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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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October 5th,
2006 - Waterboarding Historically Controversial |
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Waterboarding
Historically Controversial In 1947, the U.S. Called It a War Crime; in 1968, It Reportedly Caused
an Investigation By Walter Pincus Washington Post October 5, 2006 Key senators say Congress
has outlawed one of the most notorious detainee interrogation techniques -
"waterboarding," in which a prisoner feels near drowning. But the
White House will not go that far, saying it would be wrong to tell terrorists
which practices they might face. Inside the CIA,
waterboarding is cited as the technique that got Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the
prime plotter of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to begin to talk and
provide information - though "not all of it reliable," a former
senior intelligence official said. Waterboarding is variously
characterized as a powerful tool and a symbol of excess in the nation's fight
against terrorists. But just what is waterboarding, and where does it fit in
the arsenal of coercive interrogation techniques? On Jan. 21, 1968, The
Washington Post published a front-page photograph of a U.S. soldier
supervising the questioning of a captured North Vietnamese soldier who is
being held down as water was poured on his face while his nose and mouth were
covered by a cloth. The picture, taken four days earlier near Da Nang, had a
caption that said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation
and drowning, meant to make him talk." The article said the
practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who
practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make
people talk while still not causing permanent injury." The picture reportedly led
to an Army investigation. Twenty-one years earlier, in
1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war
crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The
subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in
the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over
his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk. "Asano was sentenced to
15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his
colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions
legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when
waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said. A CIA interrogation training
manual declassified 12 years ago, "KUBARK Counterintelligence
Interrogation - July 1963," outlined a procedure similar to
waterboarding. Subjects were suspended in tanks of water wearing blackout
masks that allowed for breathing. Within hours, the subjects felt tension and
so-called environmental anxiety. "Providing relief for growing
discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role," the manual
states. The KUBARK manual was the
product of more than a decade of research and testing, refining lessons
learned from the Korean War, where U.S. airmen were subjected to a new type
of "touchless torture" until they confessed to a bogus plan to use
biological weapons against the North Koreans. Used to train new
interrogators, the handbook presented "basic information about coercive
techniques available for use in the interrogation situation." When it
comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to
inflict pain ... can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation
of pain." In the post-Vietnam period,
the Navy SEALs and some Army Special Forces used a form of waterboarding with
trainees to prepare them to resist interrogation if captured. The
waterboarding proved so successful in breaking their will, says one former
Navy captain familiar with the practice, "they stopped using it because
it hurt morale." After the Sept. 11, 2001,
terror attacks, the interrogation world changed. Low-level Taliban and Arab
fighters captured in Afghanistan provided little information, the former
intelligence official said. When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were
captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods. These were cleared not only
at the White House but also by the Justice Department and briefed to senior
congressional officials, according to a statement released last month by the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Waterboarding was one of the
approved techniques. When questions began to be
raised last year about the handling of high-level detainees and Congress
passed legislation barring torture, the handful of CIA interrogators and
senior officials who authorized their actions became concerned that they
might lose government support. Passage last month of
military commissions legislation provided retroactive legal protection to
those who carried out waterboarding and other coercive interrogation
techniques. External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/04/AR2006100402005.html |