White House memos endorsed CIA waterboarding

The Bush administration explicitly endorsed the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods against al Qaeda suspects in a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

Here's how it looks















Here's how it works

The torture tape fingering Bush as a war criminal

"Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed."

Torture, Destruction of Evidence, Obstruction of Justice--Just a Typical Day in the Bush Administration

"Let's be frank here.

The recent discovery of documents related to the torture videotapes that were destoyed is old news, not new. The fact is that since 2001, our government has tortured, lied about the torture, and destroyed court ordered evidence and documents of the torture. In other words, they've done everything they can to cover their own asses."

House votes to outlaw CIA waterboarding

"On a 222-199 vote, the House approved a measure to require intelligence agents to comply with the Army Field Manual, which meets the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of war prisoners and prohibits torture."

Are Americans 'Better Than That'?

"The Dec. 11 report by the Post’s Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, which describes Kiriakou’s experience in interrogating suspected terrorists, raises in an unusually direct way an abiding question: Should the United States of America be using forms of torture dating back to the Spanish Inquisition?"

Ifs and Buts

"...two biggest terror trials we've had since Sept. 11 were predicated on torture evidence that was then destroyed. The government has argued that al-Qaida operatives cannot be tried because the evidence against them is secret and threatens national security. But the real rationale is much worse: The evidence against them is wholly unreliable."

Waterboarding approved at top levels of US government

"The CIA's waterboarding of a top al-Qaida figure was approved at the top levels of the U.S. government, a former CIA agent said Tuesday as agency director Gen. Michael Hayden prepared for questioning by congressional panels about the destruction of videotapes of terror suspect interrogations."

A drip-drip of revelations

"The waterboarding controversy has lifted the veil on the fact that the Bush White House gave the CIA a green light to use illegal torture techniques."

John Ashcroft: I’m Willing To Be Waterboarded

"During the speech, Ashcroft caused an uproar when he declared Guantanamo Bay was a “good place” for detainees. In addition, he defended the torture tactic of waterboarding. Ashcroft also responded to questions from the audience. The first question came from a woman who asked if Ashcroft would be willing to be subjected to waterboarding. “The things that I can survive, if it were necessary to do them to me, I would do,” he said."

Good, lets take him up on that ~ NOW!

Mukasey confirmed as attorney general

by LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press - Nov 9, 2007

The Senate confirmed retired judge Michael Mukasey as attorney general Thursday night to replace Alberto Gonzales, who was forced from office in a scandal over his handling of the Justice Department.

President Bush thanked the Senate, even though the margin had been whittled down from nearly unanimous by a sharp debate over Mukasey's refusal to say whether the waterboarding interrogation technique is torture.

"He will be an outstanding attorney general," Bush said in a statement from his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Republicans were solidly behind Bush' nominee. Democrats said their votes were not so much for Mukasey as they were for restoring a leader to a Justice Department left adrift after Gonzales' resignation in September.

In the end, Mukasey was confirmed as the nation's 81st attorney general by a 53-40 vote. Six Democrats and one independent joined Republicans in sealing his confirmation.

The choice, according to one of those Democrats, was essentially between "whether to confirm Michael Mukasey as the next attorney general or whether to leave the Department of Justice without a real leader for the next 14 months," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.

"This is the only chance we have," she said, referring to Bush's threat to appoint an acting attorney general not subject to Senate confirmation.

But members of her own party didn't agree. Mukasey, his opponents argued, refused to say whether waterboarding is torture and put the onus on Congress to pass a law against the practice.

"This is like saying when somebody murders somebody with a a baseball bat and you say, 'We had a law against murder but we never mentioned baseball bats,'" said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "Murder is murder. Torture is torture."

Being better than Gonzales or an acting attorney general is not enough qualification for the job, said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

"The next attorney general must restore confidence in the rule of law," he said. "We cannot afford to take the judgment of an attorney general who either does not know torture when he sees it or is willing to look the other way."

The confirmation vote capped 10 months of scandal and resignations at the Justice Department. Mukasey's chief Democratic patron, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., drove the probe into the purge of nine federal prosecutors that helped push Gonzales out.

The debate came after a tense day of negotiations that at one point featured Majority Leader Harry Reid threatening to postpone Mukasey's confirmation until December. His confirmation had long been certainty despite the debate over waterboarding.

Waterboarding, used by interrogators to make someone feel as if he is going to drown, is banned by domestic law and international treaties. But U.S. law applies to Pentagon personnel and not the CIA. The administration won't say whether it has allowed the agency's employees to use it against terror detainees.

"The United States will not be viewed kindly if we confirm as chief law enforcement officer of this country someone who is unwilling or unable to recognize torture when he sees it," said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat.

Mukasey has called waterboarding personally "repugnant," and in a letter to senators said he did not know enough about how it has been used to define it as torture. He also said he thought it would be irresponsible to discuss it since doing so could make interrogators and other government officials vulnerable to lawsuits.

"He felt that he could not make that pronouncement without placing people at risk to be sued or perhaps even criminally prosecuted," said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mukasey, who received a strong endorsement from Schumer, was the White House's first choice to replace Gonzales. Gonzales announced his resignation on Aug. 27, and the White House interviewed Mukasey the same day. Three weeks later, Bush introduced the 66-year-old Mukasey as "a tough but fair judge" and asked the Senate to confirm him quickly.

Mukasey, the former chief U.S. district judge in the Manhattan courthouse just blocks from ground zero, was first appointed to the bench in 1987 by President Reagan. He also worked for four years as a trial prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York's Southern District — one of the Justice Department's busiest and highest-profile offices in the country.

Mukasey oversaw some of the nation's most significant terror trials in the years before and after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He sentenced Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the "blind sheik," to life in prison for a plot to blow up New York City landmarks, and he signed in 2002 the material witness warrant that let the FBI arrest U.S. citizen Jose Padilla. That warrant marked the start of a case that wound its way through several federal courts as the government declared Padilla an enemy combatant and held him for 3 1/2 years before he was convicted last month on terrorism-related charges.

In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Mukasey criticized U.S. national security law as too weak in some areas by noting that prosecutors are sometimes forced to reveal details of cases at the risk of tipping off terrorists. He is also a supporter of the government's anti-terror USA Patriot Act, wryly writing in 2004 that the "awkward name may very well be the worst thing about the statute."

Mukasey, a partner at New York-based law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, is also a close friend to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. He stepped down as an adviser to Giuliani's presidential campaign, on which he served as part of an advisory committee on judicial nominations.

Besides Schumer and Feinstein, Democrats voting to confirm Mukasey were: Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Tom Carper of Delaware, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Of the Senate's two independents, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut voted for confirmation and Bernie Sanders of Vermont voted against.

Not voting were Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden of Delaware, Hillary Clinton of New York, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Barack Obama of Illinois. All four had said they opposed Mukasey's nomination.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain of Arizona also was absent, as were GOP Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and John Cornyn of Texas.

Drown by Law

The Bush administration's position on waterboarding is all wet

by Jacob Sullum - November 7, 2007

In 1902 a U.S. Army captain wrote a letter to The New York Times about allegations that American soldiers had used an interrogation technique known as "the water cure" on Philippine insurgents. He claimed "unauthorized methods" had been used only against members of armed groups that were essentially criminal gangs. "From the results obtained it became simply a case where the end justifies the means," he wrote. "A legitimate combatant was never ill-treated."

That letter, quoted by law of war scholar Evan Wallach in a recent Columbia Journal of Transnational Law article, anticipated the arguments the Bush administration would employ a century later to defend its use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding.

One crucial difference is that the Bush administration pretends waterboarding is perfectly legal.
That stance put attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey in a bit of a spot. During his confirmation hearings he acknowledged that torture is not only illegal but unconstitutional. He also said the president is not at liberty simply to ignore statutory and constitutional restrictions on the treatment of detainees, even if he thinks doing so is necessary to protect national security.

Since the CIA has used waterboarding on suspected terrorists, calling it a form of torture would implicate not only interrogators but superiors who authorized the technique, possibly including President Bush, in federal crimes. Investigating your boss is not the most auspicious way to start a new job.

Not surprisingly, Mukasey decided to reserve judgment on the question of whether the CIA's waterboarding qualifies as torture. He pleaded ignorance of the details and emphasized the need to avoid an "uninformed legal opinion based on hypothetical facts and circumstances."

That stance sounded reasonable but seemed less so upon reflection. As Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who turned against Mukasey's confirmation over this issue, put it, "No American should need a classified briefing to determine whether waterboarding is torture."

Federal law defines torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." It defines "severe mental pain or suffering" as "the prolonged mental harm" caused by, among other things, "the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering" or "the threat of imminent death."

Is there any way that tying someone down, tipping him backward, covering his face with cloth or plastic, and pouring water over him to produce the sensations of drowning would not qualify as torture? What classified detail could redeem a method Mukasey himself called "repugnant" and "over the line"?

As Wallach shows in his journal article, "U.S. courts have consistently held artificial drowning interrogation is torture." Military tribunals have punished Japanese soldiers for doing it to Americans, and U.S. courts have called it torture in criminal prosecutions of police officers and in a lawsuit against former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.

The technique, variations of which date back at least to the Spanish Inquisition, is also known as "water torture," a term that clarifies the current debate. In essence, the Bush administration's defenders are declaring, "Water torture is not torture."

What they really mean, I think, is that sometimes torture is justified. If a detainee may have information that could be used to prevent a terrorist attack, for instance, isn't waterboarding the lesser of two evils? As that Army captain put it in 1902, doesn't the end justify the means?

I'm inclined to think it doesn't, not least because a government that asserts the authority to eavesdrop on people at will and imprison them at will is apt to make some terrible mistakes if it also has the authority to torture them at will. But this is an argument about what the law should be, not an argument about what it is.

The Bush administration has a tendency to confuse those two issues. Mukasey's unanticipated trouble on the way to confirmation reflects the expectation that the nation's chief law enforcement official will resist that tendency.

Former interrogator: Waterboarding Should be Banned

by LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press - Nov 8, 2007

A former interrogation instructor for the Navy said the words Thursday that congressional Democrats wanted to hear from Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey: "Waterboarding is torture, period."

"Waterboarding is torture and should be banned," Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a former Navy instructor of prisoner of war and terrorist hostage survival programs, told a House constitutional subcommittee. "I believe that we must reject the use of the waterboard for prisoners and captives and cleanse this stain from our national honor."

Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said at the panel's hearing that he is against torture but that "sometimes we have to take measures to protect the innocent that we do not like."

"Severe interrogations are sometimes part of doing that," added Franks, the ranking Republican on the panel.

The exchange came as Senate leaders struggled to agree on the timing of a confirmation vote for Mukasey, who has refused to equate waterboarding with illegal torture.

The former retired judge is expected to win confirmation handily, but his nomination has sparked a fresh round of bitter debate about the legality of waterboarding.

The interrogation procedure makes the subject think he's drowning, and has been banned by domestic law and international treaties. Those policies don't cover the CIA's use of the technique, however, and the Bush administration has sidestepped questions about whether it has allowed the agency's employees to use it against terror detainees.

Mukasey's repeated refusal to testify that waterboarding is illegal torture cost him the votes of numerous Democrats in the Senate. But with an assurance that he would enforce any ban on the practice passed by Congress, he won back the votes of two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, enough for a majority on the panel and a vote by the full chamber.

Both houses of Congress are considering legislation to ban the procedure in all circumstances.

The debate shifted to the House Thursday morning, as the subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., convened a hearing on how the procedure is carried out and whether it meets the legal definition of torture.

As a former master training specialist in survival programs, Nance said that he underwent waterboarding as part of his training and that he personally led or was involved in using the procedure on hundreds of other trainees at the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School.

Nance described the experience as a "slow motion suffocation" that provides enough time for the subject to consider what's happening: "water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel(ing) your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs."

"The victim is drowning," Nance said in materials submitted with his testimony. The intent during training, he added, is to stop the process before death occurs.

Training sessions are where waterboarding belongs, not as part of efforts to gain intelligence information from foreign agents, said a second witness.

Such "coercive" interrogation techniques aren't as effective as those that elicit cooperation, because false information is often elicited under harsher methods, said Col. Steven Kleinman, a senior intelligence officer and military interrogator for the U.S. Air Force Reserves.

"Tragically, many of these same tactics have migrated into the repertoire of interrogators seeking intelligence information," Kleinman said.

Others have said, however, that suspected terrorists have revealed information under harsh interrogation techniques that include waterboarding, such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A third witness who had agreed to testify said the Pentagon prohibited him from appearing.

Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, appellate judge of the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, said he was willing to testify when permitted to do so by the Department of Defense.

In a March 31 Wall Street Journal story, Couch said he had refused to prosecute a suspected terrorist because he believed the evidence had been tainted by torture.

Two Democrats move to outlaw waterboarding

By Renee Schoof McClatchy Newspapers - Nov 8, 2007

WASHINGTON — The practice of waterboarding would be outlawed specifically, along with other extreme interrogation techniques, under legislation pushed by two Democratic senators.

The measures would repudiate the Bush administration’s policy on torture. The CIA reportedly has used waterboarding — or simulated drowning — when questioning terrorism suspects. It’s also used exposure to extreme temperatures and other methods that are expressly forbidden by the Army Field Manual. The proposed bills would require that all U.S. personnel — including the CIA — use only interrogation techniques authorized by the Army manual.

Last month, President Bush’s choice for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, refused to say whether waterboarding was torture and therefore illegal. And an executive order that President Bush released in July on what techniques the CIA could use was silent on whether waterboarding and other extreme measures were among them.

Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., have offered separate bills that make the Army manual the standard for all U.S. interrogators. All members of the military by law already must abide by the manual. The proposed law would require civilians to do the same.

However, it’s unlikely that the Senate will debate the matter before the end of the year. The legislative calendar is jammed, sponsors of these measures must round up support and Republicans may be reluctant to tie the CIA’s hands against the Bush administration’s will.

Similar legislation is expected soon in the House of Representatives.

“We need to send a clear message that torture, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees, is unacceptable and is not permitted by U.S. law. Period,” Biden said in a letter to senators.

Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, argued at a Council on Foreign Relations talk in September that the CIA shouldn't be limited to the Army Field Manual’s requirements on interrogation.

“It's clear that what it is we do as an agency is different from what is contained in the Army Field Manual. I don't know of anyone who has looked at the Army Field Manual who could make the claim that what's contained in there exhausts the universe of lawful interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Convention,” he said.

U.S. law and international treaties have long banned torture. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 said all U.S. personnel must not treat detainees in cruel, inhuman and degrading ways. But backers of the proposed bills say they’re needed because the Bush administration has interpreted the law in a way that leaves open the possibility that the CIA can use the extreme techniques.

Biden said his bill would end “the administration’s semantic games on what constitutes torture. . . . There is no place for the administration’s bad faith interpretation — of waterboarding and other forms of torture — to gain a toehold.” He also warned that “continuing to equivocate about torture” would weaken the coalitions needed to fight terrorism, fuel terrorist recruitment and place Americans in jeopardy.

Biden’s legislation also would close the “black sites” outside the United States where detainees have been held, grant detainees at Guantanamo the right to challenge their imprisonment in court and require the administration to go to a special court and make the case that any non-American terrorist suspect it wants to send to another country wouldn't be tortured there. Kennedy’s bill is limited to interrogations.

“This involves taking on the administration in a very big way,” said Elisa Massimino, an international rights expert with the advocacy group Human Rights First.

The White House’s July order allowed the CIA to restart its secret detention and interrogation program, which had been put on hold in 2006, Massimino said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the proposed restrictions on CIA interrogations were unnecessary. Graham, a judge advocate general in the Air Force Reserves, said he was briefed on how the CIA interrogates suspected terrorists. “I think the president’s CIA program has found the right balance,” he said. “It’s lawful; it’s effective. It’s different from the military’s, but still within bounds.”

Graham said he believed that waterboarding was illegal for any branch of government.

The Justice Department’s Culture of Torture

by Scott Horton - Nov 7, 2007

On Friday, Nov. 2, ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson carried a story with a series of stunning accusations. Jan Crawford Greenburg provided a report that cleared up a long-standing mystery: why did Daniel Levin, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel who authored the second in the Justice Department’s series of highly controversial “torture memoranda,” suddenly depart his post? The story that unfolded was grotesque, almost impossible to believe. I have been a critic of the Bush Justice Department for some time, but this story even I was reluctant to believe. So I waited, expecting that the Justice Department would denounce ABC’s report as some sort of hoax or falsehood. In the intervening four days, however, the Justice Department has maintained a steady silence on the story which can be explained only one way: the story is true.

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration’s legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News. 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.

Daniel Levin is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican. Now, recall Michael Mukasey’s suggestion that he didn’t know what waterboarding was. Levin took a logical approach: he decided to experience it firsthand. And he came to a conclusion that, in my mind, shows unacceptable flexibility in accepting the technique. But how did the Bush White House react to this? It was swift and simple: Levin was forced out of office.

When Levin took over from Goldsmith, he went to work on a memo that would effectively replace the Bybee memo as the administration’s legal position on torture. It was during this time that he underwent waterboarding. In December 2004, Levin released the new memo. He said, “Torture is abhorrent” but he went on to say in a footnote that the memo was not declaring the administration’s previous opinions illegal. The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.

But Levin never finished a second memo imposing tighter controls on the specific interrogation techniques. Sources said he was forced out of the Justice Department when Gonzales became attorney general.

The Bush Administration’s swift reaction: any deviation from the torture litmus test results in dismissal.

The matter raises some more very unpleasant questions. Levin was trying to impose some guidelines on the use of waterboarding as a technique. The purpose of the guidelines was to preserve some very questionable basis to argue that the practice was not torture. So why did the administration put a stop to that? I can see one explanation: they wanted complete flexibility. That means that they contemplated practices that would venture into the most extreme, cruel and horrible treatment. No limitations–let the torturer have at it.

Note that Alberto Gonzales insisted on the inclusion of an infamous footnote which stated that, notwithstanding the different analysis, it was not overturning the advice given by the Yoo/Bybee torture memorandum. Although Levin grudgingly included this, that was not enough to save his job. Why did the administration insist on this footnote? Because people had in fact been waterboarded, and this occurred with the authority of some of the seniormost officials of the Administration: Cheney, Addington, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld, for instance. Without this, the door would be open for their criminal prosecution. Senior officials of the Administration were manipulating the issuance of opinions in the Justice Department to shield themselves from criminal prosecution.

This incident dramatically demonstrates the fixation that Gonzales and Cheney’s team in particular have with the torture issue, including waterboarding. Their fixation has nothing to do with the camouflage they generally put up about torture allowing the nation to defuse nuclear bombs like Jack Bauer in “24.” It is directly tied to their own perception that they are guilty of criminal conduct and their determination to abuse the powers of Government to block any effort to prosecute them.

Waterboarding is torture. It has been understood to be torture since the sixteenth century. Waterboarding was used to torture Black slaves in America before the Civil War. American prosecutors have indicted and tried criminal defendants for torture in connection with the use of waterboarding—bringing and succeeding in cases against both Americans and others. Judge Wallach’s excellent law review article, “Drop by Drop,” covers this well-documented history which the Administration insists that all its lawyers forget. Wallach’s op-ed summarizing his conclusions can be found here.

There is no serious or competent basis upon which waterboarding can be claimed to be legal. The persistence of these bogus arguments is just more evidence of the deterioration of public discourse. Our habit as a nation has always been to accept anything that our political leadership states as a respectable contention, even if worthy of criticism. But with the arrival of the Bush Administration this has become an extremely dangerous premise. There is no respectable opinion that can hold waterboarding legal. It is criminal depravity. When we allow its justification as an article of polite conversation, we deal our society and its values a potentially mortal wound.

“Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” George Orwell reminded us in “Politics and the English Language.” In the waterboarding debate, Orwell’s warning has found its most literal application.

Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime

by Evan Wallach, Washington Post - November 4, 2007

As a JAG in the Nevada National Guard, I used to lecture the soldiers of the 72nd Military Police Company every year about their legal obligations when they guarded prisoners. I'd always conclude by saying, "I know you won't remember everything I told you today, but just remember what your mom told you: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." That's a pretty good standard for life and for the law, and even though I left the unit in 1995, I like to think that some of my teaching had carried over when the 72nd refused to participate in misconduct at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Sometimes, though, the questions we face about detainees and interrogation get more specific. One such set of questions relates to "waterboarding."

That term is used to describe several interrogation techniques. The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as "simulated drowning." That's incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is,

the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding's effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."

Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

In this case from the tribunal's records, the victim was a prisoner in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies:

A towel was fixed under the chin and down over the face. Then many buckets of water were poured into the towel so that the water gradually reached the mouth and rising further eventually also the nostrils, which resulted in his becoming unconscious and collapsing like a person drowned. This procedure was sometimes repeated 5-6 times in succession.

The United States (like Britain, Australia and other Allies) pursued lower-ranking Japanese war criminals in trials before their own tribunals. As a general rule, the testimony was similar to Nielsen's. Consider this account from a Filipino waterboarding victim:

Q: Was it painful?

A: Not so painful, but one becomes unconscious. Like drowning in the water.

Q: Like you were drowning?

A: Drowning -- you could hardly breathe.

Here's the testimony of two Americans imprisoned by the Japanese:

They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness.

And from the second prisoner:

They laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. . . . They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was almost impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water.

As a result of such accounts, a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.

More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that "the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee's mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation."

In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners' civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

We know that U.S. military tribunals and U.S. judges have examined certain types of water-based interrogation and found that they constituted torture. That's a lesson worth learning. The study of law is, after all, largely the study of history. The law of war is no different. This history should be of value to those who seek to understand what the law is -- as well as what it ought to be.

Mukasey's America

by Nat Hentoff - Nov 5, 2007

During the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on the nomination of Michael Mukasey to succeed Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, there was an exchange that many will remember. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat, a former prosecutor, asked about waterboarding, an interrogation technique long associated with the CIA: "Is waterboarding constitutional?"Mr. Mukasey answered: "I don't know what is involved in the technique. If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional."

After that testimony, John Hutson, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, told the New York Sun: "Waterboarding was devised in the Spanish Inquisition. Next to the rack and thumbscrews, it's the most iconic example of torture." And Martin Lederman, who was an attorney adviser in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel from 1994 to 2002, said about Mr. Mukasey's "not knowing enough to say whether waterboarding, or any other technique, is torture... or otherwise unlawful (shows) how far we have fallen when a jurist of Judge Mukasey's caliber cannot answer such questions without hesitation" (from the Balkinization Web site of Yale Law professor Jack Balkin).

Among others startled by Mr. Mukasey's evasiveness, George L. Gordon, a former chief appellate attorney in the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, said in an Oct. 20 letter to The New York Times: "How can the United States hope to regain its position as a respected world leader on the great issues of human rights if its chief law enforcement officer cannot bring himself to acknowledge the undeniable verity that waterboarding (making a prisoner feel he is imminently about to drown) constitutes torture, applying any conceivable definition of that term?" During his testimony, Mr. Mukasey also said it would be irresponsible of him to comment on any of the "coercive interrogation techniques" (that the president has approved) because he has not been "read in" on them by being allowed to see classified information on those techniques.

Trying to further the education of our prospective chief law enforcement officer, Mr. Lederman suggests he ask FBI Director Robert Mueller to show him the e-mails sent to him by FBI agents in the field "complaining that the CIA-run interrogation program amounted to torture." Mr. Lederman quotes a senior federal law enforcement official in the FBI messages: "'Those guys were using techniques that we didn't even want to be in the room for.'" A series of these appalled FBI complaints are in a newly published book that Mr. Mukasey, members of Congress and Americans concerned with the degrading of our rule of law should read: "Administration of Torture" by American Civil Liberties Union attorneys Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh (Columbia University Press).

At its core are more than 350 pages selected from thousands of actual government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that specifically detail systematic abuses of prisoners, including forms of torture that cannot in our law and international treaties be described denotatively in another way than some of the "coercive interrogation techniques" of which Mr. Mukasey professed ignorance. Also, "Administration of Torture" prints Final Autopsy Reports from the Office of the Armed Forces Regional Examiner and the allied Institute of Pathology. For example, a 52-year-old Iraqi male "found unresponsive... in isolation at Whitehorse detainment facility, Nasiriyah, Iraq. Cause of death: Strangulation. Manner of Death: Homicide." There were extensive head, neck, torso and extremity injuries.

Another autopsy report of an Iraqi death "while in U.S. custody" states the homicide was caused by blunt force injuries and asphyxia. Other documents that should greatly interest the likely new attorney general verify that prisoners were shackled in extremely painful "stress positions," stripped in freezing cold cells and deprived of human contact for months. Moreover, the records show that the Defense Department authorized the caging of prisoners in cells as small as 3.1 feet by 4 feet by 1-1/2 feet.

Also, Mr. Mukasey will discover that this maltreatment, to use a euphemism, "took place because of (official) policy, not in spite of it in large part," wrote Mr. Jaffer and Mrs. Singh, "from decisions made by senior officials, both military and civilians. These decisions (going up to the White House) were reaffirmed repeatedly, even in the fact of complaints from law enforcement and military personnel that the policies were illegal and ineffective." As far as these U.S. government documents from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay are concerned, future American historians will not flinch from calling them records of war crimes — not only from soldiers from the field, but all the way up "the chain of command."

Louis Brandeis said: "Courage is the secret of liberty." The Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation of Michael Mukasey would not be an act of courage. And will any candidate for the presidency read carefully "The Administration of Torture?" It's also important to remember that Mr. Mukasey testified that in these circumstances, the president can use his constitutional authority to act outside of laws Congress has passed and he has signed.

This is Mr. Mukasey's America?

The agonizing truth about CIA renditions

Khaled el-Masri, who was abducted by the CIA for interrogation as a suspected terrorist, during an interview in Ulm, Afghanistan, Dec. 11, 2005.

The fate of prisoners secreted away under the Bush administration is in some ways worse than even Hollywood has portrayed.

by Stephen Grey - Nov. 5, 2007

At 3:44 p.m. on Jan. 24, 2004, a luxury Boeing 737 business jet operated by the Central Intelligence Agency landed at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan. Onboard were its flight crew, eight members of a CIA rendition team and a blindfolded prisoner who was shackled by his wrists and feet.

The behavior of the prisoner, a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri, concerned the CIA team leader onboard. According to an agency insider, the leader sent word to Washington that "there was something strange about el-Masri. He didn't behave like the others they'd captured. He was asking: Is he the right guy?"

Within days it emerged that el-Masri was indeed the wrong man. It was a "100 percent case of mistaken identity," said another former agency official. Yet, despite this discovery, el-Masri spent 18 weeks in solitary confinement in a CIA "black site," or secret prison used by the United States in its war on terror. He is still waiting for an apology or an explanation.

The case of el-Masri -- whose lawsuit against the CIA has been dismissed by U.S. courts on the grounds of protecting "state secrets" -- caused a huge controversy within the CIA at the time of his capture. A five-month standoff between employees at the Counterterrorism Center and others in the clandestine service led then director George Tenet to step in. "On at least this occasion, Tenet made the right choice," a source told me. "He ordered the release of a man who was clearly not a terrorist."

The current Hollywood movie "Rendition" looks at a fictional case of a wrongly identified terrorist. It calls to public attention the CIA program of "extraordinary rendition," the practice of nabbing terrorist suspects abroad and transferring them without legal process to a third country -- often one where torture is commonplace -- for detention and interrogation.

In the course of investigating the rendition program for the past four years, I have interviewed victims, CIA pilots, case officers who have actually carried out renditions, senior CIA officers who directed such operations and officials at the White House who were involved in authorizing such measures. All of these sources told me in private or on the record that repeated claims by the White House that we "don't send people to countries where they will be tortured" are plain lies.

As Tyler Drumheller, head of CIA covert operations in Europe from 2001 to 2005, said in an on-camera interview, the assurances obtained from countries like Egypt that prisoners would not be tortured were hardly treated as serious. "You can say we asked them not to do it, and they do say that, but you have to be honest with yourself and say there's no way we can guarantee they are not going to do that."

Hollywood's "Rendition" makes some mistakes. It is not true, as the movie depicts, that CIA officers stand by in some Egyptian or Syrian torture room while a prisoner is electrocuted. Most CIA officers would find that abhorrent, and it would breach the CIA's own rules and be a clear violation of U.S. law.

But in some ways the truth about rendition is worse than what is depicted in the Hollywood film. When prisoners are handed over to countries like Egypt or Syria, CIA officers keep well clear of what happens next because agency rules prevent them from witnessing any strong-arm interrogations. But keeping their eyes wide shut, in effect, allows for much darker, more immoral things to occur, and for the U.S. government to preserve plausible deniability.

Inside its own "black site" prisons, the CIA uses interrogation methods that -- while falling short of the medieval techniques used in the Arab world -- still, in the eyes of many within the agency, amount to straightforward torture. It is not only the physical methods like waterboarding (simulated drowning), but also refined techniques of sensory deprivation, that can cripple a prisoner psychologically.

One witness to such abuse was Bisher al-Rawi, a longtime British resident who was snatched by the CIA and held for more than four years, first in Afghanistan, then in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In a recent interview he told me about the "dark prison" where he was held in solitary confinement while being bombarded with strange music. It was freezing cold and so dark, he said, "you couldn't see the end of your nose." Physical torture, like the beatings he later endured, could be overcome, he said, but psychological torture "lives with you all your life."

The Bush administration now acknowledges its program of rendition and the existence of its black sites. But much remains a deep secret. Most of the terrorist suspects involved remain in custody and cannot talk. And we know the fate of just a small fraction of the thousands of prisoners captured by U.S. forces around the world since 9/11.

Recently, by refusing to hear the lawsuit of Khaled el-Masri, the U.S. Supreme Court has added to this veil of secrecy. It left standing a judgment by the circuit court that however bad el-Masri's treatment, the objectives of national security outweighed the public interest in airing the truth about his arrest and detention in a public court of law.

As long as a terror suspect remains a "ghost prisoner" whose location and fate can only be guessed at, then a prison guard or interrogator need feel little fear of the consequences of what he or she might do. Secrecy is a friend of the torturer.

Giuliani: "I will torture."

By Michael J.W. Stickings - Nov 5, 2007

That, more or less, is what Rudy Giuliani said he would do as president in an interview with Bloomberg over the weekend. Think Progress has the clip.

He used "intensive questioning" on "mafia guys" in New York, he said, reiterating what he has acknowledged elsewhere, notably that "aggressive techniques" are acceptable.

Let me make two points:

1. Giuliani is not explicit, but it is clear that his definition of "aggressive techniques" includes what is widely considered to be torture. Asked about waterboarding in the past, he has said that whether or not it constitutes torture depends on context, that is, on who does it and how it's done. The enablers of torture in and around the White House, including and especially Cheney, as well as their supporters in the conservative and Republican ranks, may argue that waterboarding, for example, is not torture, and they may sincerely believe it and/or may be required to argue that it is not torture so as to protect the White House (if it is admitted that waterboarding is torture, such admission would prove that the White House has been lying about not torturing detainees and that, more seriously, the U.S. tortures), but those who know better, and one presumes that one who has actually conducted waterboarding knows better than the enablers of torture in and around the White House, and certainly better than a would-be enabler like Michael Mukasey, know that it is, and that many other such "techniques" are, too.If elected, in other words, Giuliani will authorize the use of torture. Period.
2. As John B. Judis argues in the current issue of The New Republic, "Giuliani is actually running to be mayor of the United States". That is, he "is selling himself to voters on the basis of his service as New York's mayor. He is arguing that he has the kind of administrative experience that would prepare him to be president." He was a prosecutor, he was a two-term mayor of one of the largest and most important cities in the world, and, of course, he was there on 9/11 -- that, above all else, lies at the core of his candidacy, his alleged leadership on and after 9/11, that along with his various efforts, some successful, some not, most of them emphasizing authority over liberty, to clean up the city by cracking down on crime.

Make sure to read the entire piece -- it's well worth it -- but here is Judis's assessment of whether or not "what he accomplished in New York is 'transferable' to the nation as a whole":

Put simply, that idea is impossible, disastrous, or entirely misleading. Giuliani cannot export welfare reform from New York to the federal government, since national welfare reform already happened. A broken windows strategy probably wouldn't help the FBI unearth white-collar crime or catch terrorists. Giuliani claims he will "control spending" as he did in New York; but, in fact, the budget went up 37.6 percent during his two terms, leaving his successor with a large deficit even before September 11. As for cutting taxes, which Giuliani has also promised to do, most of his New York tax cuts were relatively minor -- the most important were initiated by the state. And, in any case, the next president will have difficulty selling still another tax cut in the face of huge deficits.

The centerpiece of Giuliani's claim, however, is the suggestion that his approach to fighting crime provides a model for conducting foreign policy. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, he wrote: "I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world's bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior.

"This is a foolish analogy. In policing the world, the United States cannot claim to be enforcing its own laws; we lack legitimacy to do so, as we found after invading Iraq. When the NYPD went into poor neighborhoods, it was not an occupying force; when the U.S. military took over Baghdad, it was, and it suffered the consequences. Some of the "neighborhoods" Giuliani wants to clean up, such as Iran, possess their own armies and can call on other "neighborhoods," such as Russia and China, to deter an attempt to punish them for bad behavior. In short, the world is not New York writ large, and the trade-offs between authority and liberty look very different from the White House than from Gracie Mansion. But these distinctions seem lost on the man who aspires to be the next mayor of the United States.

What is also foolish is his suggestion that the use of "intensive questioning" of "mafia guys" in New York is akin to the use of torture on detainees in the war on terror. One doubts that those "mafia guys" were ever subjected to anything resembling, say, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, or were ever stripped of their habeas corpus rights and held indefinitely. There is no Gitmo for made men.

Tackling the New York mafia does not prepare one, let alone qualify one, to lead the war on terror at home and abroad. This, to me, explains in part why Giuliani seems to get everything about the war on terror wrong, why he doesn't seem to understand, or care to understand, that subjecting "mafia guys" to "some degree of pressure" may not constitute torture (and may or may not be justified -- that's another issue) but that subjecting detainees in the war on terror to "enhanced" interrogation techniques -- techniques he evidently knows nothing about, techniques that likely far surpass those used in New York -- does. It seems that he simply cannot distinguish between what was done in New York on his watch and what has been done (and is being done) in the war on terror, and, moreover, cannot grasp that the use of torture has done as much as anything else to destroy America's image and reputation around the world. The mafia may not have the grip on New York it once had, but America is hated more than ever.

For Giuliani, New York is the world and the world is New York. He claims to have a lot of experience -- transferable experience, from one executive office to another -- but, when it comes to what will be required of the next president, or of any president, he has precious little. And, as president, should that nightmare come to be, he will authorize the use of torture not just because he is an authoritarian who believes in it but because his understanding of the world and of his place in it begins and ends with New York and the ideological prism of religious and political authoritarianism through which his narrow experience and limited knowledge are filtered.

Warning, this film could make you very angry

by Robert Fisk, The Independent - November 4, 2007

At university, we male students used to say that it was impossible to take a beautiful young woman to the cinema and concentrate on the film. But in Canada, I've at last proved this to be untrue. Familiar with the Middle East and its abuses – and with the vicious policies of George Bush – we both sat absorbed by Rendition, Gavin Hood's powerful, appalling testimony of the torture of a "terrorist suspect" in an unidentified Arab capital after he was shipped there by CIA thugs in Washington.

Why did an Arab "terrorist" telephone an Egyptian chemical engineer – holder of a green card and living in Chicago with a pregnant American wife while he was attending an international conference in Johannesburg? Did he have knowledge of how to make bombs? (Unfortunately, yes – he was a chemical engineer – but the phone calls were mistakenly made to his number.)

He steps off his plane at Dulles International Airport and is immediately shipped off on a CIA jet to what looks suspiciously like Morocco – where, of course, the local cops don't pussyfoot about Queensberry rules during interrogation. A CIA operative from the local US embassy – played by a nervous Jake Gyllenhaal – has to witness the captive's torture while his wife pleads with congressmen in Washington to find him.

The Arab interrogator – who starts with muttered questions to the naked Egyptian in an underground prison – works his way up from beatings to a "black hole", to the notorious "waterboarding" and then to electricity charges through the captive's body. The senior Muhabarat questioner is, in fact, played by an Israeli and was so good that when he demanded to know how the al-Jazeera channel got exclusive footage of a suicide bombing before his own cops, my companion and I burst into laughter.

Well, suffice it to say that the CIA guy turns soft, rightly believes the Egyptian is innocent, forces his release by the local minister of interior, while the senior interrogator loses his daughter in the suicide bombing – there is a mind-numbing reversal of time sequences so that the bomb explodes both at the start and at the end of the film – while Meryl Streep as the catty, uncaring CIA boss is exposed for her wrong-doing. Not very realistic?

Well, think again. For in Canada lives Maher Arar, a totally harmless software engineer – originally from Damascus – who was picked up at JFK airport in New York and underwent an almost identical "rendition" to the fictional Egyptian in the movie. Suspected of being a member of al-Qa'ida – the Canadian Mounties had a hand in passing on this nonsense to the FBI – he was put on a CIA plane to Syria where he was held in an underground prison and tortured. The Canadian government later awarded Arar $10m in compensation and he received a public apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

But Bush's thugs didn't get fazed like Streep's CIA boss. They still claim that Arar is a "terrorist suspect"; which is why, when he testified to a special US congressional meeting on 18 October, he had to appear on a giant video screen in Washington. He's still, you see, not allowed to enter the US. Personally, I'd stay in Canada – in case the FBI decided to ship him back to Syria for another round of torture. But save for the US congressmen – "let me personally give you what our government has not: an apology," Democratic congressman Bill Delahunt said humbly – there hasn't been a whimper from the Bush administration.

Even worse, it refused to reveal the "secret evidence" which it claimed it had on Arar – until the Canadian press got its claws on these "secret" papers and discovered they were hearsay evidence of an Arar visit to Afghanistan from an Arab prisoner in Minneapolis, Mohamed Elzahabi, whose brother, according to Arar, once repaired Arar's car in Montreal.

There was a lovely quote from America's Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney general at the time, that the evidence again Arar was "supported by information developed by US law enforcement agencies". Don't you just love that word "developed"? Doesn't it smell rotten? Doesn't it mean "fabricated"?

And what, one wonders, were Bush's toughs doing sending Arar off to Syria, a country that they themselves claim to be a "terrorist" state which supports "terrorist" organisations like Hizbollah. President Bush, it seems, wants to threaten Damascus, but is happy to rely on his brutal Syrian chums if they'll be obliging enough to plug in the electricity and attach the wires in an underground prison on Washington's behalf.

But then again, what can you expect of a president whose nominee for Alberto Gonzales's old job of attorney general, Michael Mukasey, tells senators that he doesn't "know what is involved" in the near-drowning "waterboarding" torture used by US forces during interrogations. "If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional," the luckless Mukasey bleated.

Yes, and I suppose if electric shocks to the body constitute torture – if, mind you – that would be unconstitutional. Right? The New York Times readers at least spotted the immorality of Mukasey's remarks. A former US assistant attorney asked "how the United States could hope to regain its position as a respected world leader on the great issues of human rights if its chief law enforcement officer cannot even bring himself to acknowledge the undeniable verity that waterboarding constitutes torture...". As another reader pointed out, "Like pornography, torture doesn't require a definition."

Yet all is not lost for the torture lovers in America. Here's what Republican senator Arlen Spector – a firm friend of Israel – had to say about Mukasey's shameful remarks: "We're glad to see somebody who is strong, with a strong record, take over this department."

So is truth stranger than fiction? Or is Hollywood waking up – after Syriana and Munich – to the gross injustices of the Middle East and the shameless and illegal policies of the US in the region? Go and see Rendition – it will make you angry – and remember Arar. And you can take a beautiful woman along to share your fury.

Bush Is Right to Worry If Waterboarding Is Defined as Torture

By Jane Smiley, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted November 3, 2007.

We should take the criminality of the Bush administration's torture policy seriously, and that means making sure they are not above the law.

There is an article in Thursday's New York Times about the way Michael Mukasey has been hedging on waterboarding. The difficulty, according to many experts is, as "Jack L. Goldsmith, who served in the Justice Department in 2003 and 2004, wrote in his recent memoir, The Terror Presidency, that the possibility of future prosecution for aggressive actions against terrorism was a constant worry inside the Bush administration." Another expert points out that future prosecutors "... would ask not just who carried it out, but who specifically approved it. Theoretically, it could go all the way up to the president of the United States; that's why he'll never say it's torture."

I have to say that I am both glad and amazed that the Bush administration is with it enough to worry. That is a good sign. And they should worry, because they should be indicted, at least. I hope that they are, and that, indeed, it does "go all the way up to the president." One of the Attorney General's jobs should be making sure not only that the laws are enforced, but also that the laws are actual laws -- not opinions by John Yoo or David Addington or some other administration apologist. There is an exact definition of what a law is in this country, and it is not the same as a partisan legal opinion.

One of the enraging things about the Bush administration is the way that they have consistently written their own rules, as if governing the nation is like playing a game of stealing the flag, where the stronger team, when it finds itself losing, simply changes the score or the rules until they either technically "win" or wear out the other side (and in fact, George W. Bush, according to Gail Sheehy, was well known among his friends for changing the rules of a game until he could engineer a win -- and isn't that how they won in 2000?). To do such things is not "courage" or "resolve," it is tyranny.

Mukasey and other Bush administration officials clearly believe that they are going to put over the idea that they "might have gone too far", but that their "intentions were good" and they "just wanted to protect the country." In such a way, they plan to avoid paying the price for their choices and decisions. The law deals with this sort of defense. Someone whose car hits another person in a crosswalk might have been too frightened to stick around or might not have even realized he had hit someone, but the law still prosecutes these crimes, because a responsible citizen is expected to conform to the laws no matter what his emotional state. Same with Cheney and Bush.

You or I may suspect that they were indifferent to the idea of torture in their names, or possibly relished it, but we will never know that. We do, however, know that they explicitly and knowingly allowed torture. The law has no meaning if they don't have to pay for these crimes.

The number of times the Bush administration has skirted or broken or changed the laws to suit themselves is enormous and outrageous. We cannot hope to correct what they have done to our country without addressing their lawlessness. If this means retroactive prosecution, I say bring it on. The fact that they are worried means they know that they should have known better -- in fact, they did know better. All of them.

The following is a photoseries simulating what waterboarding looks like narrated by David Corn, excerpted from an article davidcorn.com.

Below are photographs taken by Jonah Blank [last year] at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The prison is now a museum that documents Khymer Rouge atrocities. Blank, an anthropologist and former Senior Editor of US News & World Report, is author of the books Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God and Mullahs on the Mainframe.

He is a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and has taught at Harvard and Georgetown. He currently is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic staff in the Senate, but the views expressed here are his own observations.

His photos show one of the actual waterboards used by the Khymer Rouge.

Here's the first:










How were it used? Here's a painting by a former prisoner that shows the waterboard in action:










In an email to me, Blank explained the significance of the photos. He wrote:

The crux of the issue before Congress can be boiled down to a simple question: Is waterboarding torture? Anybody who considers this practice to be "torture lite" or merely a "tough technique" might want to take a trip to Phnom Penh. The Khymer Rouge were adept at torture, and there was nothing "lite" about their methods. Incidentally, the waterboard in these photo wasn't merely one among many torture devices highlighted at the prison museum. It was one of only two devices singled out for highlighting (the other was another form of water-torture -- a tank that could be filled with water or other liquids; I have photos of that too.) There was an outdoor device as well, one the Khymer Rouge didn't have to construct: chin-up bars. (The prison where the museum is located had been a school before the Khymer Rouge took over).

These bars were used for "stress positions"-- another practice employed under current US guidelines. At the Khymer Rouge prison, there is a tank of water next to the bars. It was used to revive prisoners for more torture when they passed out after being placed in stress positions.

The similarity between practices used by the Khymer Rouge and those currently being debated by Congress isn't a coincidence. As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture -- were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

Bottom line: Not only do waterboarding and the other types of torture currently being debated put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half-century; they're also designed specifically to generate a (usually false) confession, not to obtain genuinely actionable intel. This isn't a matter of sacrificing moral values to keep us safe; it's sacrificing moral values for no purpose whatsoever.

These photos are important because most of us have never seen an actual, real-life waterboard. The press typically describes it in the most anodyne ways: a device meant to "simulate drowning" or to "make the prisoner believe he might drown." But the Khymer Rouge were no jokesters, and they didn't tailor their abuse to the dictates of the Geneva Convention. They -- like so many brutal regimes -- made waterboarding one of their primary tools for a simple reason: it is one of the most viciously effective forms of torture ever devised.