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defrogITEM: Recently released CIA documents provide details into how prisoners were waterboarded by the CIA. And they are nasty.
Listen:
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.
"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."
Not that it matters, of course. As I’ve said elsewhere, the very officials and pundits who have consistently advocated waterboarding (and I would guess the majority of their supporters/fans) have always defended it with these two basic tenets:
1. It’s not torture if you compare it to the Spanish Inquisition.
2. Even if it is torture, so fucking what? We’re talking about terrorists whose very existence in Gitmo is proof of guilt, so even if we were using thumbscrews and racks and hot pokers up the ass it would still be justified if it saves even one American life. So fuck them and their fucking human rights.
Bear in mind also that the same people who buy this logic (such as it is) have also repeatedly declared the lawyers who defended Gitmo detainees to be [probably] terrorist sympathizers [probably] loyal to al Qaeda, nine of whom just HAPPEN to work for Obama who just HAPPENS to [probably] not be American or Christian [maybe – he might be but he won’t tell us – WHY won’t he tell us?].
See what they did there?
So no, I don’t think the new grim details of waterboarding will change a thing. That ship sailed a long time ago, and it is not coming back. Waterboarding advocates are mad with Fear and as we learned with McCarthyism, there is no cure for that but time, education and ridicule.
On and on and on,
This is dF
Listen:
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.
"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."
Not that it matters, of course. As I’ve said elsewhere, the very officials and pundits who have consistently advocated waterboarding (and I would guess the majority of their supporters/fans) have always defended it with these two basic tenets:
1. It’s not torture if you compare it to the Spanish Inquisition.
2. Even if it is torture, so fucking what? We’re talking about terrorists whose very existence in Gitmo is proof of guilt, so even if we were using thumbscrews and racks and hot pokers up the ass it would still be justified if it saves even one American life. So fuck them and their fucking human rights.
Bear in mind also that the same people who buy this logic (such as it is) have also repeatedly declared the lawyers who defended Gitmo detainees to be [probably] terrorist sympathizers [probably] loyal to al Qaeda, nine of whom just HAPPEN to work for Obama who just HAPPENS to [probably] not be American or Christian [maybe – he might be but he won’t tell us – WHY won’t he tell us?].
See what they did there?
So no, I don’t think the new grim details of waterboarding will change a thing. That ship sailed a long time ago, and it is not coming back. Waterboarding advocates are mad with Fear and as we learned with McCarthyism, there is no cure for that but time, education and ridicule.
On and on and on,
This is dF
