read but i'll leave that to your conclusion i'm just putting this up so that you can take a quick look at some interesting facts about the guantanamo adventure the number of prisoners at guantanamo obviously is not one hundred sixty four as of last week i think i'm informed that it's now one hundred forty nine so there has been that change that the rest of the data is pretty much true and i would just call your attention to a couple of things the guantanamo prison facility is the most expensive incarceration pacific's syllabi the government operates it costs us two point seven million dollars per prisoner per year to house the remaining prisoners at guantanamo and with the release of the last five that number is going up the cost per prisoner in the federal system federal penitentiaries across the country is anywhere from thirty four thousand dollars to seventy eight thousand dollars per inmate per year but let me just call your attention to one of the most ironic aspects of what guantanamo has become and this is from colonel moe davis who was the chief prosecutor for the guantanamo military commission proceedings until he resigned and the reason he resigned was that he refused to prosecute with evidence that had been obtained under torture but he made this observation not too long ago speaking of the military commission system it's a very strange system where a guilty plea to a war crime is your ticket home but if you are never charged with a work crime you can be imprisoned for a life i'm flipping this because it's a letter that a number of my colleagues and i sent two members of the senate last year and i'll just call your attention first of all to that list of retired admirals and generals and i put that up because i hope you will appreciate that these are not flower children and they're not advocating that prisoners of war be mollycoddled they're not proposing that every night before going to bed every prisoner  guantanamo be given his choice of strawberry or chocolate ice cream they're approaching the issue of gone time tomorrow from the very serious consideration of what makes sense for national security as retired flag and general officers we believe it is imperative for congress to address guantanamo now it's a betrayal of american values the prison is a symbol of torture and justice delayed in two thousand five i had the unique experience of sitting around a very large conference table with a group of about fifty of these retired flag officers and the officer at this end of the table was retired four star marine who had been the commander in chief of central command following the first gulf war general joseph hoar the officer at this end of the table was a four star army retired general who had been chairman of the joint chiefs of staff general vessey was one of the most respected army officers in the history of the service but as we were all going around this room and i listen to these guys each make a comment about why they were there and they all flowed from having seen what i saw and what you saw in the photographs that abu ghraib but finally general vessey who is at this point kind of creaky was waving  and old field manual and his hand and he said all right i want you guys to pay attention to what i'm going to tell you because it's really really important and he said this is the gold standard and somehow we have allowed ourselves to be led away from the gold standard that he quoted from a few paragraphs in that manual and i was impressed enough with what he said that i have copied that i've passed this out i don't know how many places but this is the this is the key language us law follows the flag murder rape torture theft are all criminal acts this is the this is the key whenever an officer winks at the of his men it is no different then if he committed the act when soldiers understand the depredations will not be tolerated they will comply and i'll just say very quickly to you that aboud ghraib was not the work  few bad apples it was too many officers too many noncommissioned officers not paying attention to what soldiers under their command were doing and that vital element of command discipline broke down and they became  this list of claimed advantages to enhanced interrogation is interesting and i'm not going to read those to you but i want to call your attention to the line at the very very bottom the task force found evidence in the public domain that refuted or cast doubt on every one of those claims i'm running out of time  comments about the misuse of classification authority tell you that all too often documents have been classified in my opinion in our opinion in the taskforce opinion  probably for the purpose of concealing illegal actions more than for the particular information that they contained for example when the white house proposed adopting intense interrogation standards that clearly violate the geneva conventions all of the judge advocates general the judge advocate general's and say that right of each of the services wrote memoranda to the secretary of defense advise ing him that if he proceeded down this path not only was he risking violating federal and international law but he was placing american troops in danger if they became prisoners those memoranda to the secretary were classified because the administration did not want them to become public it was only because senator lindsey graham pitched that they were eventually released and i'll conclude by just noting that the torture fires have been banked but they are not extinguished as long as the proponents of enhanced interrogation torture can continue to claim that torture and abuse are critical to protecting the nation against terrorist attacks while the hard evidence to support those claims remains shrouded in secrecy there will be a temptation to go even farther there will be a public demand to do whatever it takes to protect the nation in times of future crisis and because we as a nation have been sold this bill of goods that torture is the key to our security and safety there will be a demand that it be restored to what some claim ought to be its rightful place as a necessary and valuable tool of conducting american military and foreign policy and with that i'm going to close and thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and rob i'll  that back over to you good evening i'm here to tell you that every single one of you in the audience has a human right not to be tortured and every single one of the prisoners in the sites that we just learned about have a right also not to be tortured because they're human and we have human rights now let's think about where human rights comes from and the modern human rights that we talk about freedom from torture really comes from  the atrocities and the reaction to the atrocities in world war two right we know about the nuremberg trials and indeed the nuremberg  code which congressman mcdermott referred to as the standard for ethical behavior for health professionals also comes from those violations of research ethics which at that point weren't violations in the concentration camps but only from those experiences did we have those standards and we now have human rights standards from world war two and the nurnberg trials and the trials in the pacific we see that the universal declaration of human rights in hundred forty eight speaks to freedom from torture every individual has the right to be free from torture we see this again in binding international human rights so the international covenant on civil and political rights again articulate the right for every human being to be free from torture not to be tortured these rights are inalienable no situation can take that rape right away the freedom from torture it doesn't matter where you're born where you live now what nationality what sexual orientation you have right what ethnicity you are right you have the human right to be free from torture and this again is a right that is articulated in the torture convention right of one thousand nine hundred eighty four which the united states is obligated to respect protect and fulfill we are under legal obligation for this right and how do we hold our governments accountable for violations for indeed illegal acts for indeed crimes right these are crimes in addition to the geneva convention war crimes  these violations of human rights are indeed violations of international law and our federal law how do we hold our government accountable right we need to get data right we need evidence we need to advocate right civil society must be involved in this and then of course there can be litigation right but we must know that this isn't right that everyone has a human right to be free from torture was asked to be here as the religious voice and there is a coherency of the religious voice in just about every religion i know and it's some version of the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you but there is certainly an incoherence in our actions and i don't have to look past my own tradition of christianity and our own involvement in torture to know that i also know that in a different venue a christian pastor could be up here supporting torture and so i'll just name that i come out of a tradition of bahnhof her and remeron into two and then our own country dan and phil berrigan in terms of what stream women as a religious voice i also want to expand the topic a bit and i don't mean to go off topic because i think there's a deeper issue even than the horror of torture the issue of torture is one part of a much larger picture called the global war on terror and here's the story the state is telling us a story and the story is that we are under attack and need to be afraid and this story is rooted in nine eleven a day when one thousand basically low life mostly saudi and saudi arabians we did the multi layered trillion dollar defense systems of america conveniently on a day when more exercises were happening that both confused a response and had removed the capacity to respond from the area these low lives managed to hijack four planes crashing into into new york towers causing three buildings to basically freefall into destruction crashed a plane into a pennsylvania field evaporating it crashed a fourth into the world's most heavily defended building in the most have believe defended city in the world again basically evaporating it and then in the aftermath other terrorists managed to leak out an anthrax attack and two democratic senators just in time to pass an unread but somehow already put together patriot act that in effect ceded the power of congress into the executive branch transferring it into a unitary executive operating under a dictatorial framework a perpetual state of emergency our fear is rooted in that narrative and given that narrative america has changed so that in the words of dick cheney we work the dark side now and from this moral base of working the dark side torture makes sense as does indiscriminate drone attacks and an economy rooted in permanent war surveillance of citizens punishment of whistleblowers and oppression of investigative journalists if the is defined as everyone is out to get us the current moral order of permanent war is plausible and we the people should just trust big daddy to save us and of course this moral view is the moral view of empire not a democratic republic of law rooted in the decision making capacity of its citizens and a system of checks and balances that disperses power into several different spheres of influence for christians our moral base our imagination is rooted in the story that all of us are creatures of a creator and we have inherent rights to dignity and integrity as christians we see reality from the perspective of the one who is tortured the one who is a threat to empire our ethical base compels us to seek to question the narratives that create the conditions where some are scapegoated to make the rest of us free and so the issue of torture particularly because it was a top down driven imperative that is bush and cheney and rumsfeld their lawyers justice department the top brass of military an intelligence community knew of it approved of it causes us to ask a basic pastore all systematic question about our leaders are they psychopaths and obama's shift to terror through drone attacks and bulking up special forces and continual use of private militias lynd credence to our christian suspicions that the system itself is becoming destructive of life demonic working the dark side taking the gloves off in such a context the moral voice of the church really has only one word to say to the state and that word is repent and the church is moral voice to the citizenry is to come out of empire resist and rebel against further imperial hunger and the addiction to power and dominance that such hunger creates take the side of the crucified not the crew so fires take the side of those who are practicing reconciliation not the side of those who are prolonging destruction and so to be clear and how impractical asking this state is to repent i just want to lift up ten quick actions and they're not quick actions but ten actions of what i mean by what happens when the state repents and the first is to close  then to give the land back to cuba as an act of penance the second is to begin immediately to cut the military budget in half by fifty percent perhaps over the next decade maybe two decades and commit to shutting down of our global military bases by the same percentage the third is to ban private militias the force which you might not think is related but i do is to end extended solitary confinement in domestic as a prelude to a complete overhaul of our domestic penal system and the fifth is to dismantle homeland security and sever the link between local policing and military armament the sixth is to reopen an investigation of the nine eleven military intelligence failures why has no one been held accountable why were those in responsibility promoted and in some cases even given great honors like the medal of freedom the seventh again you might think a stretch but i think hand in glove is to dismantle the federal reserve bank and restore the national purse to the congress the eighth is to prosecute the leaders who have broken u s and international law codes and to prosecute the leaders who have i'm sorry and to free the whistleblowers from prison and finally i think where i am and where the panel was probably be in agreement with me is to declassify and publish the senate select committee on intelligence it's six thousand page report torture none of this is going to happen maybe the last to come out of empire is to do the work of penance to stay within an empire is to continue pretending that the system isn't as bad as it actually has become a religious voice against torture is usually a very respectable and therefore predictable voice but what is needed today is a voice that goes deeper insisting that the nation is on a path of spiritual and institutional death a voice that teaches the nation how to resist and rebel against empire thanks very much all of you for up quickly on two points that have been made previously but i really want to do that briefly so we can get to a dialogue with all of you the constitution project is a small nonprofit in washington d c we recruit  and practitioners from across the political spectrum to reach consensus recommendations on how best to protect constitutional rights and civil liberties in a variety of different contexts a lot of the work that i do is in the national security context around counterterrorism policies and practices those experts are organized in a variety of different ways our task force on detainee treatment is one of them we have committees that address specific issues that are standing and ongoing the task force was  of eleven members of the two co chairs general irvine already mentioned investor jones and congressman hutchinson the other member birders reflected again a diversity of political views an expertise in law the military diplomacy the highest levels of the executive branch and congress medicine ethics it really was an expert group across the board in the various subject matter that the task force investigated he spent two years doing their work led by a talented staff nick lewis former new york times reporter lead that staff investigations occurred in the u s afghanistan  mo eastern europe western europe and in addition to scouring the public record task force members and staff to do interviews of over one hundred people including former guantanamo detainees former interrogators policymakers and a host  of others the temporal mandate of the report wasn't just post nine eleven it's started with the late clinton years and ran through the early obama years which i think in addition to its bipartisan make up was important factor in the way it's been received to date again is generally to mention the commission had the task force had no subpoena power access to classified information and yet i think it's fair to say did produce the most comprehensive narrative of what's occurred during that time period to date the impetus for putting a task force together as rob mentioned at the outset decision to quote unquote look forward rather than engage in a thorough and honest and comprehensive discussion about what had been done particularly in the aftermath of nine eleven i think some of that was clearly rooted in political calculus fears about being seen as engaging in a witch hunt with respect to the past prior administration but i think some of it is a reflection of the president's honest belief that he's done  taken all the steps necessary to prevent this kind of thing from happening again and as we heard from congressman mcdermott his amendment to ensuring the executive order into law is a perfect example i think of why it's clear that isn't the case the executive order got the cia out of the detention business and effectively formally shut down the enhanced interrogation program but an executive order doesn't do what a statute does it can be overturned at the stroke of a pen by a new president and i think in that regard important to remember that then candidate for president romney's national security advisers wrote a memo recommending that he do exactly that on his first day in office there are a number of reforms that i think need to be considered to our institutions to our laws if we're serious about prevention going forward the task force has recommended a number of them closing loopholes and statues that smart lawyers seized on exploited lawyer acrobatically around legal prohibitions more transparency about what went on particular in the post nine eleven context starting with release of the senate intelligence committee's sixty three hundred page report on the cia detention program preventing reliance on medical providers opinion that interrogation technique is safe as a basis for finding it legal and a number of others but we won't know the full scope of what's necessary until we know the full scope of what happened and it's my view that we're not going to see meaningful reform or movement towards that at least not anything that requires congress or this it ministration to be proactive without a shift in public opinion on torture and i think that shift is unlikely to happen in the absence of a more fulsome truth right now popular culture drives much of the torture debate television shows like twenty four movies like zero dark thirty that coupled with you know what's in the public space from those who are involved in the quote unquote enhanced interrogation program like former cia general counsel john rizzo and jose rodriguez and that means the debate is had on terms that regularly end up in a discussion over the relative merits of a ticking time bomb hypothetical that debate's not going to get us very far and i think in order to have that honest and thorough national conversation we need more information that we have our task force was an attempt to kick start it but getting the senate intelligence committee report out is an important next step but two other quick points and then i will promise to be quiet the ticking time bomb hypothetical i think it just bears quick mention  is designed entirely to drag george's opponents into a discussion about moral relativism it's nothing in my view but a trap and i think it's important to remember three things as professor riven said there's no exception in international law or u s law for a quote unquote ticking time bomb scenario that the prohibition against torture is absolute second it rests on the as something that scenario or hypothetical rests on the assumption that maybe the most important point is that i am not aware of any single instance in history of an actual fact pattern that looks like the ticking time bomb i pathetically if it's out there please somebody let me  know i pay pretty close attention this stuff and i haven't seen it it's a favorite of pop culture it's a favorite of pop culture because it's fiction conor friedersdorf writes for the atlantic wrote a piece on this recently and i think it's worth quickly quoting from  that piece because he makes the point as well as i've seen it made and i quote unless hollywood screenwriters start engaging in murderous acts of performance art no actual terror plot is ever going to involve a time bomb a code to diffuse it  collaborator in custody who has that code f b i or cia agents who know it and a waterboarding table on hand the image of the ticking time bomb was carefully chosen to evoke an inevitable catastrophe unfolding on a specific time frame that's already been set in motion can still be stopped but only with the knowledge that torture alone will listen this is comic book stuff and indeed the one of the principal architects of the cia's interrogation program acting general counsel at the time john rizzo has said publicly he isn't aware throughout the life of that program of any actual ticking time bomb scenario that cia interrogators uncovered one last note on  a point that congressman mcdermott made earlier and that was referenced again i think by at least one of my my fellow panelists force feeding at guantanamo the hanssen television program is effectively been shut down as far as we're aware there aren't detainees still going through what that program authorized force unicon tunnel is ongoing  there was a massive hunger strike last year which i'm sure many of you are aware of more than one hundred individuals participating over forty five of whom were force fed although on a smaller scale it continues today it's not well publicized or understood because in december of last year the military decided to drop a veil of secrecy on hunger strikes and hunger strike management at the prison information they had routinely provided on a daily basis about the number of people on hunger strike the number of people hospitalized the number of people being force fed they decide they no longer provide that information and they would no longer make public the protocol by which hunger strikers are managed that secrecy was justified on security grounds in the best interests of the detainees i think neither of which argument has merit and i i raise this not only because the medical community in the united states internationally international institutions and organizations and a host of others have objected to force you didn't want to know as an ethical of violation of human rights or otherwise objectionable but because there's a large between what some consider to be a legitimate debate over what to do about hunger striking the taney who makes clear his wish to continue refuse food and is literally about to die if he doesn't receive it and the current practices at  for force feeding detainees in the very literal the sense detainees are force fed they're subject to this practice in a five point restraint chair that means ankles wrists and head they are often forcibly extracted from their cell to the feeding chair that's a brutal practice according to accounts of detainees they're often forcibly extracted from the feeding back to their cell there is a new requirement guantanamo that they must be weighed at least monthly some detainees more frequently there is often a force extraction to be weighed and there are serious allegations that have arisen and recently geisha and in some respects are new about the feeding process itself how much liquid is being given how fast it's being given how long somebody has been in the spent in the restraint chair why can't individual assessments be made for each detainee about whether they need to be restrained during voluntary feeding especially if they're being fed at a point where their life is really in jeopardy do they pose the sort of risk or threat used to justify restraints why aren't all feedings videotaped we've learned recently that some are but it's not clear how many and the department of defense has not turned those videotapes over as far as i'm aware to anyone including congressional oversight committees what efforts are being made to establish trust between detainees and medical personnel professionals so that there can be a conversation  about the risks of engaging in a hunger strike that is meaningful obviously there's not a lot of trust between medical providers at guantanamo detainees for for good reason isn't it possible that at least making the practice of involuntary feeding more humane would reduce the frequency with which individuals have to be extracted from cells violently it seems like that would be in everyone's interests these are just some of the questions that don't get talked about in the debate over hunger strikes and force feeding guantanamo and they need to be whatever one's views of the ethics and morality of allowing a common hunger striker to die if that's his wish because as it currently stands the practice is especially brutal and humane and the