A secretive military Special Operations group in Iraq used several unauthorized interrogation tactics on detainees in early 2004 after it erroneously received an outdated policy from commanders in Baghdad, according to a high-level military investigative report released yesterday at the Pentagon.

This is a country which can fly pilotless drones over desert hundreds of miles from the nearest American, and kill someone who they think is a suspected terrorist (making them a suspected suspected terrorist), but they want us to believe that they only tortured people because of a paperwork error. And yes, those quaintly named "unauthorized interrogation tactics" were more than just "unauthorized" -- they were illegal. Violations of international law. Torture.

You won't be surprised when I tell you that the word "torture," not even with qualifying words surrounding it, doesn't appear in the Washington Post article linked above, will you? I didn't think so.

Added later: Just so we're clear on this, American military personnel don't torture because of memos they get or didn't get. They torture because they were trained to do so. If you were asked to interrogate someone, you might come up, having watched TV, with the "good cop-bad cop" technique. But you would be unlikely to come up with the kinds of things that were done at Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo, or elsewhere. These techniques are taught.

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