Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.
Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
This doesn’t surprise me. All states will torture if they deem it necessary and will have documented procedures to assist, which is in itself a moral failing. What particularly disgusts me is the Jack Bauer wannabees like Cheney who are not only proud of the use of torture, but find it morally defensible.
If the Fundies had their way,they would return us to a happier,simpler time.
A time when there was no science and a beneficent yet omnipotent yet delinquent,cloud being,the ultimate law giver.
Dunking stools,stocks,witch burnings as public entertainment and punishment,all displays of piety and unctuousness with the cries of the deflicted as sweet,sweet music to the zealot’s ears.
This was pleasing to god,they proclaimed.
This shameful past was much of what the constitution was designed to protect against.
Now this document that protected a nation for over 300 years needs protection itself,from those who openly weep patriotic tears of joy at its mention but who turn around and give corporations more rights and privileges and remove them from its once sovereign individuals.
The worlds smallest minority wants you to donate to their hypocritical cause and of course vote for the corporate figure head of their choice in the mid terms.
The choice is yours,keep drinking that right wing kool-aid or rotate the glad hander’s in and out until the lobbyists bankrupt the robber barons trying to control what was never theirs to begin with.
Go vote this November even if their is no choice on the ballot.
A government backed by constitutional authority
is the solution,not the problem!
“What particularly disgusts me is the Jack Bauer wannabees like Cheney who are not only proud of the use of torture, but find it morally defensible.”
And what disgusts me is that 24 is one of the most popular shows on TV, something which tells me all I need to know about the general US public or, perhaps, human beings in general.
#34 Check out #1. I am a ‘fundie’.
I also know we executed Japanese Officers for waterboarding people. Torture is not worth it for the US, if we are the concensus builders, and want everyone to just ‘get along’ then there’s no way this moves things towards that goal.
The English Crown tortured (as did many kings), having essentially a department of torture. Did it do any good, or just give that government a way to give the ‘criminals’ or ‘enemies of the state’, ‘what they deserved.’
Does that sound too different from the talk today?
amlorusso
I agree that not being there allows a more overall perspective. That being said man will always be violent nothing, will ever change that. Our torture issues have been blown way out proportion.
Sometimes bad things happen in conflict and maybe they those things should stay out of public eye raised on Hollywood war movies.
clorox
Peanut –
“I am very apolitical but what I truly hate are double standards and hypocrisy. ”
Me too.
I agree 100% – Any “American Citizen” who is involved with planning mass killings including bombing attacks against other citizens should most definately by subject to advanced interrogation techniques. And this should be publicized and become common knowledge.
Maybe this would cause them to stop and ponder their future before they carried out any attacks.
As it is, if they are caught alive, they will live for decades in better circumstances than many have ever lived in. If in the course of their bombing they die, most of them believe they get their 79 virgins.
I only hope the virgins are all old men.
And this practice stopped some terrorist plots according to documents declassified by the Obama administration.
What particularly disgusts me is the ACLU wannabees like Choneyman who are not only proud of the use of anti-torture talking points, but find it morally defensible.
#39 MikeN
Ahh the Jack Bauer defence. An oldie but a goodie.
So it immoral NOT to use torture to reveal terrorist plots? You, sir, are a barbarian.
Guys & Gents!
Just because it ‘has’ been used does not justify it. Nor does the fact that its on one side of the Torture Scale, and being drawn and quartered on the other.
As a means of getting information torture is unreliable. If you were to put me under any kind of torture, including what is mentioned here, I’m sure you could get me to testify to *anything*. We’re not talking about arm twisting here.
This stuff is *bad* and we dirty ourselves by thinking otherwise.
The leftists are strangely silent about the present-day water boarding done under Obama. Could there be a political agenda that transcends the human question?
The Iraqis were more concerned about infidels doing this light torture than about the torture itself. After all, their common means of torture was drilling holes in the bones and eyes of their victims. The videos of this were not given to the media to show endlessly on American television.
#42 Timuchin
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
@brm
Yes but if we had tortured the Japanese we interred in 1941 they would have told us about the defenses of Iwo Jima in and saved a lot of American soldiers lives in 1945.
Ensure? who are they waterboarding? Betty White?
Doing anything and everything possible to protect Americans including this torture was/is the right thing to do and a prime responsibility of our government.
If it could be arranged that only the people who were against torture and the minors who they were responsible for would become the sole victims of a terrorist catastrophe NOT prevented because they didn’t want to torture critical information out of someone, then I would be against torture too. This is only fair since it is more important to anti-torturers that I and my friends and wards become victims then have some slimebag terrorist suffer.
#46 Said,
It’s not that the CIA can’t waterboard terrorists. It’s more about that the CIA shouldn’t get caught. But, this is what you get when you fill the agency with people who got there because of connections and not for skill and merit.
#44 said “Yes but if we had tortured the Japanese we interred in 1941 they would have told us about the defenses of Iwo Jima in and saved a lot of American soldiers lives in 1945.”
Never mind that most of those interred were long-time residents of the US. Approx. 60% were US citizens. And most, if not all, of the fortifying took place after the start of the war. So only the smallest portion, if any at all, would have any idea of what Iwo Jima looked like, much less what the defenses were like. In 1941.
So your statement is one of the weakest arguments I have ever heard in support of torture. So weak that if you meant it as sarcasm, I apologize for not recognizing it.
Prick Cheney and his ilk HAVE NO MORALS !!! And their actions reduce America to acting JUST LIKE THE TERRORISTS !!! Who are the STATE-SPONSORED TERRORISTS NOW ? They SMEAR BLOOD ON LADY LIBERTY’S HANDS !!! Shameful !!!
I’m sorry but I fail to see the point in waterboarding. It is a proven fact that people will say whatever the other wants to hear in order for torture to stop. It is the same principle behind people who confess to crimes they didn’t commit. And for those who say it isn’t torture, here is the definition of torture:
“The deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason”.
So, how is someone saying anything to get the waterboarding to stop going to prevent further bloodshed??
And whoopsie… the man who claimed waterboarding was so effective has retracted his claim:
http://foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/26/cia_man_retracts_claim_on_waterboarding?page=0,0
Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.
…
“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”
But never mind, he says now.
“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”
As Miss Emily Litella would say… never mind.
Saying “they torture too” is the most stupid and disingenuous argument there is.
If their tactics are acceptable to us, what makes us better than them?
Torture provides such a grand pretext for pious nitwits to parade their virtue.
Of course torture works! The argument that people will say any thing to stop being tortured is specious, because what they say can be checked out. If, in the long history of torture, interrogators found that it didn’t work, then the argument would have been settled long ago. The very fact that it’s still used means that it DOES work. Otherwise interrogators wouldn’t waste their time.
But then, all the sanctimonious pontificators here, never having been in the field, know more than the professionals.
Now, if you think torture is just institutionalized S&M, then we’re talking an entirely different subject. Are the legions of the self-righteous here actually claiming this really is why American interrogators use torture? To get their jollies? Well, I guess they also claim that 9/11 was a Mossad plot.
It’s not a matter of being left or right, but of thinking clearly or just mindlessly mouthing pompous platitudes in order to make oneself morally superior. Yes, we are all against torture and war and not being nice. But sometimes they are necessary. Get off your high horse and get used to it, if you want to survive as a species.
Now we know it works, then when should it be used? I’d say 10:1. Torture at least 10 slimeball terrorists to save one American life. If that offends your refined sensibilities, then ef you.
#53 Very funny… a pompous nitwit mindlessly mouthing pompous platitudes accusing other people of the very sins he’s committing. You’re a joke, pal.
The U.S. military and the military forces of all civilized nations do not like torture. What do you know that they don’t, moron?
Reminds me of the old joke: A fanatic is someone who does what God would do, if God had all the facts.
Hmmm…
For those of you who don’t accept the use of torture, what are you going to do in the face of its bipartisan support? Unless you expand your mental horizons a bit you are likely to be choosing between Obama/Biden and Cheney/Palin.
Both with proven track records to be sure.
I wasn’t there personally. But about 400 years ago, they use to dunk people suspected of witchcraft, head first, into lakes and ponds. Centuries later, the excuse for this kind of post-medieval torture is “terrorism”. But isn’t it nice to know, being a 400 year old outdated interrogation practice, doesn’t deter someone like Cheney from defending it. Of course he does tend to remind me a bit of Cotton Mather.
There’s the real world and then there’s a fantasy world.
In the fantasy world water-boarding is not needed. In the real world people are water-boarded so that others can be free to talk about their ideas for a fantasy world.
Considering that America is the most important country that ever existed and if America falls, the rest of the human race serves no purpose, anything that helps to keep America dominant is acceptable.
Next thing some of you are going to argue that we should never consider nuking someone who needs it. Grow up.