Category: Torture

Dahlia Lithwick compiles a list. Number One:

1. The United States does not torture.

Here’s a fascinating account of a very fit man subjecting himself to waterboarding in order to answer the question for himself whether every legal precedent that says it’s torture is correct or not. Money quote:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract. It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying. I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye. At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved. I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex. Once that happens, it’s all over. No question.

Some may go easy without a rag, some may need a rag, some may need saran wrap.

Once you are there it’s all over.

I didn’t allow anybody else to try it on me. Inconceivable. I know I only got the barest taste of what it’s about since I was in control, and not restrained and controlling the flow of water.

But there’s no chance. No chance at all.

So, is it torture?

I’ll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I’d take the fingers, no question.

It’s horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I’d prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I’d give up anything, say anything, do anything.

The Spanish Inquisition knew this. It was one of their favorite methods.

It’s torture. No question. Terrible terrible torture. To experience it and understand it and then do it to another human being is to leave the realm of sanity and humanity forever. No question in my mind.

The good news is that some on the right are beginning to understand the catastrophic public relations of the Bush administration’s authorization of torture. But they are still in denial about some things:

I was recently invited, for example, by the Oxford Union in England to debate (for the affirmative) the proposition “Resolved: This House Would Torture to Save Lives.” I declined but counter-offered on David Frum’s advice to debate "Resolved: This House Believes Terrorists Deserve the Full Protection of the Geneva Conventions." I await their reply.

But this is a straw man. I’m obviously opposed to torturing or abusing military prisoners. But I don’t favor full Geneva protections for al Qaeda terror suspects. They shouldn’t have the full rights of uniformed soldiers in a conventional war. I just favor the minimal baseline protections of Article 3, that bar abuse and torture. I also believe that it’s not a given that all captives are thereby terrorists. As we have found out from Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, large pluralities (and at Abu Ghraib a vast majority) have been shown not to be terrorists. So how’s this for a debate at my alma mater:

"This House Believes Terror Suspects Deserve the Minimal Protections of the Geneva Conventions."

I might add this is not, under US law, a matter for debate. It is the law of the land. If Charen and Frum want to change it, they need to persuade the Senate to rescind Geneva. But I’d happily debate them at Oxford on this question.

The man who exposed the torture of Abu Zubaydah is getting Justice Department scrutiny:

Why are they targeting Kiriakou? That part’s simple. His remarks are having some predictable repercussions in Congress, where inquiries into the use of waterboarding and similar torture devices are now being discussed. Kiriakou revealed a number of Justice Department brush-off answers to be lies, and his comments provide reason to suspect that a number of senior Bush Administration officials made false statements to Congressional inquiries. In other words, they view Kiriakou as a snitch. And they’ve decided to retaliate against him.

But the action is clearly intended as a signal to others who have direct knowledge of the torture regime. If you talk publicly about this, we’ll come after you.

A small note about this description of what happened at Abu Ghraib:

the mindless cruelty of a miscreant handful of soldiers.

But what we saw at Abu Ghraib, we now know, were exactly the techniques that McCarthy supports: stress positions, abuse short of torture, sexual humiliation, religious abuse, and all the other techniques the Pentagon approved to break down resistance to giving up information. It was cruel, but it sure wasn’t mindless. It was designed to soften inmates up before interrogation – to prevent and stymie an insurgency whose victims numerically overwhelm those of 9/11. The new regime at Abu Ghraib in which such "mindless cruelty" took place was installed by General Geoffrey Miller who had been personally dispatched by Donald Rumsfeld to "Gitmoize" the place.

And this is what I don’t understand: doesn’t McCarthy support many of the techniques revealed at Abu Ghraib? I don’t mean the rapes and murder. I mean the abuse short of torture. What, in McCarthy’s eyes, is wrong with shackling prisoners hands and feet to the floor, or stripping them naked, or sexually humiliating them, or walking them around on a leash? It’s not torture, right? It was prepping interrogation targets by breaking down their psyches in advance. And it was part of the system of interrogation set up by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. Isn’t that actually milder than the policies McCarthy actually favors, like waterboarding?

To put it more bluntly: It seems to me that those who are making a fine distinction between "torture" and even waterboarding – and allowing waterboarding – have no logical basis for objecting to what we saw in many of the photographs at Abu Ghraib. Or rather their only objection must surely be that the techniques were not adequately professionalized and were allowed to leak, or were somehow inflicted by the wrong people. But the techniques were fine, right? We are at war, right? And yet McCarthy cannot quite say he endorses them. Why not? He’s not becoming part of the "revisionist Left" is he?

One gets a sense of shrill hysteria from sentences like this:

Al-Qaeda’s air raid on 9/11 eclipsed Pearl Harbor in devastation and shock value. It exceeded anything ever accomplished by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Andy McCarthy means against the homeland, I presume. But his need for existential hysteria to defend the indefensible is hurt by such qualifications. Then there’s this:

Regardless of what the revisionist Left is now saying, the only bright-line limit on the treatment of alien enemy combatants held outside the United States in 2002 was the federal law against torture.

And so the Geneva Conventions evaporate, including Article 3 which requires baseline protection from abuse and torture of any military prisoners, regardless of their uniform, status or provenance. No one’s talking full POW status; we’re talking minimal decency status. And I fail to see how John McCain and a vast swathe of American servicemembers and veterans count as the "revisionist Left."

McCarthy also goes on at length about the distinction between "forcible" or "coerced" interrogation methods and "torture." Where in the law is that distinction maintained? Coercion is coercion. It means a victim is forced by physical or mental pain or suffering to say things they have not previously said. When you freeze someone to the point of terror, you are torturing them. When you apply a technique so unbearable most victims cannot last beyond a few seconds – whether that pain is from drowning or electrocution – you are torturing them. There really is no getting around this. And the administration knows it. Why do you think they destroyed the tapes?

Yes, we’re at war. We were at war against the Nazis and didn’t adopt their interrogation methods until president Bush came on the scene half a century later. We were at war with Stalin and didn’t replicate his hypothermia and sleep-deprivation interrogation methods until the Soviet Union was defeated and Dick Cheney was vice-president. We need not have given – and almost certainly should not have given – every non-citizen terror suspect in captivity unfettered access to the civilian courts. But it was and is folly not to treat them humanely: folly for the integrity of the intelligence we need and folly for the cause we are fighting for.

The torture issue is not a function of some of us wanting to legally entangle a vital war to the point of paralysis. It is a function of some of us wanting to win this war the way Americans have always won – with honor, legal clarity and the moral highground. The Bush administration has managed both to destroy that high-ground and failed, by its arrogance and constitutional extremism, to construct a system of interrogation and detention that everyone could buy into, and everyone could be proud of.

That’s different than a denial, as Froomkin observes. There are, I think, two options. Either the president was utterly unaware of a torture session of a key al Qaeda suspect where the methods were, according to Kiriakou, meticulously recorded and approved all the way up the chain of command; or he knew all of it. Either he is a war criminal or an incompetent. I don’t think he’s that incompetent. The more we find out, the clearer it is that the torture program was the primary pillar of this president’s war policy – before the Afghanistan war or the Iraq war. Every formulaic statement – "we do not torture;" "I have no recollection" – is related to that fact. And they destroyed the tapes not just to protect themselves, but to protect him.

Yes, this is like Watergate. But that was a petty break-in the president covered up. These are war crimes. Directed from the very top.

Why are they shilling for the Bush administration? Here’s their second sentence in a story today:

The destruction in late 2005 of the tapes, showing harsh interrogation treatment of two terrorism suspects, is being investigated by the Justice Department, the CIA itself and by several congressional panels.

No serious source denies that these two individuals were – at the very least – waterboarded. And no serious, reasonable student of history, warfare or basic ethics can deny that waterboarding is now and always has been a torture technique. Why can the AP not use the word clearly in accord with its plain meaning in English? They have to make a choice. And they have decided to enable the Bush administration’s Orwellian perversion of the law and the English language. Really: a factual correction is required. This is not a subjective judgment. It is an objective fact.

A reader writes:

I have been reading a book about the Inklings. When you said today in regards to torture, "And that is why – more than any other reason – this policy must be ended. Because no president can be trusted with it," a literary metaphor became  very real for me:

"Why should  we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the hour of our need? Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the enemy."

We lack Gandalf’s wisdom:

Frodo said, ‘But I have so little of any of these things! You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?’

‘No!’ cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. ‘With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.’ His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. ‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great, for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me."

The point is not that between America and al Qaeda, there is any equivalence. It is that no country is good enough to trust itself with the evil of torture. And semantic denial is not renuniciation. That’s why we have the rule of law. That is why those who treat it as an expedient will lose themselves before too long, whatever their initial motives. And they have, I fear. They have.