CIA Waterboarding Guidelines Uncovered
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 is revolting and it is deeply disturbing,” said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. “The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.’ It just sounds like lunacy,” he said. “This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine.”
Read the rest of the story at: Waterboarding for dummies (Salon)
Watch Christopher Hitchens Get Waterboarded (Vanity Fair)
Waterboarding is horrible. The next thing you know, we will find out that our military kills people.
> The next thing you know, we will find out that our military kills people.
Actually, the next thing we found out was that our military raped children in front of their parents in order to make the parents talk. This is an extremely effective way to get people to talk. After all, what parent wouldn’t say anything you want to prevent their sons and daughters from being raped. This is why Obama went against his promise to release the torture evidence; it showed children as young as two being raped by our military.
But hey, you want waterboarding? Ok, but you got to give us a little something in return. Every time some suspect is water-boarded, your family is also water-boarded. As long as those ordering and performing the waterboarding are also waterboarded, then the torture technique won’t be used frivolously. There has to be a cost to prevent torture from being used at a hat’s drop. And those who advocate torture do not have any respect for life or human dignity, so the cost has to be turn-about.