Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

The new report on the CIA (released overnight) seems tame enough. Nothing major, at least, when compared to the tales of Abu Graib and Guantanamo. Blocking a bloke's carotid artery till he's about to pass out seems a bit rough ("extreme waterboarding"?) but the CIA dirty tricks revealed by the American Department of Justice overnight are mostly justice mind games. Pretending to execute someone in the next room, threatening to bring in Mum and the kids, waving electric drills around. All in all it's the kind of games you'd expect them to be playing in Langley, the town of poker-faces.

And a lot of this stuff, you gather from accounts of the portion of the report that's been declassified, was only carried out on Kalid Sheikh Mohammed . Remember him? KSM was brought out of a CIA ghost camp and into Guantanamo just before David Hicks' trial, Along with the new tricks, the CIA had reportedly waterboarded KSM a total of 183 times before dumping him into the Halliburton-built prison, and into the tender care of Guantanamo architect Dick Cheney, weeks before Cheney brokered Hicks release (after treatment including a reported 265 days of total sensory deprivation) into the care of the South Australian Government.

If you follow the Cheney-esque line of reasoning, then the treatment that these people have endured is vindicated by the saving of human life that would otherwise have died. That doesn't, thank whatever you like to thank, seem to apply to the Obama administration. Hours before the release of the CIA info, the US Attorney General, in an echo of Obama policy, put a letter up on the Department of Justice home page explaining how he didn't want to convict people who believe they were acting with a prescribed US legal framework. From his words, it sounds like anything he does will only be a token gesture:

"I share the President’s conviction that as a nation, we must, to the extent possible, look forward and not backward when it comes to issues such as these. While this Department will follow its obligation to take this preliminary step to examine possible violations of law, we will not allow our important work of keeping the American people safe to be sidetracked."

Here's how the Guardian reports the CIA carrying out its "important work":

Interrogators, questioning al-Qaida and other suspects at Guantánamo and secret prisons round the world, took a power drill and a handgun into the interrogation room, and also staged a mock execution in a cell next door.

The CIA document, which the agency fought for years to prevent publication of, says that the Saudi suspected of being the leader of the attack on the US Navy warship USS Cole in Yemen, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was told that if he did not talk, "we could get your mother in here. We can bring your family in here".

It added that the debriefer wanted Nashiri to infer that the "interrogation technique involves sexually abusing female relatives in front of the detainee".

You have to wonder, looking through all of this, how it all might relate to claims of U.S torture of Australians. Surely if local political pressure can help coerce Dick Cheney into releasing Hicks into South Australian custody, an appeal from those concerned that our own nationals might have been subjected to such gross violations of their rights might, just might, influence Obama to expedite the answers to questions the Rudd Government won't ask? If the U.S. is going to be able to atone for its sins, then is it just for Australia to not be allowed a similar opportunity?

Australia's retiring Police Commisssioner believed that Mamdou Habib was inventing torture claims at a time when, in the country where Habib was incarcerated, the UN believes Australian intelligence officers were visiting detainees in the places where they were being tortured. That report was lodged in February, resulting in no more Australian Government response than rebuttal of a need for inquiry.

You'd like to think that the new CIA disclosures might make the Australian Government take a more forthright stance towards participation in such activities at both the giving and receiving ends. If Australia continues its silence, it could appear to have lost control of its ethical conscience.