The American Gulag?

I've recently been reading The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account of life in the Soviet prison and labor camps . Early in the book, Solzhenitsyn lists interrogation techniques employed by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police). The techniques described by Solzhenitsyn are remarkably similar to those described in the International Committee of the Red Cross's recently released report titled "ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody" (see the report here). Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books has written a couple of excellent articles on the topic (here and here) and provides a disturbing summary of the report. This quote from Danner summarizes the ICRC findings, "the CIA seems to have arrived at a method that is codified by the International Committee of the Red Cross experts into twelve basic techniques, as follows:

• Suffocation by water poured over a cloth placed over the nose and mouth...
• Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head...
• Beatings by use of a collar held around the detainees' neck and used to forcefully bang the head and body against the wall...
• Beating and kicking, including slapping, punching, kicking to the body and face...
• Confinement in a box to severely restrict movement...
• Prolonged nudity...this enforced nudity lasted for periods ranging from several weeks to several months...
• Sleep deprivation...through use of forced stress positions (standing or sitting), cold water and use of repetitive loud noises or music...
• Exposure to cold temperature...especially via cold cells and interrogation rooms, and...use of cold water poured over the body or...held around the body by means of a plastic sheet to create an immersion bath with just the head out of water.
• Prolonged shackling of hands and/or feet...
• Threats of ill-treatment, to the detainee and/or his family...
• Forced shaving of the head and beard...
• Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food from 3 days to 1 month after arrest..."

I'll bet that most Americans did not hesitate to describe the techniques detailed by Solzhenitsyn as torture when his account was published in 1973. And most Americans at the time probably thought that torture was only used by our enemies. Growing up during the Cold War, I thought that torture was a abhorrent thing only used by the Vietnamese on our POWs or by the secret police of Eastern Bloc countries to squash dissent. I never would have imagined that the same techniques would be used by my own government (I was just a naive youngster).

As a Christian, I am appalled that my government would utilize torture. But I find it even more disturbing (and perplexing) that so many of my fellow Christians are not appalled.