When water torture is turned into "Sonderbehandlung"

Special thanks to sabra for bringing this White House release to light.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061027-1.html

Q What could "dunk in the water" refer to if not water boarding?

MR. SNOW: I'm just telling you -- I'm telling you the Vice President's position. I will let you draw your own conclusions, because you clearly have. He says he wasn't talking --

Q I haven't drawn any conclusions. I'm asking for an explanation about what "dunk in the water" could mean.

MR. SNOW: How about a dunk in the water?

Q So, wait a minute, so "dunk in the water" means what, we have a pool now at Guantanamo, and they go swimming?

MR. SNOW: Are you doing stand up? (Laughter.)

Q I'm asking -- well, let's start with something basic. Dunk in the water refers to what? If it doesn't refer to water boarding, tell me what it could possibly refer to?

Does this all sound strangely familiar to you? If you're familiar at all with Nazi Holocaust studies, it should.

Back in 2001, when I was president of a skeptics' club, we had a speaker come and visit us to discuss attempts at Holocaust revisionism. The discussion eventually turned to the Nazis' use of the term "special treatment," which in the original German is sonderbehandlung. This term was always used in relation to how the Nazis handled their Jewish prisoners. Some Holocaust revisionists have apparently insisted that sonderbehandlung could mean any number of options that had nothing to do with throwing them in concentration camps to face certain death. But then there's this 1981 interview with SS-Untersturmführer Dr. Hans Münch that was broadcast on Swedish television:

Interviewer: I must ask something. Doubters claim that "special treatment" could mean anything. It didn't have to be extermination.
Münch: "Special treatment" in the terminology of the concentration camp means physical extermination. If it was a question of more than a few people, where nothing else than gassing them was worthwhile, they were gassed.
Interviewer: "Special treatment" was gassing?
Münch: Yes, absolutely.

Corroborating this statement was none other than Adolf Eichmann, as this excerpt from his interrogation by Israeli officials demonstrates:

Q: What does "special treatment" mean, and who was subjected to it?
Eichmann: Special treatment was killing. Who thought up the term - I don't know. Must have been Himmler, who else could it have been - but then, I have no proof, maybe Heydrich thought it up after Göring gave him his authorization. But I really don't know. I'm just trying to puzzle it out.
Q: But you knew special treatment meant killing?
Eichmann: Everybody knew that, yes, Herr Hauptmann, everybody knew. When a shipment was marked "for special treatment," they decided at the point of arrival who was fit for labor and who wasn't.

http://www.ntskeptics.org/2001/2001august/august2001.htm

Does the Bush administration really have to make this any plainer for everyone to understand?

This needs to be shared with every Democratic candidate on the ballot today, including those who were duped into supporting the Military Commissions Act that legalized torture.

History is repeating itself, ladies and gentlemen - weep for what our nation has become.

I was in the room when the speaker was laying all of this out for everyone to see.

But I thank you. We're gonna get through this together, just as Dante and Virgil finally had to march through the Ninth Circle of Hell in order to escape from Hell altogether.

:hug:

it always does.

Just be grateful no-one is being given "special treatment" that we know of yet.

That's my point. Suspects who would have once been considered "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" are now being subjected to water torture, and Tony Snow wants you to think that all they're getting is "a dunk in the water."

Keith Olbermann showed an excerpt from a water-boarding demonstration. A retired Navy SEAL volunteered to be the subject of a simulated water-boarding. It looked like a scene straight out of the Spanish Inquisition.

over whether torturing someone is better or worse than actually killing them. My point was at least at this point we are only water-boarding people and not actually exterminating them.

It's a simple case of word association. "Dunk in the water" is to water boarding as "sonderbehandlung" is to Hitler's "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem." That's the point I'm trying to make, not the question of whether we're killing or merely torturing terrorism suspects.

what you were saying in your reply to me. I thought you were saying that exterminations were already under way.

I was just afraid I wasn't making my central argument clear enough. :hi:

they still might. Theyhad a regular version and an extended version. I was so shaken by the first one that I could not watch the full edition.

editing to add the current tv url :

http://www.current.tv/pods/controversy/PD04399

Credit goes to leftchick since she first posted it.

How did the Nazis describe the invasion of the Sudetenland? That's easy - they "liberated" it:

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/booklet3.htm

The nation was willing to draw the sword for you. You will be ready to do the same, if ever the German nation or the German people are threatened.

Your good fortune is shared by the 75 million in the former Reich, just as your sorrow was also shared by them.

You now join the great German future! We thank Almighty God that he has blessed us in the past and ask that he bless us also in the future.

Germany, Hail Victory!

And what were the among the first words El Diablo mentioned after we entered Iraq? "The liberation of Iraq has begun..."

liberating the invaded.

It was the covering-up of murder in bureaucratic language and odd euphemisms.

I'm sure the US has its own vocabulary of tarnsprache now. We already know that "extraordinary rendition" means "send someone somewhere else to be tortured." There are doubtless numerous other colorless phrases used to cover horrid truths.

Tucker

Then again, the Bush administration has been afflicted with a huge amount of doublethink, like the "Clear Skies Initiative" that actually pollutes our air further, and the "Healthy Forests Initiative" that makes forests healthier by removing them from the burden of having trees.