Turns Out, We Do Torture
 

But only three times!

CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly confirmed for the first time the names of three suspected al-Qaida terrorists who were subjected to a particularly harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, and why.

"We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time," Hayden said. "There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have changed."

Hayden said that Khalid Sheik Mohammed — the purported mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States — and Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were subject to the harsh interrogations in 2002 and 2003. Waterboarding is an interrogation technique that critics call torture.

Waterboarding induces a feeling of imminent drowning with the restrained subject's mouth covered and water poured over his face.

"Waterboarding taken to its extreme, could be death, you could drown someone," McConnell acknowledged. He said waterboarding remains a technique in the CIA's arsenal, but it would require the consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general.

Should have done it more times.
Extreme torture? Pouring water over your head while you have a towel on? Whatever.

Who is "we"?

AFAIK, SKM has never set food on US soil or GTMO. I could be wrong. But if he's waterboarded in say, Jordan or Saudia Arabia, Pakistan or Turkey, under the auspices of that country's Govt. with a CIA guy taking notes or asking questions, are we doing the boarding?

Whether SKM gave up real or false info under interrogation, I'll lose no sleep over using the procedure on the likes of him.

I don't know of the other 2, so I offer no comment.

Fair enough. When they go around slicing people's head off, are we supposed to play good cop / bad cop with these guys?

I guess that meas we will no longer being complaining about other nations human rights violations since we have joined their ranks.

What does waterboarding have to do with human rights? So Darfur is the same as waterboarding????

Does it matter if the acts took place outside the country or in a Holiday Inn in Des Moines if the Central Intelligence Agency directed it?

I look at it this way, what if it were your Mother, Daughter, Wife, Sister, Son, Father, or best friend somewhere with a camera and a rusty machete on him.
You caught a suspect that was involved but he won't talk.

Now are you gonna ask him nicely for the location, or are you gonna roll up the sleeves and work him over a bit?

I know if it were someone I loved, I would use whatever I could get my hands on to make that sucker talk and I would expect the government to do the same.

These suckers are blowing themselves up and taking as many innocent lives they can with them.

I'm sure the terrorist recruiting halls would be barren if the suicides were nice, slow and painful instead of instant kaboom!

If it works, go for it, but do it slow and painful.

Funny thing is, is that the gov don't have to tell us everything they do to get information from these scum bags.
We just hear about the stuff that leaks.

To the naysayers, I ask what is your solution?
How do we quickly get information from these pukes?

Do we just let them go to kill again?
Do we keep them for bargaining chips to be used by other killers?

What would you want done if it were a personal loved one of yours they had hidden away with a bunch of stinking rapists and murderers?

Would you sing playschool songs to them and let them play with puppy dogs and kittens until their soul softens, or would you crank up the 220 and give them a jolt that makes their teeth crack so they consider talking next time you ask the question?

I think morally (and legally) it doesn't matter, but in terms of American public perception I think it does.

This really comes as no surprise. In fact I would be surprised if they DIDN'T use torture at all.

I didn't know the gov had defined the technique as torture. When did that happen?

I have spoken with US Navy personnel who were water boarded as part of their training before doing covert operations in Vietnam back in the 1970's. They had a doctor nearby just in case somebody needed to be revived.

Google this: U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE)

Might be a recent thing . . .

February 2, 2008, Los Angeles Times Editorial excerpt

The attorney general of the United States, Michael B. Mukasey, testified this week that he would consider waterboarding to be torture if it were done to him, but that he cannot say it's always illegal. We believe these statements are legally and morally wrong, and set a dangerous and hypocritical standard of convenience for torturers. Such repugnant equivocation will be mimicked and distorted in dark corners around the world, and will make it more likely that waterboarding and other forms of torture will be used against U.S. soldiers and civilians.

Mukasey's arguments rely on a legal and moral relativism of the very type that conservatives typically revile. "There are some circumstances where current law would appear clearly to prohibit the use of waterboarding," Mukasey said in a letter before his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Other circumstances would present a far closer question." In fact, the question isn't remotely close. Torture is defined as the deliberate infliction of extreme pain and suffering, physical or mental, and mock execution is universally held to be a form of torture. Waterboarding, which has been used centuries, makes the victim feel as if he or she is drowning. Whether it is done carefully enough that the victim does not drown is irrelevant, as the point is to simulate execution. After World War II, the United States prosecuted for war crimes Japanese who waterboarded American prisoners.

There are several levels of SERE and if you want to do anything productive with your military career you have to go through it, although waterboarding is mighty unpleasant its sandbox play compared to other torture techniques.


http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0524072torture2.html

Is torture not torture, even when we said it was torture?

In "Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts," Judge Evan Wallach of the U.S. Court of International Trade has documented the trials in which the U.S. used evidence of water-boarding as a basis for prosecutions. The article will be published soon by the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Among the numerous examples, Wallach cites one involving four Japanese defendants who were tried before a U.S. military commission at Yokohama, Japan, in 1947 for their treatment of American and Allied prisoners. Wallach writes, in the case of United States of America vs. Hideji Nakamura, Yukio Asano, Seitara Hata and Takeo Kita, "water torture was among the acts alleged in the specifications . . . and it loomed large in the evidence presented against them."

Hata, the camp doctor, was charged with war crimes stemming from the brutal mistreatment and torture of Morris Killough, "by beating and kicking him (and) by fastening him on a stretcher and pouring water up his nostrils." Other American prisoners, including Thomas Armitage, received similar treatment, according to the allegations.

Armitage described his ordeal: "They would lash me to a stretcher, then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness."

Hata was sentenced to 25 years at hard labor, and the other defendants were convicted and given long stints at hard labor as well.

Wallach also found a 1983 case out of San Jacinto County, Texas, in which James Parker, the county sheriff, and three deputies were criminally charged for handcuffing suspects to chairs, draping towels over their faces and pouring water over the towel until a confession was elicited. One victim described the experience this way: "I thought I was going to be strangled to death."

The sheriff pleaded guilty, and his deputies went to trial where they were convicted of civil rights violations. All received long prison sentences. U.S. District Judge James DeAnda told the former sheriff at sentencing, "The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country."

So what? While we are wasting time on this stupid stuff they could be planning another attack. Win the war, then you have the luxury of playing monday morning quarterback.