Slate with must-read article on enhanced interrogation and waterboarding

The article does much to clarify certain issues that very many people continue to get wrong, such as the notion that waterboarding was used as an attempt to directly acquire intelligence information.

Did “enhanced interrogation techniques” help us find Osama Bin Laden and destroy al-Qaida? Were they torture? Were they wrong? Yesterday, three former CIA officials grappled with those questions in a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. The discussion was supposed to be about Zero Dark Thirty. But it was really a chance to see in person the thinking of the people who ran and justified the detainee interrogation program. It’s also a chance to examine our own thinking.

Read it.

Is this news? Jay Bybee and overreach by interrogators

I finished listening to an audiobook version of Marc A. Thiessen's book "Courting Disaster" this week.  That book was partly responsible for my jaw dropping when I saw this story in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — A former Bush Justice Department official who approved brutal interrogation methods by the C.I.A. has told Congress that he never authorized several other rough tactics reportedly inflicted on terrorism suspects — including prolonged shackling to a ceiling and repeated beatings.

Isn't it widely know by now that the Bush administration set strict limits on harsh interrogation methods?  And since when is "brutal" an acceptable judgment in objective reporting?

This news was old even when Attorney General Eric Holder contemplated charging CIA interrogators who went beyond the use of techniques authorized by the Bush administration.

Thiessen schools Amanpour, Sands on waterboarding (Updated x2)

From CNN (hat tips to Power Line and "Yid with Lid"), in two parts.







Over the last several years I've been fascinated by the equivocation that goes on surrounding the use of the term "waterboarding."  Amanpour defends her comparision of a submersion technique with the CIA enhanced interrogation technique thus: "Excuse me (sir?), that is called 'waterboarding.'"

If I freeze water into a rectangular solid resembling a 2x4 and whack somebody in the head with it and call that "waterboarding," the name does not make it the same as the CIA technique of stimulating the gag reflex to reproduce the sensation of drowning.

Amanpour went to teach Bill O'Reilly a thing or two about shouting down a guest when she insisted waterboarding was "Dipping people's heads in a bucket of water to simulate drowning, period, end of story."

Equivocation isn't cool.

Addendum:

Not long after I first posted on the Thiessen-Amanpour clash, I remembered the disconnect between the Amanpour report cited by Thiessen and the images shown during the video of the debate.  Thiessen described Amanpour calling submersion in a box full of water, as depicted in a Vann Nath painting, a technique used by the United States.  Just below, I provide an image of the type of box in question.  In the background one can see the painting that was Amanpour's topic (Update/Correction:  I heard Thiessen on the radio (Hugh Hewitt Show) this week and his description of the painting was actually closer to one depicting a victim hanging upside-down in a barrel of water.  Find that one as part of the collection here.)  Also see Update #2, at bottom.

While the exchange about Amanpour's reporting was going on, the following image was shown onscreen:

The latter is, or at least has become, the iconic Vann Nath image.  It is close to the type of waterboarding done by the CIA, though the painting offers no good evidence of an attempt to prevent water from entering the lungs (aspiration).   Update:  A better (bigger) image of the same painting does suggest that the platform is on an incline, albeit an incline magically achieved without any apparent support underneath the wooden platform.

Which brings us to another subject.

The "Why Didn't I Notice That Before?" Department

The second Vann Nath painting apparently shares the room with a Cambodian "water board."

A close examination comparing the painting to the museum piece shows that the devices are remarkably similar.  Perhaps the painting is a representation of the device shown.  But there is one significant difference.  As noted above, the painting shows no apparent evidence of an incline.  The head of the victim, in other words, apparently is not lowered as a protection against aspiration.  But the image above shows a marked incline.  And the right portion of the photograph shows why.  It seems that a single 4x4 keeps one end of the exhibit elevated (look inside the faint yellow circle I added to the photo).  Also note that aside from the helpful 4x4 the device seems designed to sit level.  It has feet at the head and a wider set of short feet at the foot end.

How do we explain the discrepancy between the painting and the museum exhibit?  Possibly the Khmer Rouge used water torture with and without an incline using the same or a similar device.  Possibly the museum placed the 4x4 to enable visitors to better view the exhibit.  Least likely, we should hope, is that the photographer had the piece repositioned to help emphasize the similarity of the Khmer Rouge to the CIA.

Mini-update:
I located another photograph that helps confirm that the museum piece is normally displayed on an incline (making the conspiracy option even less likely), and the image also suggests that more than one 4x4 supports the end near the paintings.

Update #2:

Amid some doubt as to whether either Thiessen or I correctly identified the painting Amanpour spoke of, I decided to post portion the earlier CNN transcript that Thiessen quoted back to Amanpour, but with a bit more of the surrounding context included:

Take water torture, for instance. Van Nath remembers it as if it were yesterday. I gasped as I entered a room filled with his vivid depictions.

One of his paintings shows a prisoner blindfolded and hoisted onto a makeshift scaffold by two guards. He is then lowered head first into a massive barrel of water. Another shows a prisoner with cloth over his face, writhing as an interrogator pours water over his head.

Van Nath still remembers the accompanying screams: "It sounded like when we are really in pain, choking in water," he told me. "The sound was screaming, from the throat. I suppose they could not bear the torture.

"Whenever we heard the noises we were really shocked and scared. We thought one day they will do the same thing to us."

As he talked and showed me around, my mind raced to the debate in the United States over this same tactic used on its prisoners nearly 40 years later. I stared blankly at another of Van Nath's paintings. This time a prisoner is submerged in a life-size box full of water, handcuffed to the side so he cannot escape or raise his head to breathe. His interrogators, arrayed around him, are demanding information.

I asked Van Nath whether he had heard this was once used on America's terrorist suspects. He nodded his head. "It's not right," he said.

But I pressed him: Is it torture? "Yes," he said quietly, "it is severe torture. We could try it and see how we would react if we are choking under water for just two minutes. It is very serious."

Is it serious to falsely portray what the United States did to detainees? Yes, it is very serious.



1/21/2009:  Edited the post to significantly reduce the number of times "significantly" occurs.

Malcolm Nance and waterboarding

Malcolm Nance offered one of the most important opinions on waterboarding as the debate moved public. His testimony carried considerable weight because of his professional experience. As Nance tells it:

As a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, I know the waterboard personally and intimately. Our staff was required to undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception.
(nydailynews.com)

Nance's descriptions of waterboarding helped sell the notion that waterboarding should count as torture. Ed Morrissey, once of Captain's Quarters and now blogging at Hot Air, was influenced by Nance, but during the Michael Mukasey nomination battle wrote about the discrepancies between Nance's descriptions and that of other SERE instructors:

In his column at the Daily News, Nance wrote that "pint after pint" of water enters the lungs, and that the subjects actually start to drown. That description got disputed in two separate interviews I conducted, one with a former SERE instructor and another with a SEAL. The latter, whom I have known personally for years, explained why Nance's previous description made no sense. Mike's secondary specialty in the SEAL force is as an advanced combat medic. Without getting into specifics on his experiences, Mike strongly disputes Nance's exaggerations of waterboarding. There is a word for people who have "pint after pint of water" filling their lungs: dead.
(Captain's Quarters)

Nance appeared to have exaggerated his account beyond what he taught or experienced during SERE training. But setting that aside, Nance's experience with SERE left him only partially qualified to judge the CIA-administered versions of waterboarding, simply because Nance was apparently not in a position to know specifically what the CIA was doing.

Quite possibly, Nance would judge that any version of waterboarding is severe enough to qualify as torture. But his opinion does not matter so much as what the law has to say on the matter.

***

When I started this post, I had been unaware that Morrissey had critically reviewed Nance's testimony. Part of my motivation for treating this issue was Morrissey's initial acceptance of that testimony. The subsequent declassification of various memos has helped to clarify Nance's role; though he is ideologically committed in opposition to waterboarding based on his acceptance that it is torture, his testimony was probably offered in good faith in spite of any exaggerations. At least some of that exaggeration probably occurred simply because Nance was not precisely familiar with limitations the CIA set on its practice of waterboarding.

My post is simply an effort to help set that part of the record straight.

Piquing PolitiFact: How many times was waterboarding used?

Fresh from criticizing PolitiFact for flubbing its analysis attached to a statement from former vice president Dick Cheney, I e-mailed the Truth-O-Meter at PolitiFact asking for a resolution of the discrepancy between number of sessions reported in the so-called "torture memos" and the reports from the terrorists as given to the Red Cross.

Dear Truth-O-Meter,

I have encountered numerous news reports to the effect that Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were waterboarded 83 and 183 times, respectively.

But testimony from both men collected by the Red Cross appears to directly contradict that, as Zubaydah told of 10 waterboarding sessions and KSM said that he experienced 5 sessions.
http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf
(see page 10)

How is this discrepancy explained?

Cheers,
Bryan

If my inquiry is not ignored (I expect it to be ignored), then PolitiFact will be set up to either publish a piece contradicting one of its earlier stories or forced into correcting the same earlier story.

I expect PolitiFact will do nothing to correct the misinformation it reinforces in its readership, but I look forward to seeing my expectation dashed.

Grading PolitiFact: Cheney on how many were subjected to waterboarding

An easy one, but PolitiFact found a way to blow it.

Fact-checking the fact checkers

The issue:

During a recent speech, Dick Cheney asserted that, despite a continued furor over waterboarding, it was administered to only three terrorists. PolitiFact relates it like so:

"You've heard endlessly about waterboarding," Cheney said in his address at the American Enterprise Institute. "It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about his beheading of Daniel Pearl.

The fact checkers:

Robert Farley: writer, researcher
Bill Adair: editor

Analysis:

To make a short story even shorter, Farley got this one right. Three detainees were subjected to waterboarding, and PolitiFact graded Cheney with its highest degree of accuracy ("True"). So what's the problem?

Farley put an odd focus on a marginally related subject, that of how many times the three detainees were waterboarded, and very probably got it wrong.

Farley used a New York Times story as his source, apparently assuming that its status the "the paper of record" would ensure accuracy. Fact-checkers ought to guard themselves against such assumptions. Numerous reports surfaced since the Times story calling its numbers into question.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program told FOX News that the much-cited figure represents the number of times water was poured onto Mohammed's face -- not the number of times the CIA applied the simulated-drowning technique on the terror suspect. According to a 2007 Red Cross report, he was subjected a total of "five sessions of ill-treatment."

"The water was poured 183 times -- there were 183 pours," the official explained, adding that "each pour was a matter of seconds."

The Times and dozens of other outlets wrote that the CIA also waterboarded senior Al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah 83 times, but Zubayda himself, a close associate of Usama bin Laden, told the Red Cross he was waterboarded no more than 10 times.

(Fox News)

The Times and Farley no doubt expect that the poor terrorists were so traumatized by the technique that they could not accurately recall how many sessions they had endured.

Abu Zubaydah:

The suffocation procedure was applied during five sessions of ill-treatment that took place during an approximately one-week intense period of interrogation in Afghanistan in 2002.
(page 10)

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

The procedure was applied during five different sessions during the first month of interrogation in his third place of detention.
(page 10)

"In addition I was subjected to 'water-boarding' on five occasions, all of which occurred during that first month."
(page 35)

Have the facts been checked adequately if the assessment includes just one of two widely discrepant accounts, and stories purporting to explain the discrepancy are simply ignored as though the writer was unfamiliar with them?

I don't think so.


The grades:

Robert Farley: D+
Bill Adair: D+

Both men pass merely on the strength of evaluating the main issue correctly. Including the minor issue was questionable, and getting it wrong is unacceptable. Or should be unacceptable.


Afterword:

Guidelines established by the Bush administration set limits on the number of sessions and duration of waterboarding.

You have informed us that the waterboard may be approved for use with a given detainee only during, at most, one single 30-day period, and that during that period, the waterboard technique may be used on no more than five days. We further understand that in any 24-hour period, interrogators may use no more than two "sessions" of the waterboard on the subject - and that no session may last more than two hours. Moreover, during any session, the number of individual applications of water lasting 10 seconds or longer may not exceed six. The maximum length of any application of water is 40 seconds (you have informed us that this maximum has rarely been reached). Finally the total cumulative time of all applications of whatever length in a 24-hour period may not exceed 12 minutes.

[W]here authorized, it may be used for two “sessions” per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water application. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

(Bradbury memo, via waterboarding.org)

The math:

• Mohammed and Zubayduh both reported a number of waterboarding sessions consistent with the limitation of five days in a 30 day period.
• Five times at two sessions per day is 10 sessions (probably not a "session" as used in terrorists' descriptions) in a month.
• Six applications of water multiplied by 10 sessions comes to 60 applications of water in a month.

Sixty, of course, is less than 83, but it remains unresolved whether "applications" as used in the CIA descriptions matches the use of the same term in the Bradbury memo. It may have been necessary to use more than one container of water to sustain a 40 second segment. Or the CIA may have exceeded the guidelines. Either might be the case, not to rule out both.

Kathleen Parker on waterboarding

Bless Kathleen Parker and (at last) the Washington Post.

A reasonable account of the controversy from the mainstream press was long overdue, and Parker delivers.

Whether one agrees with the Bybee-Yoo interpretation is a difference of opinion but nothing more. Any fair assessment has to include consideration of context and distinctions that matter, including the definition of waterboarding, which varies according to country and century.

I have no interest in defending one against the other, but there are significant differences between what the Japanese did during World War II, for example, and what was authorized by the U.S. government.

The latter paragraph represents a critically important point with respect to the attacks on the practice of waterboarding. The press was guilty of promoting bad information about waterboarding, such as what it was and how it compared with past versions of "water torture" and "the water cure."

As previously noted at this blog, Judge Evan Wallach and the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law played a key role in poisoning our well of knowledge. Props to the Post for taking a notable step toward correcting the record.

Disinformation on waterboarding from The New York Times

In past entries on waterboarding I've demonstrated various ways in which the media, including The New York Times, have provided bad information.

Yesterday's edition provides yet another outstanding example of disinformative journalism from Brian Stelter. I do not see where the story is marked as "news analysis," but plainly it fails to qualify as news reporting in the legendary tradition of the Gray Lady.

It is instructive to note the Times' presentation of this story. Here is how the story links from a different page (online edition):

clipped from topics.nytimes.com

How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

By BRIAN STELTER

An official’s claim that waterboarding yielded quick results was widely repeated, but has now been discredited.

The official's claim that waterboarding produced "quick results" has been discredited, supposedly.

Now on to the story and its headline.

How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

What type of objective data could ever justify that headline? I have no idea, other than the Times is reporting somebody's opinion about it without crediting that entity in the headline. In this case, the opinion seems to be that of the reporter/news analyst.

On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.

Keep your eye on the pea. Kiriacou said that waterboarding yielded results "very quickly," and supposedly that is the claim that we will see discredited.

Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”

Keep your eye on the pea. If Zubaydah gave information within a day of being waterboarded for 30 to 35 seconds, then Kiriacou's claim that waterboarding worked quickly has good support. Whether that one instance of waterboarding continued "(f)rom that day on" is not a measure of how quickly it worked but a measure of the enduring effectiveness of that one session.

His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”

If Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, then it contradicts the notion that he was waterboarded once and cooperated happily ever after. But do Kiriacou's claims that waterboarding worked quickly and resulted in actionable intelligence suffer at all? We have no evidence from Stelter to that effect.

But he presses that point nonetheless in his subsequent paragraph:

Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique.

In addition to the pea, let us keep our attention on what has actually been discredited (the notion that one waterboarding session led to enduring cooperation). Supposing that the discredited portions of Kiriacou's testimony did heighten public perception of the effectiveness of waterboarding (this news report has offered us no evidence that is the case except for the opinion of "some" anonymous "critics"). Of note, the remainder of the paragraph gives us a quotation from former Human Rights Watch lawyer John Sifton to the effect that Kiriacou's statements "sanitized" waterboarding.

Is the issue supposed to be the effectiveness or the harshness? Does somebody need to instruct the Times' writers and editors regarding the organization of information into appropriate groups?

After spending a few paragraphs on the historical context of Kiriacou's news appearances, Stelter apparently returns to the issue of discredited information from Kiriacou, but our pea remains out of view:

At the time, Mr. Kiriakou appeared to lend credibility to the prior press reports that quoted anonymous former government employees who had implied that waterboarding was used sparingly.

If only a handful of terrorist suspects were waterboarded, then that is using waterboarding sparingly. Minus quotations from or at least identification of the "prior press reports," we have little reason to trust that Stelter is not putting one over on us. Put nicely, his is not a compelling argument.

Stelter himself seems to lose track of the pea for a couple of paragraphs, one featuring a quotation about the "fiendishness" of the CIA, before providing another relevant tidbit about Kiraicou:

Mr. Kiriakou refused an interview request last week. In a statement to ABC, he said he was aware only of Mr. Zubaydah’s being waterboarded “on one occasion.”

As noted above, the number of times waterboarding was performed is irrelevant to how quickly it works, unless it is alleged that it resulted in no useful information until after it had been used many times and presumably over a longer period of time. Stelter has the pea under the shells, and they're moving briskly over the course of his story.

Oh, and about that "sparingly" thing--Stelter gets back to that in paragraph 17:

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said: “This agency did not publicly disclose the frequency with which the waterboard was used, noting only that it was employed with three detainees. If reporters got that wrong, they weren’t misled from here.”

Good point, Gimigliano.

But Stelter is back to discredited claims, albeit he seems to have lost track of which claims were discredited and which have not:

In the days after Mr. Kiriakou’s media blitz, his claims were repeated by an array of other outlets. For instance, the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace cited the 35 seconds claim to ask a congressman whether the interrogation program was “really so bad.”Months later the claims continued to be amplified; the National Review editor Jonah Goldberg used Mr. Kiriakou’s assertions in a column last year to argue that the waterboarding was “right and certainly defensible.”

Are we supposed to conclude that if Zubaydah was waterboarded on over 80 occasions then it is irrelevant how long each session lasted?

clipped from thehamptons.files.wordpress.com

Mark Danner, a journalist who has written extensively about the covert program for The New York Review of Books, said the news reports had fed the idea that brutal interrogations could instantly glean information about terrorist plans.

And Danner may well be right. But was he talking about mere collection of information that may or may not be reliable information, or was he talking about instant access to reliable information? The latter would very probably represent a poor understanding of the process. The former does not appear to have been brought to serious doubt. Stelter fails his duty as a reporter by leaving the issue unclear.

“There was a completely mistaken impression put about that this technique was not cruel because it could break detainees so quickly,” (Danner) said.

That impression certainly did not come from Kiriacou, who stated plainly that he felt waterboarding was torture. The examples Stelter provides from media reports through this point of the story concern not whether the technique was cruel but whether it was effective and whether or not it should be legal. After all, even the U.S. Constitution bars only "cruel and unusual" punishment. Cruel may be Constitutional and legal.

The rest of the story meanders around various opinions of waterboarding. In effect, Stelter has lost track of his own pea.

That's OK. I was paying attention on his behalf.

The story provides reasonable evidence that some information implied in Kiriacou's testimony was misleading. That is, that one session of waterboarding produced enduring cooperation from the detainee in question.

The "pea," the idea that waterboarding produced quick results and actionable intelligence, was never addressed in the story except obliquely and unconvincingly.

Likewise, the notion that that the Kiriacou interviews "tilted" the debate in some significant way is not established in anything akin to the sense we might expect in a news story. Instead, we get a generalized paraphrase of anonymous sources and the statement from one activist expressing that opinion without any objective data in support.

All in all, an excellent excuse to once again use the tag "journalists reporting badly."

Reason Online muddles waterboarding

Cathy Young waded into the waterboarding debate over at Reason Online recently.

My series of posts on waterboarding have argued that the media have served us rather poorly regarding the debate. Young falls somewhat short of providing the antidote.

Young starts by calling the detainee treatment issue the most contentious of President Obama's young presidency. That declaration may be premature given the burgeoning controversy over the economic stimulus package, but Young made me chuckle with her assertion that Democrats found Obama's move to close Gitmo in a year "Lincolnesque." Would that be the same Lincoln who suspended Habeas corpus during the Civil War to make things tougher on Southern sympathizers?

That historical gaffe aside--perhaps it can be pinned on the Democrats to whom Young refers--Young sets forth a reasonable proposition: that the issue is more complicated than either partisan extreme lets on.

But a few paragraphs later, Young perhaps oversimplifies the issue:

Semantic hair-splitting aside, waterboarding is torture. It has been widely recognized as such for a long time—specifically, by the United States when committed by oppressive foreign regimes. It is also difficult to argue in good faith that exposure to extreme cold and heat or being chained in a painfully contorted position are not torture or its moral equivalent.

Young's claim that waterboarding is a recognized form of torture based on past conflicts probably stems from the type of flawed research that The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law published in an essay by Evan Wallach. Wallach's essay brims with equivocal language respecting waterboarding, as numerous approaches to simulated drowning all get similarly characterized. Forced aspiration of water or even seawater repeatedly over a period of hours is clearly quite different from the waterboarding technique used by the CIA, even if there are some similarities as well. Drawing the easy-yet-inaccurate comparisons as Young does is the wrong way to approach the debate. That's assuming that one desires an honest debate, of course.

But I like the way Young wrapped up her column.

Obama's statement in his inaugural speech that "we reject the false choice between our safety and our ideals" was a noble sentiment. Yet there is a certain arrogance in the assertion that we can balance safety and idealism with no difficult compromises - and it seems that, in practice, Obama is well aware of the need for such compromises.

I hope she's right.

Torture, out in Left Field

Though it can be torture simply reading Kathy's tortured arguments over at "Comments from Left Field," Kathy's post on waterboarding is worth drawing out for commentary because she makes what is probably an accurate observation.

I’m starting to notice a trend among far right bloggers. Instead of insisting that particular interrogation techniques like waterboarding are not torture, and that what the rest of the world calls torture is not torture at all but simply “aggressive interrogation,” bloggers on the right are starting to acknowledge — sometimes tacitly, sometimes outright — that torture is torture.

Leaving aside the prejudicial tautology at the end (it scalds the sensibilities considerably less if read as "that waterboarding is torture"), I find it quite plausible that "far right bloggers" (and their ilk!) would refer to waterboarding as torture more often now than previously.

Kathy doesn't venture an opinion regarding the explanation for the shift. But I think I can provide one. Congress passed legislation that pretty much defines waterboarding as torture whereas there was no similarly clear reason to classify it as such beforehand. John Yoo's original memo regarding the legal ramifications of enhanced interrogation techniques, as they were apparently known at the time he wrote, provided a pretty good explanation as to why. So bloggers were quite reasonable to leave the classification ambiguous. For one thing, as I have pointed out in my posts on waterboarding, most of us do not really have an accurate description of the technique or techniques.

***

I posted a comment out in Left Field asking Kathy why she thinks waterboarding is torture. Perhaps some reasonable debate will ensue.

1. Bryan on July 6th, 2008 9:00 pm

   Kathy, have you gotten around to writing why you think waterboarding is torture? I’d like to hear the specific rationale you would use.

Hitchens on waterboarding

Christopher Hitchens was waterboarded. Though not, as one might expect, to inquire as to how he could possibly accept Richard Dawkins' view of the anthropic principle. Hitch was playing the role of journalist, which he does quite perfectly much of the time. Accordingly, his opinion on the procedure ought to receive a serious reception.

Hitchens makes clear from the start of his story that he considers waterboarding a form of torture. Hitchens, however, also presents the opposite case.

Maybe I am being premature in phrasing it thus. Among the veterans there are at least two views on all this, which means in practice that there are two opinions on whether or not “waterboarding” constitutes torture. I have had some extremely serious conversations on the topic, with two groups of highly decent and serious men, and I think that both cases have to be stated at their strongest.

The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

(Vanity Fair)

It is perhaps possible to detect signs of insincerity in Hitchens' presentation of this side of things, but the essence of the argument seems intact.

In making the case for waterboarding as torture, however, Hitchens doesn't do much better. Though he could have drawn simply from his own experience, a ghastly one that receives the customarily creative and erudite literary treatment from Hitchens, he instead hands off to Malcolm Nance. Nance is the serious figure who testified about waterboarding before Congress and offered a description of waterboarding that appears at odds in some respects with personal accounts like Hitchens'.

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

I continue to find this argument unpersuasive, since, as with Evan Wallach's essay in The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, it rests on an equivocal understanding of waterboarding. That is, waterboarding as Hitchens experienced it is treated as identical with the methods used by the Japanese and the Germans even though significant dissimilarities existed.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

The second objection has obtained some truth over time as the Geneva conventions have received the "living Constitution" treatment. Known terrorists, via loophole, get the same treatment as either innocent civilians or legitimate members of the military. The conventions grew out of a world culture that respected military action as a legitimate expression of diplomacy (the realist view). The argument Hitchens borrows from Nance here doesn't follow, for it presupposes an inability to reach new international agreements that would protect Americans from those who pay attention to those sorts of agreements. It is worth noting, of course, that Japan, which provided one of the most egregious examples of wartime behavior, signed the Geneva Conventions. Our soldiers received scant protection.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

Once the invention of a method for extracting only reliable information is complete I'll be able to pay proper attention to the third point. Credit Hitchens for the proper presentation of this point, though. Often it is simply said that waterboarding produces only bad information. Reports from solid sources appear to indicate that waterboarding elicits at least some reliable and actionable information.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Waterboarding does not open the door from point number four. Asking the "ticking bomb" question opens that door if any measures beyond normal interrogation are considered. Waterboarding is apparently not currently on the table, with legislation having passed that ties the CIA to the same interrogation methods as the armed services. To the extent that waterboarding was used, it opens that door--but right now that door has been shut so the premise of the point appears to have crumbled.

Updated July 6, 2008 for spelling and clarity

Does waterboarding work?

The Blog at The Weekly Standard posted an exchange between Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, and political science professor Dr. Stephen David. Hat tip to Hugh Hewitt.

DR. DAVID: Let me talk about torture. Is waterboarding a form of torture? Is it an effective means of extracting information? If it is a form of torture or if it is not an effective means of extracting information, why will not the Intelligence Community, the CIA foreswear its use?

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Let’s take it from the beginning. Has waterboarding ever been used by a professional organization whose mission is to extract information? The answer is yes. You might ask what are the circumstances? Three times. Situations where there’s been interrogation over a period of time. It was unsuccessful. Water boarding was used and then information started to flow.

Just to put it in context, probably upwards of a quarter to a third of all the information generated in this period of time came from these three individuals. It’s saved lives.

(The Weekly Standard)

There's more to the exchange, so use the links.

*****

PolitiFact botches another one

I've been sitting on this one for a number of days because I've been engaged with a time-intensive non-writing project lately.

I haven't been reading The St. Petersburg Times'/Congressional Quarterly's PolitiFact regularly. I just happened to stumble onto this entry while doing some research.

History supports McCain’s stance on waterboarding

The morning after the CNN/YouTube debate in St. Petersburg, John McCain remained firm in his stand against the use of an interrogation technique called “waterboarding.” He cited solid history to buttress his position.
(PolitiFact)

Though I intend to vote for McCain as things currently stand, the PolitiFact analysis is out in left field.

It's a bit difficult to blame them, however. They uncritically accepted a shoddy piece of scholarship by Judge Evan Wallach, published by credulous student editors at the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Wallach's carelessness is summed up by his blanket treatment of "water cure," "water torture" and "waterboarding" despite the fact that the descriptions vary substantially between the most common descriptions of the former two and the latter.

Here's the statement from McCain that receives PolitiFact's highest mark for veracity:

“I forgot to mention last night that following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding,” he told reporters at a campaign event.

Wallach's essay (rough draft found here) provides no support for even the existence of a "charge" of waterboarding. The essay most closely approaches that judgment when it makes the claim that a technique similar to modern waterboarding served to support a charge of treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Sawada and his co-defendants were not specifically charged with torture in the trial charges and specifications.
("Drop by Drop" by Evan Wallach)

They weren't specifically charged with waterboarding, either.

McCain and PolitiFact were probably both suckered by the Wallach essay, figuring that that Columbia Journal of Transnational Law wouldn't publish it without careful review. The carelessness of PolitiFact is nonetheless painfully evident in that they ignored McCain's specific claim relative to the content of Wallach's flawed essay.

Here's how PolitiFact rated McCain over the statement:

clipped from www.politifact.com

The rating means nothing more than how much McCain's statement accords with a particular orthodoxy. It is fairly certain that McCain truly believes what he's saying, so it wouldn't make sense to suggest that he lied about it. Likewise, the workers at PolitiFact almost certainly have absolutely no thought of misleading those who make use of their, um, service.

But they blew it again on this one.


My take on waterboarding.

*****

Update June 16, 2024: Updated the link to the rough draft of Wallach's "Drop by Drop," using the Internet Archive. The old link had stopped working.

Waterboarding.org

Waterboarding.org ostensibly exists to clear up confusion about waterboarding.

I take the the owners of the site at their word on that, but the enterprise is off to a shaky start.

They offer a page featuring "firsthand accounts" of waterboarding, prominently featuring that of Malcolm Nance (noted here). The other account, by Henri Alleg, was from Algeria in the 1950s.
The Nance account features "pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs" and Alleg mentioned (albeit not reproduced at Waterboarding.org) "the captain, who, with a cigarette between his lips, was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw out the water I had swallowed."

The problem, as I noted with Nance's congressional testimony, is the apparent lack of congruence between the firsthand accounts and other contemporary accounts of the technique. And that's where Waterboarding.org comes back into play. Another page at the site describes waterboarding:

Pour water onto the inclined face so that the water runs into the upturned mouth and nose. The water stays in the head, filling the throat, mouth, and sinuses with water. The lungs don't fill up with water so your prisoner doesn't asphyxiate, but they *do* feel their entire upper respiratory system from sinuses to trachea filled with water, "simulating drowning". You're drowning your subject from the inside, filling their head and neck. The lungs stay out of the water, keeping oxygen in the blood and prolonging the glubbing.

If "(t)he lungs don't fill up with water" then why does Nance describe the opposite?

The folks at Waterboarding.org have their work cut out for them. The harsh interrogation techniques employed by the United States are classified secrets. Either the information will be leaked illegally or come from someone to whom the information was illegally leaked, unless the information simply isn't reliable (in which case it could come from anyone!).

The desire to bring the techniques to light is partially understandable--we can't know what we're talking about unless the techniques receive clear description. On the other hand, the clear description may remove some of the value of the techniques (which is the main reason they're kept secret in the first place).

There is a place for secrecy when it comes to interrogation techniques. The desire for clarity is laudable in terms of ultimately deciding whether or not the United States ought to used harsh interrogation methods where those methods arguably (if not in fact) constitute torture. That decision probably best rests with bipartisan groups within the government (oversight committees) rather than with the general public.

*****

Congress briefed on waterboarding

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

(Washington Post)

The story goes on to mention one protest that stemmed from the initial briefing. It came from Jane Harman (D, Calif.), not Nancy Pelosi (D, Calif.).


Hat tip to Captain's Quarters.

*****

Waterboarding in the news

News about waterboarding has spiked this week amid revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped waterboarding sessions.

The most interesting part of the Reuters account occurred on the third of three pages (a pox on the inverted pyramid!).

He said the techniques were "lawful, safe and effective," and approved by the Justice Department and executive branch. But the CIA wanted to make sure it was within the law, "So, on its own, the CIA began to videotape interrogations," he said.

He said the CIA stopped the taping because officials concluded it was not needed as a backup to the agency's other means of documenting interrogations. It destroyed the tapes after making sure they had no more intelligence value and were not relevant to any inquiries.

(Reuters)

I've known too many journalists to trust their paraphrasing, and in the above account two paraphrases appear to work against each other.
1) CIA taped to makes sure it was within the law
2) CIA stopped taping because taping not needed to back up other documentation of interrogations

If they're taping to make sure the technique is within the law, they really only need to tape a given technique once. If that's the sole reason they're doing the taping then no additional reason is needed to stop taping. The second paraphrase implies that the taping was done to provide backup documentation.

Thus, the statement that the CIA stopped the taping because the additional documentation was not needed implies another purpose for the taping.

If I'm the editor I have the reporter(s) clarify that point.

*****

More on water boarding: Captain's Quarters interviews a SEAL

Cap'n Ed promised a continuation of his series on water boarding. Today he made good on the promise by interviewing "Mike the SEAL."

Mike's secondary specialty in the SEAL force is as an advanced combat medic. Without getting into specifics on his experiences, Mike strongly disputes Nance's exaggerations of waterboarding. There is a word for people who have "pint after pint of water" filling their lungs: dead. "In fact," according to Mike, "they would be very, very dead. By definition, anyone who has drowned is in fact dead. A large percentage of true drownings do not involve ANY water entering the lungs because the epiglottis closes off the air passages as water enters the throat. People who die immediately from being immersed in water actually die of suffocation, not water entering their lungs. Not only that, many people who survive a near-drowning who do have even small amounts of water that slip by the epiglottis and enter their lungs can die later of fluid shifts and pneumonia. I can assure you that we do not use any technique that involves true suffocation or aspiration of water into the lungs. One cannot get questions to answers from people who suffocate or have water fill their lungs in any interrogation technique, which would render that technique more than a little self-defeating.
(Captain's Quarters)

Mike's report helps confirm my suspicion that a number of commentators have sold a bill of goods regarding their opinion of water boarding.

*****

Water boarding: The Daniel Levin matter (Updated)

Disinformation seems to dog the issue of water boarding like BDS dogs liberal democrats.

And perhaps that's no coincidence.

Media reports earlier this month made much of the story of Daniel Levin, a DOJ employee charged with updating administration policy on torture.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.

(ABC News)

The thing that should stand out in this report (and it seems standard in related reporting, from what I can tell) is the lack of comment from either Levin or from any explicitly identified person. The report is based on anonymous sources (they may be known government officials providing information on condition of anonymity; "deep background" or that sort of thing).

Take a look at the photo/graphic.

clipped from abcnews.go.com

Note the portion that the media have helpfully highlighted: "Torture is abhorrent."

The thrust of the story, supposedly, is that Levin thought that water boarding was torture and wrote that in the memo. Is "torture is abhorrent" the best they could do? The same story links to a .pdf of Levin's memo. The .pdf is protected against cut and paste, and the search function doesn't work, either. From what I can tell, the memo does not specifically mention water boarding at all.

And note again the third paragraph I quoted from the story. Levin's opinion seems to be that water boarding would not (necessarily) qualify as torture if done on a limited basis and under close supervision ("could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision").

And with that in mind, have a look at whack-job Keith Olbermann:



"'Water boarding is torture,' Daniel Levin was to write."

If that's what Levin wrote, then where did he write it?

Olbermann's take on the story isn't worth a day's flatulence from a flatworm if we don't get to the source of the claim.


Update:
I still haven't located the source for Olbermann's claim, but I did locate a version of the Levin 2004 memo that permits cuts, pastes, and searches.

In Simpson v. Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, 326 F.3d 230 (D.C. Cir. 2003), the D.C. Circuit again considered the types of acts that constitute torture under the TVPA definition. The plaintiff alleged, among other things, that Libyan authorities had held her incommunicado and threatened to kill her if she tried to leave. See id. at 232, 234. The court acknowledged that "these alleged acts certainly reflect a bent toward cruelty on the part of their perpetrators," but, reversing the district court, went on to hold that "they are not in themselves so unusually cruel or sufficiently extreme and outrageous as to constitute torture within the meaning of the [TVPA]." Id. at 234. Cases in which courts have found torture suggest the nature of the extreme conduct that falls within the statutory definition. See, e.g., Hilao v. Estate of Marcos, 103 F.3d 789, 790-91, 795 (9th Cir. 1996) (concluding that a course of conduct that included, among other things, severe beatings of plaintiff, repeated threats of death and electric shock, sleep deprivation, extended shackling to a cot (at times with a towel over his nose and mouth and water poured down his nostrils), seven months of confinement in a "suffocatingly hot" and cramped cell, and eight years of solitary or near-solitary confinement, constituted torture); Mehinovic v. Vuckovic, 198 F. Supp. 2d 1322, 1332-40, 1345-46 (N.D. Ga. 2002) (concluding that a course of conduct that included, among other things, severe beatings to the genitals, head, and other parts of the body with metal pipes, brass knuckles, batons, a baseball bat, and various other items; removal of teeth with pliers; kicking in the face and ribs; breaking of bones and ribs and dislocation of fingers; cutting a figure into the victim's forehead; hanging the victim and beating him; extreme limitations of food and water; and subjection to games of "Russian roulette," constituted torture); Daliberti v. Republic of Iraq, 146 F. Supp. 2d 19, 22-23 (D.D.C. 2001) (entering default judgment against Iraq where plaintiffs alleged, among other things, threats of "physical torture, such as cutting off . . . fingers, pulling out . . . fingernails," and electric shocks to the testicles); Cicippio v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 18 F. Supp. 2d 62, 64-66 (D.D.C. 1998) (concluding that a course of conduct that included frequent beatings, pistol whipping, threats of imminent death, electric shocks, and attempts to force confessions by playing Russian roulette and pulling the trigger at each denial, constituted torture).
(usdoj.gov)

Emphasis added to text emphasizing use of water.

*****

The debate on water boarding

Cap'n Ed over at Captain's Quarters has promised a followup to a post he offered last week on water boarding.

The Cap'n gave his tentative stamp of approval to a story on water boarding by Malcolm Nance. Nance claimed a degree of expertise, and judged that water boarding is unequivocal torture.

As Cap'n Ed since noted, the commentary on that post erupted in controversy. One aspect of the controversy I found particularly intriguing was Nance's claim that he underwent waterboarding in training with the result that he had water poured directly into his lungs (not that it bypassed his throat or nasal passages!).

From what I understand about modern water boarding, the prisoner is stabilized in supine on an incline, with the result that water would have to flow uphill to enter the lungs. Now, given proper conditions it is certainly possible to draw water up an incline to enter the lungs. The normal use of a soda straw attests to that readily enough.

The thing is, water boarding techniques (such as compressing the chest and covering the mouth and nose with cellophane) seem to make that type of aspiration by suction difficult if not impossible. As a result, Nance's testimony seemed dubious.

In the followup, Cap'n Ed promised to provide accounts by two sources with the same type of qualifications clalimed by Nance. Ed drops the hint that both were appalled by Nance's account.

I will look forward to the next chapter in this story.

*****