Waterboarding for dummies: Salon report
p2pnet view P2P | Politics:- The US Department of Justice gave Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two senior Bush era lawyers (right) a slap on the wrist after finding them guilty of approving the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
They were “reprimanded” for using “poor judgment” but avoided charges of professional misconduct, according to the Guardian in February.
The two “provided legal cover for the CIA to use torture and other harsh interrogation techniques”, it said going on >>>
The techniques approved by the lawyers included waterboarding, which Barack Obama has described as torture but the former vice-president, Dick Cheney, insisted was not.
In a much-repeated quote, Cheney tried to trivialise it by describing it as a mere “dunk in the water”.
“After five years of heated internal wrangling, the justice department has rejected calls by its own ethics investigators for tougher measures against the two men”, said the Telegraph.
Now, Salon’s Mark Benjamin has written a “stomach-churning account of the waterboarding practiced at Gitmo”, says Boing Boing, going on:
“This fine-tuned torture process repeatedly took its victims to the brink of death (one victim was waterboarded 180+ times) until many of them simply gave up on breathing and tried to allow themselves to drown, only to be revived by unethical medical personnel who collaborated with the war criminals conducting the torture.”
In Salon’s Waterboarding for dummies, Benjamin says 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”.
He continues >>>
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.
And >>>
Detainees would be strapped to the gurney for a two-hour “session.” During that session, the continuous flow of water onto a detainee’s face was not supposed to exceed 40 seconds during each pour. Interrogators could perform six separate 40-second pours during each session, for a total of four minutes of pouring. Detainees could be subjected to two of those two-hour sessions during a 24-hour period, which adds up to eight minutes of pouring. But the CIA’s guidelines say interrogators could pour water over the nose and mouth of a detainee for 12 minutes total during each 24-hour period. The documents do not explain the extra four minutes to get to 12.
And >>>
Should a prisoner stop breathing during the procedure, the documents instructed interrogators to rapidly tilt the gurney to an upright position to help expel the saline. “If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose, and nasopharynx,” Bradbury wrote. “The gurney used for administering this technique is specially designed so that this can be accomplished very quickly if necessary.”
Documents drafted by CIA medical officials in 2003, about a year after the agency started using the waterboard, describe more aggressive procedures to get the water out and the subject breathing. “An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately,” the CIA Office of Medical Services ordered in its Sept. 4, 2003, medical guidelines for interrogations. “The interrogator should then deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water.” (That’s a blow below the sternum, similar to the thrust delivered to a chocking victim in the Heimlich maneuver.)
But even those steps might not force the prisoner to resume breathing. Waterboarding, according to the Bradbury memo, could produce “spasms of the larynx” that might keep a prisoner from breathing “even when the application of water is stopped and the detainee is returned to an upright position.” In such cases, Bradbury wrote, “a qualified physician would immediately intervene to address the problem and, if necessary, the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy.” The agency required that “necessary emergency medical equipment” be kept readily available for that procedure. The documents do not say if doctors ever performed a tracheotomy on a prisoner.
And >>>
One of the weirdest details in the documents is the revelation that the agency placed detainees on liquid diets prior to the use of waterboarding. That’s because during waterboarding, “a detainee might vomit and then aspirate the emesis,” Bradbury wrote. In other words, breathe in his own vomit. The CIA recommended the use of Ensure Plus for the liquid diet.
Concludes Benjamin’s Salon report on Guantanamo Bay waterboard torture:
“The memo also contains a last, little-noticed paragraph that may be the most disturbing of all. It seems to say that the detainees subjected to waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That paragraph reads as follows:
” ‘NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment’.”
(Cheers, RW)
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Guardian – Inquiry clears US lawyers who approved torture at Guantánamo Bay, February 20, 2010
Telegraph – Waterboarding memo lawyers will not be disciplined, February 20, 2010
Boing Boing – Stomach-churning details of CIA waterboarding crimes, March 8, 2010
Salon – Waterboarding for dummies, March 9, 2010
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March 9th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
There were more than just CIA memos. It’s been reported that complete “how-to” videos were created to train future interrogators.
Originally, all waterboarding was recorded on video, with all the participants (torturers and torturees alike) having their faces covered so they couldn’t be identified.
Despite these precautions, all video evidence was destroyed on orders from the White House.
It’s not yet known how many of the reported “suicides” were deaths that occurred during interrogation.
March 10th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
This makes me very sad.
At first I felt very heavy of heart, recalling how, only about two weeks ago, a lifelong friend of mine posted a status update on his facebook page that said: [that he] “has been trying to teach his son about World War II, because it appears that his school has not touched the subject. How do you explain to a 9 year old what Hitler, and the Nazi’s did? Or why we felt the need to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Seriously though… How do you explain Auschwitz???
I wondered if we could go back in time, before the staggering numbers of Jews were being led into the showers, before they started rounding up people by the hundreds and thousands and (shudder) millions, when the mass psychosis was only in an embryonic state, would we see something familiar? Would we see behavior of people and society looking remarkably similar to what is reflected in this article? The thought of such a possibility (alright, likelihood) was momentarily a little overwhelming and I whispered in my room alone, “God help us,” and didn’t know what else to do.
So I wrote that first sentence above: “This makes me very sad”
At that point though I remembered also how I had felt compelled to respond to my friend. And I posted the best hope I could for him, not to have him say to his child this way exactly, but to give him a way to frame it in his own mind in order to talk with his son about it in a way that didn’t seem so bleak. And maybe for others who may also read and feel what he wrote on his wall, I posted the following reply:
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“What brought up the subject of WWII if not being discussed in school? Perhaps how to explain the answer is defined in the context of the question.
Well, listing of events transpired is perhaps not so difficult, but the anxiety comes from anticipating the inevitable follow-up question a child is likely to ask following such a recounting of insanity: ‘Why?’
And the anxiety stems from either that we don’t actually know, or that we suspect the awful truth and find it too discouraging or depressing to tell a child: that it is simply ‘human nature.’ All gloriously displayed on grand scale when manifested in the collective insanity of WAR is our penchant for greed, violence, and the struggle for power and control. Many come to the conclusion that those motives are evil and the reason for all the bad, but what is not immediately apparent is that those are actually secondary motives themselves which stem something far more basic. If we trace the evil motivations down to their inception in the non-conscious primordial soup of instinct we will find something that was hardwired into our existence as a necessary tool for survival: Fear.
So I would explain all that this way: ‘Humans sometimes act irrationally despite our intelligence often because our perception is distorted and we don’t even realize it. We may react to something incorrectly particularly when we don’t take the energy to ensure that we see clearly what we are reacting to, and then that incorrect reaction can cause other cascading chains of impropriety. Time has the effect of creating perspective as well, so in the case of wwII we can clearly see what may not have been appearing the same way at the time to those involved and so bad things happened and people suffered. We humans are still subject to this type of “not-seeing”, but people as individuals and as a whole are beginning to understand that we can practice seeing better so that our actions are more appropriate to the situation and cause less suffering.’ ”
>
The fact that I had this hope then gives me hope now as well, and reminding myself of the things I meant to explain there (however awkwardly they came out) has made me realize that the difference between then and now is the very fact that the awareness is growing. We have a moment now when we can, if we open our eyes and choose to, prevent future suffering. Thankfully, the opportunity through sites such as yours, and yes, facebook, has arisen for us to have an open dialogue about these fears and thereby bring them to light.
And in the light, we can see a little better.