Total Sensory Deprivation, Confined Spaces, And The Inquisition - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Total Sensory Deprivation, Confined Spaces, And The Inquisition -

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Another detail we discovered about then torture techniques adopted by Bush and Cheney was confinement in tiny boxes and total sensory deprivation. This was done to Jose Padilla, an American citizen, for years. with permanent shackles, ear-muffs and goggles to blind him.

We also know that the Cheney regime put individuals in upright coffins, as well as using the stress positions photographed below. Since the CIA destroyed all the evidence of many of its torture sessions - with impunity - and since the Obama administration seeking to "move on" from what it itself called "torture" (itself making the Obama administration more baldly in violation of the Geneva conventions than even the Bush administration which publicly claimed it was not torturing anyone) - we have no photos of this. But here again is a still from a Youtube of the Peruvian Inquisition Museum in Lima, Peru, which shows a torture victim both forced into a stress position and into sensory deprivation. It's not clear what horrors apart from total dark and soundlessness were in that box - maybe the insect the CIA used to terrify one victim or the caged rat made famous in Nineteen-Eight-Four - but the concept is clearly identical:

Here's Padilla's total sensory deprivation:

Here's a victim of the Peruvian Inquisition:

There is simply no dispute that the US, under Bush and Cheney, authorized classic torture techniques from the Inquisition to the Gestapo and to the Khmer Rouge. I'm sorry, Mr president, but I refuse to move on until these war criminals are held accountable and brought to justice.