On the Wednesday radio show with Lee Stranahan, I mentioned that Abu Ghraib, in the late Winter of 2004, was perhaps the first example of American torture revealed to the public. I was off by a little more than a year.
In December of 2002, the Washington Post uncovered violent interrogation techniques used by American officials at Bagram in Afghanistan, as well as the existence of CIA black sites and extraordinary rendition of prisoners to nations known for their questionable human rights records.
The following passage from the article caught my attention:
According to one official who has been directly involved in rendering captives into foreign hands, the understanding is, "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them."
So while there were the methods outlined in the OLC memos (waterboarding, stress positions, walling, the attention grab, etc -- the methods being casually downplayed by the pro-torture right) there are a variety of other techniques which are barely being acknowledged in the current discourse -- if at all. Some of those techniques are seen in the Abu Ghraib photos, but we may never know about what horrors were done in to some prisoners who were rendered to various lenient nations.
But we do know what techniques for which some of these nations are notorious: for instance, Jordan, one of our extraordinary rendition nation, uses beatings and strappado -- the technique used on John McCain.