Nov
4th
2006
Waterboarding: Oh, the humanity!
Steve Harrigan of Fox News gets waterboarded.
He could barely get through his report, so shattered was he by the experience. By the end of the segment he’s reduced to sobbing and pointing to a copy of “The Conservative Soul†that he’s held up to the camera.
No, he was fine.
As one commenter put it:
It’s the new bungee jumping.
hmmmm, so any regular joe shmoe can handle waterboarding just fine, right? It really isn’t that harmful, right? Just like a good old fashioned Boy Scouts hazing ritual, right?
Well, then why would you think it would be effective on a hardened warrior? How can it break someone who fights all day when it can’t break a soft American?
The realism of it is, the only reason it didn’t “bother” him in the long term is simple. It was a farce, 3 short episodes, no repeated episodes, no lack of knowledge when it was coming, no sleep deprivation, no food deprivation, etc… give him 30-40 of those a day for a few weeks and see how his mental state has held up, put him on a board and put his head underwater until he looses consciousness and see if he gets back to normal. Real waterboarding and that farce are completely different.
Are we really trying to minimize the nastiness of waterboarding with this post? Why is Pres. Bush so reluctant to admit to using this technique?
P.S. One of the key strengths of waterboarding as a torture method is that the tortured thinks he’s going to drown. Obviously, this reporter wouldn’t have feared that.
Have any of you seen the movie Patriot Games? When Jack Ryan has the British mole who betrayed them in the basement, he has to know what the IRA commandos are going to use to escape so that he can save himself and others.
He threatens to(or actually does) shoot the leg of this “prisoner” to get information because if he doesn’t, he and his family may not survive.
Only analyzing the shooting of his leg, or the threat of shooting his leg seems inhumane, but this “aggressive” technique needs to be put into context.
So it is with “aggressive” techniques against those possibly holding information regarding plans or whereabouts of terrorists that intend to harm America.
If you actually watch the video clip you’ll see that the reporter talks about how waterboarding would have broken him almost immediately, and yet he was fine just a few moments later. It speaks to the effectiveness of the technique (and as a couple commenters pointed out, the reporter knew this whole thing was a setup, but waterboarding was still incredibly effective).
doug,
you’re telling me that if you really had valid information that you’d give it up to the enemy if you were waterboarded? even if you knew that you wouldn’t die or be permanently harmed from it? One thing all these detainees know is that America does not kill its prisoners (or at least, they used not to…but lately they don’t seem to care that much if a detainee dies while interrogated).
Furthermore, you seem like a good honest man, Doug. You’d probably be fairly forthcoming anyways. Now take a hardened terrorist, who has a much easier time of lying. How forthcoming do you think he will be? Do you really think that something that a soft American can make it through will break him?
Furthermore, how do you, as the American interrogator know you even have an individual that has accurate information? Most detainees actually tend to be foot soldiers who don’t even know the big picture. You don’t know if your detainee even has accurate information and so you have to verify somehow if the information is actually correct. It turns out that most of what KSM told his captors when he was waterboarded was not verifiable nor accurate. Hmmmm, could he have been telling the CIA operatives what he thought they wanted to hear? Maybe to stop the simulation of death? Hmmm….
Dan,
I realize that I didn’t respond to your earlier comment…mainly because it basically agreed with my assertion: waterboarding is not torture.
Now, since you have repeated yourself, let me outline my argument:
The government has professionals that do this sort of thing. The folks actually doing the interrogations (not you or me!) say it has resulted in some good intel. This helps the war on terror. I’m satisfied. End of story.
Since waterboarding is hardly torture, I’ve got no problem with the US employing it as a technique. If the CIA decides it stinks as a technique for getting actionable intel, fine. That’s their call, they’re the pros. But it’s not torture, so if they want to use it, full steam ahead.
Doug,
I’m not going to go through this yet again (I’ve done so now on too many blogs), but waterboarding is torture. I’ve got evidence that it hasn’t actually produced the verifiable actionable and accurate intelligence CIA was seeking. You say they have. Can you show me your evidence?
Dan,
Where do you get your information?
Non-involved think tanks or organizations that don’t have real experience or expertise with interrogation somehow seem unqualified to declare US Intelligence gathering techniques “inhumane” or “ineffective.”
Consider, are you going to listen to environmental groups that have “data” on how to best fight fires and protect the environment, or are you going to listen to the Forest Service which has decades of experience and mountains of expertise on putting a wild blaze out?
Ryan,
On my blog I’ve quoted from military interrogators. Who do you quote from?
Dan,
Nice blog. Your article here is very thorough.
To respond to who my sources are, let me first clarify a couple of things. My impression is that the military interrogators speaking out are a minority. And even still, they are discussing torture which seems to be more along the lines of the photograph featured in one of the articles you linked to on your post.
So, let me call witness #1. Former and current CIA officers.
Water boarding is harsh and aggressive, but I find it hard to dismiss it as an option when I watch things like this video. But to your credit, there are those in the CIA that do not like it. However, the most damning point is that actual plots were uncovered and or foiled. How can we rationally do otherwise? The right to life supersedes the right to not be water boarded.
And this argument seems a lot like the anti-Iraq war position pushed by democrats. Essentially complaining and pointing out that it is not working, but not proposing substantial or realistic alternative options. I wish we could sit these guys down and they would just talk, which is sounds like they will sometimes:
But if they don’t talk, then you can’t just sit on your hands. I would feel a lot worse about the Library Tower in LA getting hit by an airliner than I would about KSM being water boarded for 2 1/2 minutes.
[...] Ryan commented today: The right to life supersedes the right to not be water boarded. [...]
Ryan,
I dispute this point in my posts on my blog. Evan Thomas wrote for Newsweek which I quoted in the post you linked to:
Cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch?
Here’s the problem for those who support these “alternative set of procedures,” Ryan. What plots can you say definitively were stopped through the use of these techniques on detainees? Brian Ross talks about a supposed plot on the Library Tower in LA, but….what are the details? Who was involved in that? How does the CIA know the plot is credible? Is it as credible as cutting down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch?
The worse problem with the use of waterboarding is that no previous “civilized” nation had used this technique. Previously (and still today) it is used by rogue nations, and rather evil people, such as Pol Pot in Cambodia, or Stalin in the Soviet Union. Their use of waterboarding was not to extract information, but to garner confessions. That right there should tell you how “effective” it really is.
By the way, I want to thank you, Ryan, you actually looked at my sources and replied back very reasonably. So few have done that.
It seems the debate has become:
“There is not enough credible information validating the effectiveness of water boarding or like treatment”
against
“The intel the CIA is said to have received seems to outweigh or discredit arguments against water boarding”
As for details on credibility of plots, all I can assume is that the CIA is unable to unclassify details. Similar perhaps to the leaked intelligence financial monitoring which wasn’t supposed to be available openly.
I suppose my next argument would be, what can be shown to suggest that a more “humane” method would cause those like KSM to divulge the useful information the CIA officers report as having been confessed?
In your blog post, there are examples given of how some terrorists cooperate. But if they don’t, what then do you do?
Of course, if some of your quoted stories are true, its sad and hurtful to America’s image if untrained or over zealous interrogators abused prisoners wrongly. I don’t think there is any debate on that.
Ryan,
I think you touched on probably the most important point, here. Even if some of the information is credible, just what cost comes with using these techniques? Some Americans may not care about our image in the eyes of the rest of the world, but when the time comes that we need the rest of the world on our side, things like this will come back to haunt us.
You really do have to ask yourself why Bush wants these techniques to remain secret if, as he says, he doesn’t want the enemy to find ways to counter the techniques, when the enemy already knows of far worse techniques used by countries like Jordan, and probably has built up resistances to those harsher techniques? If these bad guys have built up resistances to things far worse than waterboarding, why keep secret about waterboarding? It isn’t as if these guys don’t know we’re now in the business of either torturing them or renditioning them to other countries that have no problem using torture on them. There is no logical excuse for keeping these techniques classified.
On the other hand, Bush’s real reason for not wanting to publicly speak about these techniques probably lies in the fact that if he were to publicly talk about these techniques, future prosecutors can use his words to charge him with breaking the law. There is a reason the Military Commissions Act of 2006 has a retroactive immunity clause set in. It is because Bush already ordered the CIA to violate the Geneva Conventions (even though the GC is the Law of the Land according to the Constitution), and the War Crimes Act of 2006. If he doesn’t have a law that immunizes him and the CIA, he will inevitably be prosecuted for violating American law, in the most severe way.
This is really bad stuff, Ryan. Certainly not something Mormons should even think of backing.
[...] the sad thing is, when they come for you they won’t ask whether you were for the wars in afghanistan and iraq, whether you are for or against waterboarding, or whether you want to respect their right to privacy while they plot their attacks against us on the phone. [...]