Shek

Chicago Tribune
December 28, 2005

'Waterboarding' Spurs Debate On What Is Torture

By John Crewdson, Tribune senior correspondent

In an appearance in March before the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Sen. John McCain asked CIA Director Porter Goss about a purported agency interrogation technique intended to "have the prisoner feel that they were drowning."

"You're getting into, again, an area of what I will call professional interrogation techniques," Goss replied.

"That's the area that I'm concerned about," retorted McCain, an Arizona Republican, whose amendment to a military appropriations bill forbidding the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees in U.S. custody passed the Senate in October by 90-9.

The CIA won't discuss the technique McCain mentioned, known as "waterboarding," which it says is classified. But as Goss also told the committee, "We don't do torture."

"There is no doubt that waterboarding is torture, despite the administration's reluctance to say so," argues Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales recently told CNN that "Congress has defined what torture is, and it is intentional infliction of severe--I emphasize the word `severe'--intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering."

Asked whether "waterboarding" would be allowed under that definition, Gonzales replied that "that would be something that would have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis."

Whether or not it constitutes torture, intelligence officials and others who have seen waterboarding -- or experienced it--say nothing in the interrogator's arsenal is simpler, quicker or more effective.

The difference, they say, is that waterboarding doesn't induce pain that can be withstood. It induces terror and a reaction of the autonomic nervous system that cannot be controlled.

Several conflicting descriptions of how waterboarding is done have been published in recent weeks. According to a Navy SEAL who says he underwent waterboarding during training, the process works like this:

The subject is strapped to a board and tilted so his head is lower than his feet. A cloth is tied over his nose and mouth and saturated with water, eventually making it impossible for him to breathe.

When used in the field, the technique is less elaborate but no less effective. No board, for example, is involved; the suspect is simply held down.

"You just pull the guy's T-shirt over his face and dump a canteen of water on his head," said the SEAL, who spoke on condition that he not be identified and who emphasized that he had never used the technique during a real interrogation.

Waterboarding has been described as "the illusion of drowning." In fact, there is no illusion; if interrogators didn't stop, the subject would drown.

"Inhaling even a small amount of water causes the body to close the glottis and violently cough to remove the offending substance," said the SEAL, who is also trained as a Navy hospital corpsman.

"This entire process initiates the fight-or-flight response in the sympathetic nervous system, causing the person to involuntarily raise their heart rate, respiratory rate, and flail and writhe in an effort to break free from the situation.

"This reaction is even more pronounced when the subject is lying on his back with feet elevated and head down. This is due to the fact that the nostrils serve as a catch basin for small, but significant nonetheless, amounts of water."

Because the water prevents air from entering the nose and mouth, and therefore the lungs, the supply of oxygen available for metabolic functions is exhausted within seconds.

"After performing this on a target for 30 seconds and then stopping the flow of water, the sense of relief and then the realization that this is but a brief respite are extremely powerful motivators for the subject to cooperate in the interrogation," the SEAL said.

Waterboarding experienced in training, he added, "is instantly effective on 100 percent of Navy SEALs, a group which is probably more comfortable in adverse maritime swimming conditions than any other on the planet."

"In my case, I wasn't even held down. My teammate simply poured a canteen of water over my face while I had my T-shirt pulled over my head. Instantly, my ability to breathe through the T-shirt was taken away and my natural reaction to inhale deeply through my mouth and nose for air caused me to take on small amounts of water."

Waterboarding is also effective, the SEAL said, because the subject realizes that "there are no enduring physiological consequences, which he intuitively knows. This is important psychologically, because he can legitimately hope that he will be able to live on normally after the experience, if only he cooperates.

"Breaking kneecaps and pulling out fingernails does not hold this promise. The fact that the target has a chance to remain fully whole makes him more likely to be truthful and to break more quickly."

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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Shek

Chicago Tribune
December 28, 2005

Spilling Al Qaeda's Secrets

'Waterboarding' used on 9/11 mastermind, who eventually talked

By John Crewdson, Tribune senior correspondent

Moral and legal aspects aside, conventional wisdom is that torture simply isn't practical: that someone who is being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that information gleaned through torture is therefore not reliable.

Some former military and intelligence officers say, however, that physically aggressive interrogation techniques that some human-rights groups consider torture can be effective in the short term. When asked for specifics, the technique they cite is "waterboarding," in which water is poured over a subject's face to create the sensation of drowning.

Consider Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 39-year-old former Al Qaeda operative who was the Sept. 11 mastermind and bearer of many Al Qaeda secrets.

If anyone had a motive for remaining silent, it was the man known to terrorism investigators as "KSM." But not long after his capture in Pakistan, in March 2003, KSM began to talk.

He ultimately had so much to say that more than 100 footnoted references to the CIA's interrogations of KSM are contained in the final report of the commission that investigated Sept. 11.

Not that everything KSM said was believable. But much of his information checked out in separate questioning of other captured Al Qaeda figures.

What made KSM decide to talk? The answer may be waterboarding, to which KSM was subjected on at least one occasion, according to various accounts.

Intelligence operatives say that while waterboarding can break through a suspect's initial resistance, it isn't effective for long-term interrogation.

Once a suspect begins to communicate, however, an interrogation specialist can put into action a wide range of far more subtle techniques, which include playing to a subject's ego or pretending to be his friend.

It could not be learned exactly when KSM was waterboarded or whether the technique was used more than once. But only 12 days after being captured in Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, KSM made his first reported major revelation.

As part of his initial proposal for the attack on America, he had "considered targeting a nuclear power plant," KSM said. But Al Qaeda chieftain Osama bin Laden "decided to drop that idea," evidently concerned about a Chernobyl-type fallout that might threaten countries adjacent to the U.S.

There are no footnotes keyed to the next 12 days. But on March 24, KSM began talking again, this time about assistance Al Qaeda provided to Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested in Minnesota before Sept. 11 and later pleaded guilty to planning to fly a plane into the White House as part of a separate plot.

On April 17, KSM spoke about the abortive 1995 plot in which several U.S. airliners were to have been brought down simultaneously over the Pacific by bombs smuggled onboard.

On May 15, KSM began divulging something of the inner workings of Al Qaeda. From that point onward, according to the commission's footnotes, KSM became a veritable fountain of information.

It was bin Laden, he said, who had argued for increasing the number of Sept. 11 targets and planes beyond the four ultimately selected.

The 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies in Africa had cost less than $10,000, KSM continued, adding that after the success of those attacks Al Qaeda had decided to focus on "soft targets" in the West like oil refineries, embassies and airliners.

The Sept. 11 report reflects five productive interrogation sessions during the last two weeks in May 2003, four in June, eight in July, four in August, three in September, three in October and four in November.

The interrogations continued through the winter and early spring of 2004, producing increasingly detailed information about Al Qaeda.

KSM said bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, opposed the Sept. 11 attacks, disagreeing with bin Laden on whether to honor the request of Afghanistan's Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, not to attack the U.S.

In early April 2004, KSM revealed that the 15 men who joined the hijacking plot for the express purpose of subduing the airplanes' passengers and disabling their crews hadn't known they were to become part of a suicide mission until a month before Sept. 11.

The last footnote, dated June 15, 2004, reflected KSM's annoyance with hijacker Khalid al-Mihdar, who left the U.S. without Al Qaeda's permission in the summer of 2000 to visit his family in Saudi Arabia.

The commission's report was published in July 2004. But for all the world knows, KSM may be talking still.

THL

If they want to pur water over this guys face to make him feel like he is drowning - I say go for it. He should count his graces that they did not stick his head IN the bucket of water to really give him that drowning effect.

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TopHatter

The guy only masterminded the death of 3000+ people - and let nobody say they weren't hoping for 50,000+ - and now a bunch of pansy bleeding-heart liberals are whining that the guy might have been a tad uncomfortable while the CIA tried to extract information out of this pile of filth that would prevent another 9/11.

Somebody, please save us from ourselves....

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Shek

TH,

To be fair, Senator McCain's Torture Amendment bans this I believe, so you cannot heap this all on pansy liberals. While I very much respect Senator McCain, I think that he erred on this one. I support Krauthammer's view that there should be some very narrowly defined exceptions - the "ticking nuke" scenario and the "high ranking AQ member." While much of what makes America are our values, we shouldn't neuter ourselves to the point that we are forced with either compromising our security or having to break our own rules over a handful of individuals whose intelligence value is of such magnitude, thereby appearing hypocritical.

astralis

shek,

just to play the devil's advocate, there was an author on slate that wrote regarding krauthammer's argument. (which is to say, the author's opinions are not necessarily mine.)

http://www.slate.com/id/2132195/

what do you think?

Shek

It was a good article until the last few paragraphs, at which point he goes off the ideological deep end IMO. Not a convincing argument for me, but reasoned and well laid out position. I think you do have to worry about sliding once you break an absolutist position. However, the slippery slop argument tends to be very unconvincing for me. For example, the writ of habeus corpus was suspending by Lincoln during the Civil War. With the slippery slope argument, we should be a totalitarian state by now (although I'm sure there are a handful out there who probably believe that Bush-Cheney are only a few steps away).

I tend to view things more through a utilitarian lens, or maybe you could call it a moralist light. In any event, the ticking time bomb has been very real (although not in the WMD context, yet) - it happened in Algeria, it's happened in Israel (I think it even happened on "24", LOL). You can dismiss it has a hypothetical, but if a bomb were to go off and kill a million people, I think it would be a safe bet that Pandora's box would be open and that there would be retalitory strike, so you're talking about more than just the lives killed by the nuke itself. Just think if 9/11 had been prevented - my guess is there wouldn't have been OEF or OIF.

Trooth

I would argue that you measure what is torture by your own standards. So for example i almost certainly have a different view of torture to say, Uday Hussein. But then I imagine most of the members of this board would rather meet me down a dark alley (not sure I am going with this) than Uday.

Therefore if waterboarding breaks my interpretation of torture then it is. Even if Uday would be wondering where the electrodes and pliers were going to be applied after the warm up. It doesn't matter who i am now torturing, or for whatever reason. I have broken my own rules. If i want to live by Uday's rules then so be it.

On the basis that we are talking about the US in these articles, the US's definition of torture includes :-

Given the means by which waterboarding works (i.e. to stimulate the body into a physical and mental reaction to the very real risk of drowning) and given that it is unlikely that the waterboardee is unlikely to be told "Don't worry mate, it will feel like you are going to drown, but you aren't - Jim here will pull the rag off before you actually stop breathing" then i would say it qualifies as torture in that the victim will suffer the mental pain of beng in imminent fear of drowning.

It's a different matter to whether or not certain people should be tortured.

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