CIA officers who subjected themselves to water boarding

[bluedog]

The use of torture on suspects, a common practice around the world, rarely achieves its goal.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent
Published September 23, 2006


While a prisoner of war four decades ago, U.S. Sen. John McCain was tortured by North Vietnamese demanding information on members of his flight squadron. McCain caved in, to some degree - he rattled off the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line.( my note)*****how do we know that McCain didn't give them the "trutg"....we don't....he says green bays packers.......wheres the proof?

snip

"The only thing that torture guarantees is pain," says Joe Navarro, a former Tampa FBI agent who is an expert on interrogation. "It never guarantees the truth."

snip


- The belly slap: a hard, open-handed slap to the stomach that causes pain but no internal injury.

- Long time standing: Prisoners are forced to stand for more than 40 hours with hands cuffed and feet shackled to the floor. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are said to be effective in yielding confessions.

- The cold cell: The prisoner is doused with cold water as he stands naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees.

- Water boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the face and water is poured over him. Although it is almost impossible to drown because the lungs are higher than the mouth, the technique produces a sensation of drowning that induces near instant pleas to halt the treatment.

Water boarding is so terrifying that military tribunals created after World War II considered it a crime. Some of the Japanese who used "water treatment" and other forms of torture on Allied prisoners were executed.

According to the ABC report, CIA officers who subjected themselves to water boarding lasted an average of 14 seconds. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed drew the admiration of interrogators when he held out more than two minutes before begging to confess.

But the techniques also killed at least one detainee and led to false confessions by others. Among them was Ibn al Shayk al Libi, who was water boarded before claiming that Iraq trained al-Qaida members to use biochemical weapons - part of the basis for the Bush administration's decision to go to war. It was later determined that he had no knowledge of training or weapons and had made up the story to avoid further harsh treatment.


http://www.sptimes.com/2006/09/23/Worldandnation/Breaking_prisoners__b.shtml

[Kali]

1. torture = terrorism

who are the terrorists, again?

[niallmac]

2. I think I know. I'll get back to you.

We have met the enemy ....
Pogo is my main man right now.
Hope future generations are able to forgive us.

[Solly Mack]

3. United We Torture

A house divided against itself cannot torture

just saying

[Benhurst]

4. We should only use torture procedures which have first been

tested on Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld.

[DinahMoeHum]

5. I don't want info from THEM. I want to see them suffer in HUMILIATION.

and THAT is the REAL purpose of torture, folks.

:evilfrown:

[blondeatlast]

6. Precisely, and on national television, I might add.

If you want to change the national mood, puty it on American Idol, for instance.

[Bucky]

10. My prediction: under threat of torture, Cheney'd crack & rat them all out

If I were a prosecutor, I'd definitely give the immunity offer to Cheney--he seems like the one most liable to back stab his cohorts.

[Hubert Flottz]

7. I think we should use public waterboarding instead of televised

political bebates. I'm tired of being lied to campaign after campaign.

How about a weekly political program on TV called Meet the Waterboard? Or Hardboard?

EDIT to add this...

History of an Interrogation Technique: Water Boarding

snip...

Water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago. A photograph that appeared in The Washington Post of a U.S. soldier involved in water boarding a North Vietnamese prisoner in 1968 led to that soldier's severe punishment.


"The soldier who participated in water torture in January 1968 was court-martialed within one month after the photos appeared in The Washington Post, and he was drummed out of the Army," recounted Darius Rejali, a political science professor at Reed College.


Earlier in 1901, the United States had taken a similar stand against water boarding during the Spanish-American War when an Army major was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for water boarding an insurgent in the Philippines.

"Even when you're fighting against belligerents who don't respect the laws of war, we are obliged to hold the laws of war," said Rejali. "And water torture is torture."

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1356870

[Bob3]

8. Torture gets people to confess to what the torturers want them to say

Which is why all those women in the middle ages confessed to flying on brooms and having sex with the devil and that is where all the confessions came in the Russian Show trials and of course the Nazis routinely used torture to force confessions. The truth is not what they are looking for they are looking for the confessions to use them as a beard for their atrocities.

Given that you have to think that's why the * administration is so hot on torture. They haven't been able to make any real progress and they have all these prisoners (low level operatives and complete innocents caught in the dragnets). So my sense is that in order to make it look like we are actually doing better than we are - they want to torture these people to get them to confess to plots so they can say see we are winning.

It's not about information. It's all about looking like they are doing something. Which is as evil as it gets.

[Hubert Flottz]

9. K&R

Are you more proud to be an American now than you were 6 years ago? I'm not!

edit...

waterboarding

snip...Although in a technical sense there are actually several other forms of water-based interrogation, all variants have in common that the victim reliably almost drowns but is rescued or re-animated by his captor just before death occurs. The technique is designed to be both psychological and physical. The psychological effect is inherent in the fact that the victim is given to understand that he or she shall be killed outright by dint of enforced drowning unless their cooperation as demanded is indeed produced promptly. This perception reinforces the interrogator's control and gives the victim sound cause to experience mortal fear.

The physical effects are extreme pain and damage to the lungs, brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation and sometimes broken bones because of the restraints applied to the struggling victim. The psychological effects are lifelong

http://www.answers.com/topic/waterboarding

"The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong" "The psychological effects are lifelong"

[Hubert Flottz]

11. Imitating the Gestapo, Imitating Stalin

http://www.progress.org/2006/tort02.htm

snip...

Conservative Totalitarianism

Ending torture will have a major impact beyond torture itself for a simple reason: as slavery was the linchpin to the entire pre-bellum Southern social order, torture has become integral to today's conservative ideology. Conservative ideology was once a coherent set of ideas built around limiting state power over the individual. It has today degenerated into a rationale for expanding executive power over the individual, including not only the right to torture but the right to spy on citizens, wage aggressive war while lying about it, prevent gay people from marrying, deny a woman the right to an abortion, publish disguised government propaganda in the media, and even deny us the right to die in peace if conservatives decree that we must live as vegetables or in unendurable pain.

It is no coincidence that the executive's right to torture was defended not ony by Bush and Cheney, but also by conservative ideologues at The Weekly Standard, financed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol, who published a cover story by Charles Krauthammer -- widely admired in conservative circles -- which declared that "we must all be prepared to torture" to save American lives. Or that the The National Review opined that "if McCain's amendment becomes law ... we will then be able to apply only methods formulated to deal with conventional soldiers in a different sort of conflict than the one that faces us now. This is folly."

Today's conservative movement has been reduced to a set of impulses, above all a totalitarian impulse to support the expansion of autocratic power it was founded to restrain. Since its ideological blinders prevent it from developing sensible measures to reduce terrorism, it has turned to justifying only those policies that expand executive power and seek to rule through coercion, threats, and violence.

Whatever a movement to abolish torture will achieve for society, it is clear what participating in it means for each of us as individuals. It means above all that our children and grandchildren will not remember us with shame, that they will not one day have to try to justify to our victims our failure to oppose the torture being conducted in our names, and that the term "good Americans" will mean just that, and not become an excuse for fear or indifference.

[It was not a pretzel]

12. Some of those "harsh interragation" techniques

like standing still over long periods and forced hyperthermia were used in Dachau concentration camp, not to extract information but to control, hurt and torture.

I`d like to scum like Fox`s Gibson and O`Reilly subjected to it.