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.

Blumner shows how consistency isn't always a virtue

Credit this week for Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner of the St. Peterburg Times' editoral page. She demonstrated consistency in condemning President Obama on the issue of presidential power for which she has excoriated President Bush in the past.

But Blumner's column also provides evidence of the unfortunate type of consistency:

These rhetorical criticisms that the candidate leveled at Bush are sad reminders of what we expected of Obama. He was to dismantle the prior occupant's jerry-built rationales for unlimited and unanswerable executive power. But Obama's refusal to follow the strictures of the War Powers Act says that he, too, is willing to manipulate language to ignore inconvenient limits on his power. Bush had John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel approving the use of torture by absurdly defining it so narrowly that it no longer included waterboarding.

The unfortunate type of inconsistency occurs when one consistently condemns something like waterboarding without producing a coherent argument.

Blumner called waterboarding torture in part because of deeply flawed essay by Judge Evan Wallach.  Wallach's essay treated substantially different types of techniques under the term "waterboarding" in order to argue it constituted torture.  Wallach's argument wallowed in the fallacy of equivocation throughout.

Suppose somebody buys an equivocation-laced argument such as Wallach's.  What better way to attack the argument on the other side than by claiming that its definitions are too narrow?  That's exactly what Blumner does.

Let's hope Blumner eventually expands her use of the good kind of consistency to avoid the bad kind.

WaPo's Fact Checker weighs in: Did harsh interrogation help nab bin Laden?

The press treatment of waterboarding has interested me for some time, so naturally the fact check to determine whether waterboarding helped pin down bin Laden's location piqued my curiosity.

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler picked up with a minor war of words between former Bush administration attorney general Michael Mucasey and Sen. John McCain.  I'll start with Kessler's conclusion and work back from there:

We do not have enough information to make a definitive judgment. But it appears that Mukasey is straining to make a connection between the killing of bin Laden and the harsh interrogation techniques that appears, at best, tangential. Otherwise, he would not have had to resort to verbal sleight of hand to make his case. McCain, by contrast, appears to clearly connect the dots from the courier to bin Laden, citing information derived from conventional techniques.

At the same time, while the enhanced techniques may not have provided the Rosetta stone to bin Laden’s whereabouts, Mukasey may be right when he asserts that valuable leads in the broader war against al-Qaeda were derived through these techniques.

We probably will never know whether the same information -– or more accurate information -- could have been obtained through conventional interrogation. The use of these techniques also harmed the U.S. image overseas — another question U.S, policymakers will have to balance in the future.

Kessler did a better job than I thought at first.  The first paragraph of his concluding section made it appear that he had largely bought McCain's view and discounted Mukasey's.

Marc Thiessen's book "Courting Disaster" makes clear the role of enhanced interrogation.  It is not used to elicit information from a detainee but rather used to make detainees cooperate with "conventional techniques."  Thus every piece of information will occur as a result of using "conventional techniques."  But not every piece of information gathered using conventional techniques would necessarily obtain all the information accrued after using enhanced techniques.  In particular, the detainee might delay in revealing information minus the use of enhanced interrogation.  But it's hard to say if such delays might have obscured the trail to bin Laden.

Kessler might have been clearer about the role of enhanced interrogation, but his conclusion is substantially correct.

Presidential approval of waterboarding: "Damn right."

George W. Bush has refreshed the topic of waterboarding in the news with a portion of his memoir.  Bush wrote that he responded to the request to use waterboarding on Khalid Sheik Mohammed with "Damn right."

The reporting leads to the same types of meandering circles of disinformation as it did in years past.

The normally estimable Thomas E. Ricks, for example:

In February 1968, a U.S. soldier was court-martialed simply for holding down a Vietnamese man while two Vietnamese soldiers waterboarded him, according to Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam. (329)

Ricks' reference leads to a single paragraph in Lewy's book.  Lewy's account describes the case as resulting in a "special court-martial."  A "special" court martial is "often characterized as a misdemeanor court."  If Ricks' account conjured images of prolonged imprisonment or of execution then it succeeded in misleading readers.  More importantly, the Lewy's book recounted the court-martial incident by citing an announced U.S. policy of encouraging South Vietnamese forces to hew to compliance with the Geneva Conventions.  Thus any finding of the court with respect to the so-called "waterboarding" incident would likely take into account whether the victim was entitled to Geneva protections.  In short, the incident contributes virtually nothing (if anything) to our knowledge of the legal status of CIA waterboarding.

Yet Ricks follows with this:

I mention this because both George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney now have publicly admitted they were approving of waterboarding, a form of torture that once was a crime in the eyes of the U.S. government -- and still is under international laws.

Ricks appears to follow in the footsteps of Evan Wallach and others who use an equivocal definition of "waterboarding" along with spurious arguments to the effect that U.S. law forbids the practice.

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.

Blumner: Pay no attention to the Pelosi behind the curtain! We must bash Bush!

Editorial columnist Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner of The St. Petersburg Times is back with another clueless screed.

Oh, joy.

This week's column is a defense of Nancy Pelosi ... which is kind of another way of saying that the column is dedicated to bashing the Bush administration. The latter, coincidentally, is Blumñata's primary literary muse, at least over the past 10 years or so.

But we start with the recent dust-up between Speaker Pelosi and the CIA:

The CIA lies to Congress, at least it has many times in the past. We know it, and so do Republicans in Congress. Which is why all this faux patriotic indignation over the suggestion that the CIA misled Congress in briefings over detainee treatment is just raw political theater.

Is it?

George Tenet was running the CIA when the controversial briefings took place. Tenet was appointed by President Clinton and retained at his post by President Bush. Whom does the CIA serve? The president? Congress? Itself?

The indignation is not really over the suggestion that the CIA has misled Congress at various times. The indignation comes because Pelosi is alleging that the current CIA (under Obama) is currently misleading us when it contradicts Pelosi. And that, in turn, is important because what Pelosi knew and when she knew it is important if people are serious about prosecuting those who supported, protected and enabled enhanced interrogation methods employed during the Bush administration.

House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and other congressional Republicans are relishing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's tiff with the CIA regarding what she knew about waterboarding and when she knew it. Now they want an investigation ­— a ploy to keep the issue in the news, no doubt.

Given that we have two outcomes more likely than any other--either the Speaker of the House is telling a public whopper of a lie or the CIA is telling one of its own--why not? If either is true, isn't it important? Why would Blumner want that out of the news? Why not get behind Boehner on this one?

Pelosi says that she was misled by the CIA in a secret September 2002 briefing by not being told that detainees had already been subjected to waterboarding. The CIA counters with notes of the meeting that say she was informed that such techniques "had been employed."

Small potatos, here. The real issue is where Pelosi and the CIA agree: She was told that the administration had found enhanced interrogation methods legal. Pelosi registered no objection from her position of oversight. What did she think was the purpose of the briefing? Why tell Pelosi anything if she has no role in oversight?

But let's play along with Blumñata for now.

In the prior month a CIA detainee had been waterboarded 83 times.

Probably not. Though CIA documents report that 83 "sessions" were administered to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohammed's own recollections for that time limit the number to five. That is a big difference, and the solution to the discrepancy probably rests in the definitions of terms.

And it is a side issue, after all. Back to the Blumñata narrative:

While it is possible that Pelosi is conveniently not recalling properly, I think it is more likely that the CIA has it wrong, and the agency soft-pedaled to Congress what it was doing to prisoners.

And an editorial columnist is conveniently accorded the privilege of expressing opinion even in the midst of a newspaper that supposedly adheres to the objective standard of journalism.

What is her evidence? Most of it is essentially irrelevant. The CIA has, at various times in the past, intentionally give false information about its activities. On the other hand, members of Congress also frequently lie through their teeth, so I call that one a wash.

Unfortunately for Blumñata, that takes care of the bulk of her defense of Pelosi.

But we still have this:

(O)n the detainee issue specifically, the Washington Post reported in 2006 that Mary McCarthy, a former CIA deputy inspector general, was convinced that the CIA had lied in multiple congressional briefings about detainee treatment by failing to disclose the abuses or denying them outright.

Mary McCarthy. That former CIA deputy inspector general who was apparently dismissed for leaking classified information to the press? And who, according to the Washington Post story in question, made her alleged allegations through anonymous sources?

The reader may be interested in the fact that the St. Petersburg Times has a policy against reporting news based on anonymous sources. Blumñata just sidestepped that ethical barrier with a nifty head fake.

And now she sees herself behind the defensive backfield and approaching the goal line:

Ultimately, Pelosi vs. CIA is a sideshow to divert attention from the real issue, which is that our intelligence agency engaged in a pattern of torture and abuse of prisoners. Who knew about the abuse, when and who approved it are important questions, but they need to be posed to all the principals involved, including the former president and vice president.

Flag on the play.

The dispute between Pelosi and the CIA reveals exactly why neither the Democratic majority in Congress nor the Democratic administration under President Obama will pursue the investigation Blumñata wants: They know they won't be able to avoid sharing the blame. We can probably best measure Blumñata's realization of this via successive visits from Halley's Comet.

But it will be fun to watch her stew over the next four years while it doesn't happen, most likely blaming it on the relatively powerless Republicans.

When that is the kind of investigation Republican leaders want to launch, they'll finally be putting country before politics.

See what I mean? The Democrats don't need any help from the Republicans to launch a full investigation. President Obama can order one through the Department of Justice. The Democratic-controlled Congress can steamroll the tiny opposition and start up an investigation any time they like.

Squirm, Blumñata, squirm.

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.

The liberal mind: The Amazing Kathy

This will be cross-posted at my blog critiquing blogs (Bad Blogs' Blood).

"Kathy" is one of the main contributers to a trending liberal blog called "Comments from Left Field." Every so often I drop by there to see how liberals think, and to contribute to discussion threads. Unfortunately, it is all too apparent that I will have to keep searching for quality content from the left.

Not that I reached that conclusion only recently. But a recent exchange with Kathy on waterboarding provided such an astounding example of bankrupt thinking that I can't keep CFLF on the Sith blogroll at Sublime Bloviations, and moreover it is time to induct CFLF into the bad blogs list at Bad Blogs' Blood.

I found Kathy's approach to waterboarding typical of the left--in my experience, anyway--and therefore both fascinating and disturbing. Kathy thinks that waterboarding is obviously torture--and her opinion parallels Justice Potter Stewart's famous opinion on obscenity from Jacobellis v. Ohio: "I know it when I see it."

Having read the Bybee and Yoo memos, I was aware that the legal opinion on which the Bush administration relied rested largely on the distinction between "pain" and "extreme pain," the latter representing the concept of torture stated in the Convention Against Torture. Kathy used the Convention Against Torture as her source for the definition of torture, but denied that the CAT definition was ambiguous.

Given the relatively obvious demarcation problem with the CAT definition, I asked Kathy how we should distinguish between "pain" and "extreme pain." Though her posts in the discussion thread contained many errors, her response to that query serves as a clear representation of why a blogging Kathy will serve primarily to uneducate people, and why CFLF belongs on the bad blogs list. At least if she sticks to politics and world events instead of something about which she possesses genuine knowledge.

Enjoy:

Bryan:

Where do we draw the line between “severe” and non-severe? Do you know, since you do not find it the least bit ambiguous?

Kathy:

Common sense, not to mention intellectual honesty, would tell you that severity of suffering is defined by what the victim is feeling, not by what the torturer thinks he is feeling, or decides he will feel if a particular torture is done in a particular way.

As well, common sense would tell you that if the victim is screaming, or crying, or begging for the torture to stop, severe suffering is taking place.

And common sense should tell you that intentionally drowning someone to the point of blacking out and/or death — much less doing it 83 times, or 183 times — will cause severe suffering.

Finally, common sense will tell you that if the purpose of subjecting a person to waterboarding, or to sleep deprivation, or to excruciating stress positions, or to exploitation of phobias, is to force the victim to comply with your request for information or answers to specific questions, then the suffering really should probably be severe, since mild discomfort is probably not going to do the trick.

And yes, all of this IS obvious. Or should be, to a minimally intelligent and reasonable person.

So much so, in fact, that I feel I’ve entered some Alice in Wonderland world just by answering these questions.

Which is why I won’t, anymore.

I expect that most people who seriously follow the news would realize that legal standards based on subjective impressions pose a difficulty. I knew no other way to take a standard based on "what the victim is feeling, not what the torturer thinks he is feeling, or decides he will feel if a particular torture is done in a particular way."

Isn't that type of subjectivity the perfect vehicle for a prisoner lawsuit alleging that confinement apart from his terrorist allies produces intolerable psychological pain? How is one to properly serve Allah as a proper extremist if he is prevented from killing infidels? I chose to illustrate the absurdity of Kathy's position by showing her to be a torturer of the worst sort. In my reply, I complained that Kathy was torturing me.

But that wasn't the end of it, of course. Kathy provided the tools to make a strong case against her. After all, it is the victim's impression of suffering that serves to indicate the degree of torture, not the expectation of the torturer. Kathy's own rationale silenced her objections.

True to form, however, Kathy had somewhat contradicted herself. Though the suffering victim of torture is the arbiter of the degree of torture in her view, "common sense" was supposed to inform us that suffering accompanied by various behaviors of the sufferer would indicate to observers (perhaps even the torturer?--I didn't get around to asking that of Kathy) that the physical or mental pain was "severe pain" rather than mere potentially legal "pain."

It was clear what I had to do. I hit the "Caps Lock" key and begged Kathy to stop torturing me.

I figured I had an airtight case according to Kathy's logic. She didn't mount much of a defense.

Bryan: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE STOP, KATHY!

Dang. You’re guilty.

And you, Bryan, are an idiot. Draw whatever conclusions you wish: I am through here.

So, Kathy's mental assessment of the legal definition of torture amounts to "It's obvious" or "I know it when I see it." And when called on her shallow-as-a-Slip 'n Slide definition of torture, she reverted to ad hominem and avoidance.

And without a deeper rationale than "It's obvious," there is no way to reason the issue. Sadly.

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.

Credit crunch persists at "Comments from Left Field"

Did the rounds of a few previously-visited blogs ... and even funnier than Alan Colmes attempted barbecue of Karl Rove is a borrowed attack on Condaleezza Rice over at Comments from Left Field.

The blog deck proclaims that the bloggers at CFLF have been loaning out brain cells to those in need. Apparently they're overextended, perhaps because they're just lending the cells to each other in a poverty-sticken community. But an explanation is in order.

First, appreciate the awe of Scott Horton:

Scott Horton calls it a “train wreck,” and it sure is. She is clearly not used to being challenged so directly and forcefully about the Bush administration’s policies — and in her intense focus on defending herself, she says a lot of things that are just not true. Horton — who for anyone who doesn’t know, is a lawyer and an expert in constitutional issues who teaches at Columbia University and writes a column at Harper’s — gives us the facts.

The supposed "train wreck" was Rice's interaction with a student at a Stanford University function.


According to "Kathy," Rice was "pwned" by the student. All analysis comes courtesy of Horton, via Harper's. Perhaps he's the one carrying the borrowed brain cells?

(1) She perpetuates the Abu Ghraib myth (“Abu Ghraib was not policy”), even as the Senate Armed Services Committee report demolishes it.

If Horton and I are reading the same report, then he appears to be either a very confused legal expert or a liar. The report does suggest that techniques used at Abu Ghraib were descended from the practices approved for use at Gitmo, but that simply isn't the same thing as the treatment amounting to policy. Policy at Gitmo, maybe. Not policy in the case of the Abu Ghraib abuses.

(2) In Condiworld, the threat of Al Qaeda was greater than the threat faced by the United States in World War II, as demonstrated by the 9/11 attacks.

Horton calls Rice's assessment "an astonishing failure of reasoned judgment," and then supports it with the curious method of giving casualty totals from WWII. Evidently we are supposed to compare those with the death toll from the 9-11 attacks. As if that is reasonable. Apparently Horton does not realize that the American death toll from WWII could be rapidly eclipsed by a group of terrorists using biological weapons or dirty bombs. It wasn't that 9-11 itself demonstrated the threat of terrorism. The attacks established the ability of terrorists to cause far greater casualties using other methods.

(3) Rice insists that no one was tortured at Guantánamo. She cites an OSCE report that called it a “model medium security prison.” But, as the report’s author stressed, this was a characterization of the physical facility. How about the treatment of the prisoners? On that score, the OSCE had a different conclusion: it was “mental torture.”

During the exchange on the video, one should note that Rice identified the root of the "mental torture" complaint accurately, though she did seem to misattribute the reasoning to the Red Cross reports instead of the OSCE. The reason, of course, was the prisoners' uncertainty as to how long they would be detained. All that would seem to show is the remarkably low threshold some folks need in order to cry "Torture!"

Horton also cites two Red Cross reports that supposedly concluded that detainee treatment was torture. He cites one ICRC report that called treatment "tantamount to torture." I believe I have the direct link to that document, and the full quotation occurs on page 23 (item 59):

This ICRC report documents serious violations of International Humanitarian Law relating to the conditions of treatment of the persons deprived of their liberty held by the CF in Iraq. In particular, it establishes that persons deprived of their liberty face the risk of being subjected to a process of physical and psychological coercion, in some cases tantamount to torture, in the early stages of the internment process.

Come to think of it, Horton's complaint rings a tad hollow in the first place:

The Red Cross did complete two studies of detainees at Guantánamo, and Condi’s characterization of them is false. The first report concluded that the treatment of prisoners, particularly isolation treatment, was “tantamount to torture.”

Note to Horton: Iraq and Guantanamo are geographically distinct locations. Not a particularly good reference to use to prove torture at Guantanamo.

Aside from various problems with the report, such as its reliance on uncorroborated detainee testimony, this Red Cross report is soft on conclusions. We know from Abu Ghraib (battery attached to genitals? Ouch!) that detainees risked degrading treatment "tantamount to torture." Was it policy? The examples in the document are all over the map and often fail to accord with approved harsh interrogation methods. But this Horton guy teaches at Columbia. He couldn't be wrong, could he?

There's always the second report to check. Horton presents the second one as an unqualified judgment of torture. Here is the key graph:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture.

So once again we're dealing with allegations, and even supposing the accuracy of the allegations the ICRC does not have the authority to proclaim the treatment torture in a legally relevant sense. That said, it was fair of Horton to state that Rice's characterization of the latter report was inaccurate.

Next:

(4) Rice claims that the Bush Administration’s efforts to try the Guantánamo prisoners were blocked by the Supreme Court.

Horton goes on to argue that the Bush administration is at fault, but that amounts to a semantic argument as regardless of where one detects fault Rice's statement is quite true. The Bush administration tried to use military commissions to try the detainees and the Supreme Court blocked it. Horton appeals to the recommendations of "an overwhelming majority of legal authorities" as to what the administration ought to have done, but it seems facile for him to claim that following that course would unquestionably have worked. It is not a bad argument for Horton to make, but in logical terms he overstates the certainty of the outcome. And his argument fails to contradict Rice despite his use of language suggesting as much.

Next:

(5) Rice insists that waterboarding is not torture. Why? Rice pulls a Nixon. It was not torture because the president authorized it.

It seemed to me that Rice said quite a bit more than that, so I reviewed the video to see what Horton left out.

My transcript of the relevant exchange:

Q:
Is waterboarding torture?

Rice:
Uh, the president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations--legal obligations--under the Convention Against Torture. So that's--and by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization subject to the Justice Department's clearance.

Q:
OK.

Rice:
That's what I did.

Q:
Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

Rice:
I just said the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

While it is fair to say that Rice did not answer the question directly, I would suggest that her answer amounts to trusting the legal evaluation of the administration. And rather than Rice saying that if the president says it is legal it is therefore legal, I think it much more likely that she was saying that the president had committed to doing things legally and by the manner the administration's actions were defined by the president they would be legal actions. That makes good sense of Rice's transitional use of "and so." Horton's interpretation is probably best counted as sadly uncharitable.

And finally:

(6) Whereas the Senate Intelligence Committee’s summary shows Rice giving authorization for waterboarding, Rice has a different recollection. “I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.” This is dicing things very finely.

As I understand it, the agency in question requested presidential authorization to use techniques its agents wanted to use. As Rice is not the president, I don't see that she could have given the authorization herself. But she would have been able to report to the agency that the president had approved the measures. That seems like a fair distinction given that the Senate Intelligence Committee's summary makes it appear that Rice somehow held the authority to OK the harsh interrogations and used it--as though the buck stopped with her.

Horton, it seems to me, twists that distinction into a legal defense strategy or something. I think it counts as uncharitable to think Rice was mounting an echo of a would-be legal defense.

Revised title to slightly snazzier form moments after publishing

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."

Looking forward to a new "Legend of the Left"

My spider sense is tingling with respect to newspaper reports about the DOJ enhanced interrogation timeline.

The new timeline shows that Rice played a greater role than she admitted last fall in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
(Comcast.net, via the AP)

I haven't had any success finding the written testimony Rice gave to the Senate Armed Services Committee--the testimony that supposedly doesn't agree with Attorney General Eric Holder's account.

I'd like to see more cards on the table with respect to this story. I trust Rice over Holder and I trust the press hardly at all.

This whole situation is likely to cause more Legends of the Left such as the belief that comments from the Bush administration increased the percentage of people who felt that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were involved in the 9-11 attacks. And the national press will be largely at fault.

Link to Justice Department memos on interrogation techniques

The link goes to The New York Times and a hat tip goes to Power Line.

Though it is a bad idea to reveal interrogation techniques, the documents may prove useful in exposing the hysteria of some of the criticisms of Bush administration policy. An example follows.

The linked document offers a description of waterboarding. To no surprise on my part, the description in the memo differs from the ones Judge Evan Wallach used in his oft-cited legal criticism ("Drop by Drop: Forgetting The History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts") of the technique:

One investigator describes water-boarding as a technique "in which a prisoner is stripped, shackled and submerged in water until he begins to lose consciousness." Another current source says that in water-boarding "a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown." The similarity is startling, given the opprobrium occasioned by its application to American military personnel. Furthermore, it is striking because, as discussed at length below, it bears a stark resemblance to conduct by American troops in the Philippine insurgency following the Spanish-American War, just over a hundred years ago.

The similarity, it turns out, is startling because it doesn't exist as described.

Incidentally, the two citations Wallach used for his descriptions of waterboarding both came from stories in The New York Times.

Will we see a correction?

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.

More Bush baloney from Blumner

Perhaps realizing that she'll have to get it out of her system, St. Petersburg Times editorial columnist Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner fired another errant rhetorical blast at soon-to-be-ex-president George Bush.

Blumner's awful offal offering coalesces around Guantanamo.

Guantanamo is one royal fiasco. It remains open even though Bush said more than two years ago that he'd like to see it close. The holdup is due to all the thorny legal issues surrounding the remaining 255 or so prisoners. Issues such as, how do you prosecute a prisoner when the ostensible evidence against him was elicited through torture or torture "lite"? Issues that are a direct consequence of Bush and his vice president's approval of prisoner abuse, ghost detainees, rendition and indefinite detention without charge.

No doubt Blumner and other horizontal left-leaners would like for Guantanamo to eventually result as a royal fiasco. But if the United States was to keep captured terrorists without letting other nations keep them for us (resulting in rendition complaints), then something along the lines of Guantanamo was needed. Bringing prisoners to the United States proper would have increased pressure for such prisoners to be treated with full Constitutional rights, something such prisoners only deserve if the Constitution doubles as a suicide pact.

Blumner, like a stopped clock hitting the right time once or twice per day, gets it right when she says that legal issues keep Guantanamo open--many of the same ones that made Guantanamo or something like it necessary in the first place.

As for Blumner's recommended example, "how do you prosecute a prisoner when the ostensible evidence against him was elicited through torture or torture 'lite'?, it's easy. You simply remember that Constitutional rights apply primarily to U.S. citizens and not to foreigners engaged in terrorism. You don't need to read a member of al Qaeda a Miranda warning when you capture him in Afghanistan. He is not entitled to a phone call. And unless he's wearing a uniform along with a number of other qualifying aspects, he need not be treated as a POW according to the Geneva Conventions.

The end of the Blumner paragraph quoted above makes pretty clear that she considers the failure to treat Guantanamo detainees far better than the law requires a problem, even if it were agreed that waterboarding should be a forbidden torture method. After all, only three confirmed cases of waterboarding have occurred, and there are more than three prisoners at Guantanamo.

But lest we distract from the Bush-bashing:

But Bush has never acknowledged that opening Guantanamo as a legal black hole to dump terror suspects potentially for the remainder of their lives was a mistake. The closest he's come is to express exasperation. Back in June 2006, Bush told reporters in Vienna after a summit with European Union leaders, "I'd like to end Guantanamo. I'd like it to be over with."

Is there some reason why Bush should admit that it was a mistake? Don't readers of the Times want to know nearly to the extent that National Enquirer readers do? Don't keep us in suspense, Blumñata!

It was a feint, an appeaser's answer. Bush never intended to act. As reported last week by the New York Times, Bush "never considered" options that were drawn up by the Pentagon and State Department for closing the prison camp. Our feckless president's modus operandi for his last months in office is to hand off the baton, so that none of the disastrous fallout from his policies appears to accrue to his presidency.

But keep us in suspense she does, while accusing Bush of insincerity with insufficient grounds. Blumner claims that Bush "never intended to act" but no good evidence supports that accusation. Yes, The New York Times paraphrased anonymous administration officials to the effect that the president never considered specific plans for closing Guantanamo. And the Gray Lady also provided the flaw in the argument Blumner uses to suggest that Bush didn't mean it:

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

How could Blumner leave that part out unless she was deliberately trying to deceive her readers? Sure beats me. Maybe she only read or remembered the portion of the story that pleased her. Or perhaps I should just skip evidence and draw my conclusions the same way Blumner draws hers: Blumner is a bald-faced liar.

We know that the remaining Guantanamo prisoners will have to be released or tried under a fair process. Some have now been held for longer than World War II raged. But Bush will leave that difficult job to someone else.

The Bush administration used what has been considered a fair process in the past. The federal court system ignored precedent and found military tribunals unsatisfactory. That decision threw a monkey wrench into the works. Perhaps only if Bush had made the court's decision could Blumner have criticized it and fixed there the blame for the current difficulty surrounding Guantanamo detainees.

Note she's all over Bush for not getting the job done (not for lack of trying, if Blumner were fair about it) while at the same time hinting at sympathy for the next president who will inherit this "difficult job."

See how difficult it gets after the next domestic terror attack.

Then, if a dangerous prisoner ends up being released, fingers will point to the president who insisted on due process.

Due process is a constitutional right. In war, we kill people regularly without due process. It is insane to apply constitutional due process to the conduct of war, and detaining enemy combatants is part of the conduct of war. In short, it would be entirely appropriate to point fingers at the dope of a president who insists on due process for enemy combatants.

And until that happens we can at least still point fingers at a dope of an editorialist who advocates that type of stupidity.

But no matter how many former detainees may turn violently against the United States, the danger cannot compare to that caused by the very existence of Guantanamo and the explosive anger it has stoked in the Muslim world.

The anger in the Muslim world over Guantanamo doesn't seem any greater than that caused by cartoons that feature Islam's prophet, from what I can see. Far less, if anything. Perhaps President Bush should turn his attention to that thorny legal problem, for if the anger over Guantanamo is explosive then the potential anger caused by printing Muhammad cartoons is surely thermonuclear.

Perhaps it should occur to Blumner that Islamic anger may be channeled for the purpose of advancing radical Islam. But I doubt it will. Blumner has the advance of her own ideology on which to focus; facts such as the world wide cartoon riots are part of a blurry background if they aren't Photoshopped out of the picture entirely.

Al Qaeda "Mata Hari" captured

MIT graduate and Al Qaeda radical. What a combination.

Her name reportedly rolled from KSM's lips when he was captured and interrogated by US intelligence officers. She has also been linked to Adnan El Shukrijumah, a pilot and suspected al Qaeda member also on the Ashcroft-Mueller list.
(ABC News)

KSM=Kalid Sheik Mohammed. That's one of the people the CIA subjected to waterboarding in order to extract information. As I recall, KSM was treated with waterboarding because he wasn't talking. I wonder if any mainstream media source will make the direct connection between this woman's identification and subsequent capture with the successful use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique. ABC stops short of that connection.

CPU gluttony

Kathy of "Comments from Left Field" added a rejoinder to my comment in reply to her post about waterboarding. I tried to pick up the conversation, but with no real luck thus far.

This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota

Please contact this site's webmaster.

Wait a few minutes and use your browser's "Back" button or click here to try again.

---

If you are the webmaster, your account may have gotten this error for one or more of the following reasons:

• Your account has used more than its share of the cpu in the past 60 second sliding window.
• Your account has too many concurrent processes running simultanously.
• Your account has consumed too much memory.
• Your site was recently very busy trying to run inefficient scripts.

The solution would be to optimize your applications to use less CPU.
Adding appropriate indeces to your SQL tables can often help reduce CPU.
Using static .html documents instead of painful .php scripts will practically eliminate CPU usage.

More likely their server problem rather than me being a CPU pig, I think.

Anyway, I don't want to lose what I typed so I'll reproduce it here and maybe graft it back over there at a later time once their server has calmed itself.

Kathy supposed that my question indicated a misunderstanding of the title of her post ("If I Write About It, I'll Feel Better"). She also commented to apologize for misspelling my name. That was nice.

I figured the title had something to do with anger you were feeling, but my question did not stem from any misunderstanding of the title. It stems from the fact that your writing indicates that you understand waterboarding as torture. Based on that indication, I am expressing curiosity regarding the foundation of that understanding.
Don't trouble yourself over the name thing. I'm not easily offended. Though I do appreciate your concern.

Your last comment may be a good place to start. You call waterboarding attempted drowning. Yet the longest reported session of the modern waterboarding technique is about 30 seconds in duration (Hitchens' experience by his own report was considerably shorter than that). Is it possible to drown somebody in that length of time?

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