Sully: They Waterboarded Him 183 Times In One Month
One of the disadvantages of relying on a torture-regime for the facts about the torture they have been practising is that they have an interest in lying. And the job of a journalist in these matters - especially after the torrent of deception that came out of the Bush White House - is to exercise skepticism about the government's claims. National Review, in the Bush era, became a de facto propaganda arm for the government, and no more so than on the question of torture, an issue where one might have imagined a magazine steeped in traditional Catholic ethics, might have been just a little bit honest. But nah. So we had Deroy Murdock in one of the most repulsive columns ever printed in that magazine declaring
Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.
Not reluctantly forced to contemplate torture in the last act of desperation to save mass death. But proud. Nonetheless, Murdock was at pains to tell us:
U.S. and Pakistani authorities captured KSM on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. KSM stayed mum for months, often answering questions with Koranic chants. Interrogators eventually waterboarded him — for just 90 seconds. KSM “didn’t resist,” one CIA veteran said in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker. “He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” Another CIA official told ABC News: “KSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.”
Oh really? From the 2005 Bradbury memo:
The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.
In this, you see something that occurs in every instance of torture regimes justifying their stance. They invariably minimize what they have been doing, lie about what they found out, and refuse to allow transparency so that the rest of us can find a way back out of a labyrinth of untruth, pure force, and abandoned morals they have constructed. (I await NRO's and Murdock's correction.)
Moreover, it is worth pointing out that even if you accept the preposterous notion that waterboarding isn't torture - something no legal authority in human history ever has before Dick Cheney came along - and even if you accept the amazingly detailed limits that Bradbury placed on the frequency and severity of waterboarding to make it "legal," even then, we now know that the CIA violated those standards.
Here's Bradbury's unhinged Orwellian judgment of how much waterboarding stayed within the boundaries of legality:
[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 appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.
As emptywheel notes,
So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM.
So even by the Bush-Cheney standards of legality, the waterboarders far exceeded what was allowed. They broke the law even by Bush's standards. And why, pray, is breaking the law in such a grave matter as a war crime no longer subject to prosecution or even investigation in the United States?
The US is a banana republic if this stuff is allowed to go unpunished. A banana republic with a torture apparatus.
Benen: CLOSING THE PROSECUTORIAL DOOR....
Last week, when the White House released the Bush administration's torture memos, President Obama's statement explained there would be no prosecutions of CIA officials who followed the advice of Bush's OLC in good faith. Whether there might be prosecutions for anyone else remained an open question.Yesterday, the door that appeared ajar suddenly closed shut.
The Obama administration opposes any effort to prosecute those in the Justice Department who drafted legal memos authorizing harsh interrogations at secret CIA prisons, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said yesterday.
Some analysts and lawmakers have called for investigations and possible prosecution of those involved because they say four of the memos, disclosed last week by President Obama, illegally authorized torture. Emanuel's dismissal of the idea went beyond Obama's pledge not to prosecute CIA officers who acted on the Justice Department's legal advice.
"It's not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back" out of "any sense of anger and retribution," Emanuel said on ABC's "This Week." His remarks reflect the White House's effort to claim a middle ground after the release of the memos, which had been top secret, angered backers of the Bush administration's interrogation policy.
As pleased as I was to see the White House release the documents -- without significant redactions, despite howls from the intelligence community, knowing there would be significant partisan blowback -- describing accountability for alleged criminal behavior as "looking back" with "anger and retribution" is foolish.
It's simply not how our system of justice is supposed to work. "Bygones" is not the appropriate response to the evidence of criminal wrongdoing contained in the torture memos.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) added that the idea of "criminalizing legal advice after one administration is out of the office is a very bad precedent.... I think it would be disaster to go back and try to prosecute a lawyer for giving legal advice that you disagreed with to a former president."
But we're not just dealing with an instance of bad legal advice; we're talking about high-ranking administration officials establishing and justifying a system that permits war crimes.
Failing to criminalize crimes is what really sets "a very bad precedent."
Think Progress: UN Rapporteur On Torture: Obama’s Pledge Not To Pursue Torture Prosecutions Of CIA Agents Is Not Legal
When President Obama released the four of the Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) Bush-era torture memos last week, he issued a statement promising not to pursue torture prosecutions against CIA agents who relied on the memos to justify their use of torture tactics on terrorist suspects in U.S. custody. (Notably, Obama left open the possibility of prosecuting the torture architects.) “[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution,” Obama said.
But in an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Manfred Nowak, explained that Obama’s grant of immunity is likely a violation of international law. As a party to the UN Convention Against Torture, the U.S. is obligated to investigate and prosecute U.S. citizens that are believed to have engaged in torture:
STANDARD: CIA torturers are according to U.S. President Obama not to be prosecuted. Is that decision supportable?
NOWAK: Absolutely not. The United States has, like all other Contracting Parties to the UN Convention Against Torture, committed itself to investigate instances of torture and to prosecute all cases in which credible evidence of torture is found.
Indeed, Article 2 of the convention on torture explains that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” can be used to legally justify torture. Further, the convention states that an “order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.”
Nowak explained that by invoking the OLC’s memos as justification for the actions of CIA agents against terrorist suspects in U.S. custody, Obama is acting contrary to U.S. obligations under the treaty:
STANDARD: In other words, by making this announcement, Obama has violated international law?
NOWAK: Correct. It is a violation of binding international treaty law in this case, because this is an international law convention — and it provides unequivocally that states are not merely obligated to make torture a crime, but also to prosecute any incidents of which credible evidence can be found.
In announcing his decision to release the OLC memos, Obama also suggested that he is not inclined to conduct a full investigation into the government’s use of torture. Nowak, however, said the he believes that such an investigation ought to be Obama’s highest priority. “Most importantly, there should be a comprehensive investigation undertaken by an independent body. Whether by a special investigatory commission created by Congress or by a special investigator — there are different approaches,” Nowak explained.
Yglesias: Commentary’s Abe Greenwald is Pro-Torture
I had the opportunity over Passover to reflect a bit on the humanitarian tradition in Jewish thought. And then of course there’s Commentary where Abe Greenwald defends himself against charges of being pro-torture with the quip “anything to which Christopher Hitchens is willing to submit himself in pursuit of a Vanity Fair article is not torture. This covers, among other things, back-waxing, exercise class, and waterboarding.”
Over at the Wonk Room, Matt Duss reminds us that Hitchens’ conclusion after having been waterboarded was that “if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”
As Jay Bybee wrote in a memo that concluded that waterboarding is legal, “You have orally informed us that this procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control even though he may be aware that he is in fact not drowning.” Basically the idea is that if you would like to torture someone by holding them under water until they nearly drown, but your lawyer tells you that you’re not allowed to run the risk doing permanent physical harm to the torturee, “waterboarding” is a nifty method of producing all the relevant torture but without the chance of accidentally drowning the guy you’re torturing. The only reason anyone could ever reach the conclusion that this isn’t torture is that they (a) want to torture people, and (b) don’t want to admit that they want to torture people. Since Bybee, along with George W. Bush and other Bush administration officials, wanted to torture people but didn’t want to face the legal consequences of admitting that they were torturing people, the sophistry makes perfect sense. It’s not entirely clear to me why Greenwald feels the need to follow suit — he can just shout loud and proud that he likes torture.
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