The CIA's intensive use of water torture

Paul Woodward, Online Correspondent

• Last Updated: April 21. 2009 10:50AM UAE / April 21. 2009 6:50AM GMT

Following the release of what are now known as the "torture memos", The New York Times on Monday credited its headline story to research by a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, who discovered that waterboarding had been used by the CIA 266 times on two suspects.

"The CIA officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qa'eda operative.

"A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organisations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

"The 2005 memo also says that the CIA used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing CIA officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known."

After Mr Kiriakow spoke to ABC News in December 2007, The Washington Post reported: "He described Abu Zubaydah as ideologically zealous, defiant and uncooperative - until the day in mid-summer when his captors strapped him to a board, wrapped his nose and mouth in cellophane and forced water into his throat in a technique that simulates drowning.

"The waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds before Abu Zubaydah broke down, according to Kiriakou, who said he was given a detailed description of the incident by fellow team members. The next day, Abu Zubaydah told his captors he would tell them whatever they wanted, Kiriakou said.

" 'He said that Allah had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate, because it would make things easier for his brothers,' Kiriakou said.

In a report compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mr Zubaydah described to investigators his experience of waterboarding: "I was put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then place over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breath. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds caused severe pain. I vomited. The bed was the again lowered to a horizontal position and the same torture carried out with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occassion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled without success to breathe. I thought I was going to die."

The detainees described threats that were made against them.

"Mr Khalid Shaik Mohammed alleged that... one of his interrogators stated that the greenlight had been received from Washington to give him a 'hard time' and that, although they would not let him die, he would be brought to the 'verge of death and back again'.

"Mr Abu Zubaydah alleged that... he was told by one of the interrogators that he was one of the first to received these interrogation techniques, 'so no rules applied'.

The report said: "Mr Abu Zubaydah also believed that his interrogation was a form of experimentation with various interrogation techniques. Indeed some forms of ill-treatment were allegedly used against him that were not reported to have been used on other detainees. He claimed that he was told by one of the interrogators that he was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques."

Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer who writes for Harper's Magazine, was blunt in his assessment of the reason the memos were written and what must happen now that their contents have become public.

"The torture memoranda were written to enable torture and with the full expectation that it would happen. They are, therefore, documents that evidence criminal conduct. But the full dimensions of the criminal dealings remain substantially obscured. It’s time to start unwinding the torture tango, through a process that involves both a special commission of inquiry and a special prosecutor."

Wilder Tayler, the acting secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists, said: "If a nation committed to law is not willing or capable to hold those responsible who authorised some of the worst crimes under international law it sends a terrible message to the rest of the world. It does great harm to the universal prohibition of torture."

The Washington Post described the meticulous instructions through which interrogators were provided with legal guidance on how to approach the threshold of torture.

"Doctors had to evaluate in advance the ability of each detainee to survive the coercion; slaps to the head and gut could not provoke severe or lasting pain; the water used for dousing had to be safe for drinking, and those holding the hose had to stop at two-thirds of the time that normally causes hypothermia.

"Detainees could not be allowed to hang from their shackles. Simulated drowning could be practiced only with a saline solution, to keep blood sodium levels in a safe range, with the liquid poured for up to 40 seconds at a time, reaching a total of 12 minutes per day. Moreover, the detainees had to be fed a liquid diet in advance, to keep them from choking on their own vomit.

"David B Rivkin Jr, a lawyer at Baker Hostetler who supported the detainee policies, says the memos' 'careful and nuanced legal analysis' of such trade-offs produced 'eminently reasonable results'.

"But a frequent complaint by other lawyers was that the documents' language, including the articulation of precisely calibrated limits, was circular. The memos relied heavily on the CIA's assurances and information about the limits of pain and suffering, and repeated them in their instructions.

"A senior Obama appointee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to comment, said, 'My overwhelming feeling is boy, what a kind of corruption of the system of law to serve a political end.' Tax lawyers, for instance, may always work at the edge of the law, he said, but 'you don't treat the [anti-]torture convention the same as the tax code.'

"Louis Michael Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, said the memos' authors fell into a familiar trap: They looked so hard for legal authority that they paid too little heed to sound intuition. Sometimes, he said, 'the law promotes rather than stands in the way of morally reprehensible behaviour.' "

In an editorial, The New York Times wrote: "To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W Bush's Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

"Their language is the precise bureaucratese favoured by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect - all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

"In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

"These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors' statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country's most basic values."

Evan Wallach, a US federal judge, recounted the most recent case in which government officials in the United States have been prosecuted and imprisoned after using water torture.

"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."

pwoodward@thenational.ae