Is Sadism an American value?
Or just accepted political expediency?
Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney’s “dunk in the water”
Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.
Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
Aside from the many…many testimonies and accounts of how ineffective and illegal torture is, here comes another expert knocking down the knee-jerk, fear-mongering leftovers from the last Administration.
Throughout his lecture, Sulick stressed the CIA’s need to uphold the law, while simultaneously protecting the American public.
“We have to find some way to achieve that balance,” he said. “We have to find the common ground between maintaining our values and safeguarding Americans.”
“I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about [it from] a legal, moral or ethical standpoint.”
Michael Sulick, Ph.D., Director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service
Are the sheep too willing to pave over our own laws in the name of partisanship? Are grave threats such as the ‘War on Christmas” and perpetuating the myth of a ‘liberal media’ too taxing to be able to concentrate on tedious technical annoyances like bring accountability to elected officials? Isn’t that the meme of the teabaggers? If Al Qaeda really wanted to yank our collective chain, they would videotape a waterboarding instead of a beheading…..
Posted on April 4th, 2010 by Constitutional Insurgent
Filed under: Abuse of Power
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