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Waterboarding: Not Much of a Slippery Slope
According to this ABC report, waterboarding has only been used three times on Al Qaeda operatives since 2001 (one of whom was Khalid Sheik Mohammad) and hasn't been used since 2003, after Gen. Michael Hayden took over as CIA director. The article also offers some of these tidbits:
A senior CIA official said KSM later admitted it was only because of the waterboarding that he talked.
Ultimately, KSM took responsibility for the 9/ll attacks and virtually all other al Qaeda terror strikes, including the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
"KSM lasted the longest under waterboarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again," said a former CIA official familiar with KSM's case.
snip
CIA sources outlined for ABC News a list of harsh interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration in a "Presidential Finding," which authorized the use of the techniques on a narrow range of "high-value" targets.
The CIA sources described the list of six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" instituted in mid-March 2002 and used, they said, on a dozen top al Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe. According to the sources, only a handful of CIA interrogators are trained and authorized to use the techniques:
- The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.
- The Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.
- The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.
- Longtime Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.
- The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.
- Waterboarding: 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.
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RE: Worthless, Brainless, Truthless Partisan Crap
Do you, personally, consider those methods as torture? That is the gist I've been trying to pin you down with.
And I'm still not going to answer. For two reasons - first, I don't believe that they limit their techniques to these. According to the HRW and AI reports, they go far beyond it. Second, even if I should think it's ok, there's still the fact that we've signed treaties agreeing not to do it.
I have no problem with our government condemning regimes such as Iran, North Korean, and Sudan for using similar practices because those regimes use them on political and religious dissidents as a method of "reeducation" for one, whereas we use them on terrorists to gain valuable intel in order to save lives.
Yep. Partisan crap. Torture's ok with you so long as it's used in support of your ideology.
I also don't buy the "torture (the non-torture torture, I mean) doesn't work" logic because then that means the CIA is wasting valuable time as well as international political capitol just for the hell of it.
Not "for the hell of it" - but simply because it seems like it "ought" to work. But there are quite a few experts on the subject who insist that the information you get simply isn't reliable.
Think about it: do you honestly think that the Bush administration would continue putting up with the international political fallout of using methods that some consider torture if it didn't get results?
Absolutely.
But the question is not whether it gets results. The question is whether it gets results that cannot be gotten otherwise. That's extremely doubtful.
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