New Trends in Questionable Interrogation Techniques

I haven't had as much time to blog over the past couple of days as I'd expected to, so I'm running a bit behind. I'd meant to be more timely in linking to this historical overview of waterboarding in Thursday's Washington Post. It had a nicely understated headline ("Waterboarding Historically Controversial"--I guess), but it's filled with informative little tidbits about the torture technique.

The Senate insists that its recent torture bill outlaws waterboarding, but the Bush administration won't comment on that one way or another. It's not particularly a secret that waterboarding was used to get information out of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, although as the article points out, a former senior intelligence official reveals that not everything he said proved reliable. There's little or no reason to expect that the Bushies would refuse to use the technique now.

What it doesn't do is give a really good explanation about what it is and how it works. Fortunately, about a year ago, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito of ABC News reported on it as one of six "enhanced interrogation techniques" currently being used by the CIA.

The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

"The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

But the Post article does give us a lot of other useful facts. A Japanese officer served fifteen years of hard labor for waterboarding during World War II. The Post printed >this photo of U.S. soldiers using a similar technique in Vietnam. Another ABC story reported that the soldier performing the act was court-martialed within a month of the photo's publications.

Waterboarding can likely credit its newfound popularity to its overwhelming effectiveness in getting the victim to talk. The Post wrote:

In the post-Vietnam period, the Navy SEALs and some Army Special Forces used a form of waterboarding with trainees to prepare them to resist interrogation if captured. The waterboarding proved so successful in breaking their will, says one former Navy captain familiar with the practice, "they stopped using it because it hurt morale."

Aside from the moral complications of the U.S. using this technique at all, David Corn described another problem the technique presents. He quoted Jonah Blank, currently a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. (Also at the link are photos Blank privides of a waterboarding device used by the Khymer Rouge on display at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which now serves as a museum. He reproduces a painting by a former prisoner showing a victim being tortured, as well.)

As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

Waterboarding makes the victim say something that will make the torture stop. As Blank points out, it doesn't matter whether confessions coerced by a dictatorial regime is accurate or not. Presumably most are not--that's why they have to torture people to make them admit to it.