AlterNet: Postcards from the Edge:

"The system of injustice that, since 9/11, we've sent offshore and organized globally - from Guantanamo, Cuba to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan - is by its nature also a system of torture. It was designed from the beginning to be a Bermuda Triangle of injustice, existing in an extrajudicial darkness beyond 'our' sight or oversight. There, on military bases and in special military-controlled prisons, the 'war on terrorism' could be carried to its informational climax in whatever ways and by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might 'break' whatever prisoners we had.

Whether in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, this developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of imprisonment for crimes - hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for the purpose of information extraction (and possibly revenge). The men (and woman) running the Bush administration's foreign policy in this period didn't have to specify the actual use of torture, though some of them seem to have done so. We know from the Sunday Washington Post that, in April 2003, after 'debates' on the subject, Pentagon officials at 'the highest levels' approved twenty 'psychologically stressful' methods of interrogation, most or all of which any sane person would classify as torture, including the questioning of naked prisoners, and that these methods were later approved at least for 'high-value detainees' in Iraq. In the meantime, there was a good deal of post-9/11 torture chatter in the media about how much of it we could, should, and would use in a war to the death against a fanatic enemy.

Both the President and his Pentagon chief claimed to be 'shocked' or 'disgusted' by the forms a torture system took - – by its look. Yes, they had been informed of what had happened at Abu Ghraib prison, but those, after all, were just words, months of words. The difference was the images on television and in the press. "We saw the pictures," said the President. "It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place," said his secretary of defense. "Words don't do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane, all of which is true, that it was blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You see the photographs and you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged."

That is in itself a kind of confession, if you consider it for a moment... They determined the camera angles and set up the cameras, so to speak, but when the pictures came back they had no stomach for them. Words, that was another matter entirely."

(full article here)