Thread: "Waterboarding"

Waterboarding

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Painting of waterboarding at Cambodia's Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, by former prison inmate Vann Nath.

Waterboarding is a form of torture that consists of immobilizing a person on their back with the head inclined downward and pouring water over the face and into the breathing passages.[1][2] Through forced suffocation and inhalation of water, the subject experiences the process of drowning and is made to believe that death is imminent.[3]

In contrast to merely submerging the head face-forward, waterboarding almost immediately elicits the gag reflex.[4] Although waterboarding does not always cause lasting physical damage, it carries the risks of extreme pain, damage to the lungs, brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation, injuries (including broken bones) due to struggling against restraints, psychological injury, and death.[5] The psychological effects on victims of waterboarding can last for years after the procedure.[6]

Waterboarding was used for interrogation at least as early as the Spanish Inquisition to obtain information,[7] coerce confessions, punish, and intimidate. It is considered to be torture by a wide range of authorities, including legal experts,[5][8] politicians, war veterans,[9][10] intelligence officials,[11] military judges,[12] and human rights organizations.[13][14]

In 2007 waterboarding led to a political scandal in the United States when the press reported that the CIA had waterboarded extrajudicial prisoners and that the Justice Department had authorized this procedure.[15][16] The CIA is known to have used waterboarding on at least three Al-Qaida suspects: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.[17][18]

Technique

The waterboarding technique was characterized in 2005 by former CIA director Porter J. Goss as a "professional interrogation technique".[13] According to press accounts, a cloth or plastic wrap is placed over or in the person's mouth, and water is poured on to the person's head. As far as the details of this technique, press accounts differ – one article describes "dripping water into a wet cloth over a suspect's face",[19] another states that "cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him".[20]

CIA officers who have subjected themselves to the technique have lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in.[4]

Two televised segments, one from Fox News and one from Current TV, demonstrate a waterboarding technique that may be the subject of these press descriptions.[21][22] In the videos, each correspondent is held against a board by the interrogators. In the Current TV segment, a rag is then forced into the correspondent's mouth, and several pitchers of water are poured onto the rag. The interrogators periodically remove the rag, and the correspondent is seen to gasp for breath. The Fox News segment mentions five "phases" of which the first three are shown. In the first phase, water is simply poured onto the correspondent's face. The second phase is similar to the Current TV episode. In phase three, plastic wrap is placed over the correspondent's face, and a hole is poked into it over his mouth. Water is poured into his mouth through the hole, causing him to gag. He mentions that it really does cause him to gag; that it could lead to asphyxiation; and that he could stand it for only a few seconds.

Dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, the technique has been favored because, unlike most other torture techniques, it produces no marks on the body.[23]

Information retrieved from the waterboarding may not be reliable because a person under such duress may admit to anything, as harsh interrogation techniques lead to false confessions. "The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law", says John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.[4]

It is "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough", said former CIA officer Bob Baer.[4]

Mental and physical effects

Dr. Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, has treated "a number of people" who had been subjected to forms of near-asphyxiation, including waterboarding. An interview for The New Yorker states, "[He] argued that it was indeed torture, 'Some victims were still traumatized years later', he said. One patient couldn't take showers, and panicked when it rained. 'The fear of being killed is a terrifying experience', he said".[6]

Keller also stated in his testimony before the Senate that "water-boarding or mock drowning, where a prisoner is bound to an inclined board and water is poured over their face, inducing a terrifying fear of drowning clearly can result in immediate and long-term health consequences. As the prisoner gags and chokes, the terror of imminent death is pervasive, with all of the physiologic and psychological responses expected, including an intense stress response, manifested by tachycardia (rapid heart beat) and gasping for breath. There is a real risk of death from actually drowning or suffering a heart attack or damage to the lungs from inhalation of water. Long term effects include panic attacks, depression and PTSD. I remind you of the patient I described earlier who would panic and gasp for breath whenever it rained even years after his abuse".[24]

In an open letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Human Rights Watch claimed that waterboarding can cause the sort of "severe pain" prohibited by 18 USC 2340 (the implementation in the United States of the United Nations Convention Against Torture), that the psychological effects can last long after waterboarding ends (another of the criteria under 18 USC 2340), and that uninterrupted waterboarding can ultimately cause death.[5]

Etymology

While the techniques involved in waterboarding have been used for centuries, the use of the phrase "waterboarding" to describe such techniques is a relatively recent phenomenon.
The first use of the term "water boarding" in the media was in a New York Times article of May 13, 2004:

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as 'water boarding', in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.[25][26][27]

The American attorney Alan Dershowitz is reported to have been responsible, two days later, for shortening the term to a single word—"waterboarding"—in a Boston Globe article where he stated: "After all, the administration did approve rough interrogation methods for some high valued detainees. These included waterboarding, in which a detainee is pushed under water and made to believe he will drown unless he provides information, as well as sensory deprivation, painful stress positions, and simulated dog attacks".[28]

Dershowitz later stated to New York Times columnist William Safire that "when I first used the word, nobody knew what it meant".[27]

Prior to this use, techniques that involved forcible drownings to extract information were referred to as "water cure", "water treatment", "water torture", or simply "torture".[29][27]

Notably, a UPI article in 1976 used the term "'water board' torture" to describe a training technique: "[U.S. Navy trainees] were strapped down and water poured into their mouths and noses until they lost consciousness ... A Navy spokesman admitted use of the 'water board' torture ... to 'convince each trainee that he won’t be able to physically resist what an enemy would do to him'".[27]

Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College and the author of the recent book Torture and Democracy, has speculated that the creation of the word "waterboarding" was probably the result of the need for a euphemism to describe the practice. Rejali stated that "there is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding" — a word found as early as 1929 — "they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them".[27]

Classification as torture

Waterboarding is considered to be torture by a wide range of authorities, including legal experts,[5][8][30] politicians, war veterans,[9][10] intelligence officials,[31] military judges,[12] and human rights organizations.[13][14] David Miliband, the United Kingdom Foreign Secretary described it as torture on 19 July 2008, and stated "the UK unreservedly condemns the use of torture."[32] Arguments have been put forward that it might not be torture in all cases, or that they are uncertain.[33][34][35][36] The U.S. State Department has recognized that other techniques that involve submersion of the head of the subject during interrogation would qualify as torture.[37]

The United Nations' Report of the Committee Against Torture: Thirty-fifth Session of November 2006, stated that state parties should rescind any interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, that constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.[38]

Controversy over classification as torture in the United States

Whether waterboarding should be classified as a method of torture was not widely debated in the United States before it was alleged, in 2004, that members of the CIA have used the technique against certain suspected detained terrorists.[39][40] Since then, some commentators have argued that waterboarding as an interrogation method should not qualify as torture in certain circumstances while other individuals have refused to state whether they would consider waterboarding to be torture without knowing the specific facts of a situation.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a licensed attorney and former U.S. federal prosecutor now serving as director of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism, states in an October 2007 op-ed in National Review that he believes that, when used "some number of instances that were not prolonged or extensive", waterboarding should not qualify as torture under the law. McCarthy continues: "Personally, I don't believe it qualifies. It is not in the nature of the barbarous sadism universally condemned as torture, an ignominy the law, as we've seen, has been patently careful not to trivialize or conflate with lesser evils".[33]

Nevertheless, McCarthy in the same article admits that "waterboarding is close enough to torture that reasonable minds can differ on whether it is torture" and that "[t]here shouldn’t be much debate that subjecting someone to [waterboarding] repeatedly would cause the type of mental anguish required for torture".[33]

Some American politicians have unequivocally stated that it is their belief that waterboarding is not torture. In response to the question "Do you believe waterboarding is torture?" on the Glenn Beck Program, Representative Ted Poe stated "I don't believe it's torture at all, I certainly don't". Beck agreed with him.[36] The American conservative media commentator Jim Meyers has stated, in a December 2007 Newsmax.com opinion piece, that he does not believe that waterboarding should be classified as a form of torture, because he does not believe it inflicts pain.[41]

However, other American commentators have questioned the legality of waterboarding as an interrogation technique. For example, Professor Wilson R. Huhn's 2008 scholarly editorial "Waterboarding is Illegal", published by Washington University Law Review, directly questions the legality of the technique from a legal perspective.[42]

In May 2008 the journalist Christopher Hitchens voluntarily experienced waterboarding. He managed to resist for twelve seconds the first time, and, embarrassed at his poor performance, he asked to try again. He then managed to resist for 19 seconds. [43] He later told the BBC: "There is a common misconception that waterboarding simulates the sensation of drowning, but you are to all intents and purposes actually drowning".[43] He said that although he was somewhat prepared for his ordeal, he had not been prepared for what came later: "I have been waking up with sensations of being smothered". [43] Hitchens concluded, "if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture. Believe me. It's torture".[44][45][46]