Water-boarding
From American Gulag
The Trickle of Information: Waterboarding in American Journalism
Three days after the Justice Department released its contentious "torture memos"—which authorized brutal interrogation techniques—the New York Times reported on a shocking discovery. A single footnote, buried in a 2005 memo, revealed that the CIA had waterboarded two Al Qaeda detainees 266 times, significantly more than previously believed.
Initially discovered by blogger Marcy Wheeler, this number contradicted the 2007 account of a former CIA officer, who claimed one of the detainees broke down after a mere 35 seconds of waterboarding. As a result of this inconsistency, new questions immediately surfaced about the definition of torture and the effectiveness of waterboarding.
“When I read this [number], I thought it must be a misprint,” journalist Christopher Hitchens said in an interview. “It would suggest that waterboarding doesn’t work at all.”
The American public first learned of waterboarding in 2004, when the New York Times reported that the CIA used such enhanced interrogation techniques on Al Qaeda detainees. But because the article appeared in the midst of other shocking revelations, including Abu Ghraib prison abuses, waterboarding initially received little public attention.
It took three years after the first report for waterboarding to gain traction as an issue. By 2007, the interrogation technique finally caught the attention of the national media, and today waterboarding is at the center of the debate on the legality and morality of intelligence gathering. Still, as journalists uncover new information, and as the public learns more about this controversial technique, it becomes apparent just how much information is still unknown.
Contents |
[edit] Background
Waterboarding, a “near drowning” experience, dates back to the Spanish Inquisition. Since then, various governments and regimes have condemned the technique as torture. Many European countries banned waterboarding in the early nineteenth century, and during World War II, the United States punished a Japanese officer with 15 years of hard labor after he waterboarded an American soldier.
Waterboarding is one of many techniques used by the United States military in its SERE program, which trains American pilots and soldiers to resist torture by foreign combatants. During a waterboarding session, interrogators strap the prisoner to a board, cover his eyes with cloth, and pour water over his face for repeated intervals until the prisoner is willing to speak.
CIA interrogators waterboarded three high-level Al Qaeda detainees in 2002 and 2003. The Justice Department authorized waterboarding and other techniques after September 11, citing the need to protect the United States from another terrorist attack by extracting intelligence from senior Al Qaeda members trained to resist interrogations. The Bush administration refused to discuss the interrogation techniques, claiming secrecy was necessary in order for the methods to be effective. But journalists have slowly uncovered evidence of CIA interrogations, most recently with the release of the “torture memos.”
Supporters claim waterboarding sessions have yielded critical information. Critics, however, argue that the technique constitutes torture. They say it is immoral, illegal, and ineffective.
[edit] Initial Findings
Waterboarding first appeared in the national media in May 2004 in an article on CIA interrogation methods. The New York Times reported that it was one of the techniques used on Al Qaeda detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The article contained a brief description of the technique but conveyed very little specific information about when or where the CIA waterboarded prisoners.
By the time this first article was published, an internal debate was already taking place within the administration. In December 2004, Daniel Levin, then acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), issued a new legal opinion denouncing torture as “abhorrent.” Prior to making this decision, Levin himself voluntarily underwent waterboarding, and shortly after, then White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez announced that Levin would not be appointed to head the OLC. Levin, who declined to comment on this information when it was initially reported, wrote in a May 2009 email that he still was not authorized to discuss the situation.
Though Levin’s waterboarding experience clearly contributed to his resulting legal opinion on torture, he refrained from calling waterboarding illegal in the opinion. According to a 2007 ABC News article, Levin claimed waterboarding would be illegal torture if it was not closely supervised. At the White House’s insistence, Levin also included a footnote in his new opinion, stating that the Bush administration’s earlier opinions—which authorized waterboarding—were not illegal.
Waterboarding gained significant media attention during Michael Mukasey’s attorney general confirmation hearing in 2007. In a letter to senators on October 30, 2007, Mukasey wrote that interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, “seem over the line or, on a personal basis, repugnant to me, and would probably seem the same to many Americans.” He refused, however, to call waterboarding torture.
Some experts disagreed. On October 31, intelligence consultant Malcolm Nance, a former SERE instructor, wrote an article in the Small Wars Journal titled “Waterboarding is Torture…Period.” The author, who said he understood waterboarding “personally and intimately,” used his own experience to argue that the technique did constitute torture.
“I’d supervised hundreds of sessions,” Nance said in an interview, noting that he wanted to address the situation “definitively” in his article. According to Nance, “the article created a phenomenal debate at the Pentagon,” in part due to its “scolding, you-should-know-better tone.”
In December 2007, the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed interrogation videotapes of two detainees, including Abu Zubaydah. The tapes, which were destroyed amid intense Congressional inquiry in 2005, documented waterboarding. By destroying the tapes, the CIA permanently deleted a critical source of information about how waterboarding sessions proceeded and if they were effective.
A few days later, former CIA official John Kiriakou discussed waterboarding on ABC News, calling the technique “necessary but torture.” He gave specific, supposedly firsthand information about the waterboarding of detainee Abu Zubaydah—claiming Zubaydah broke down after just 35 seconds—though Kiriakou admitted he did not actually witness the waterboarding sessions. He also said he did not know about the interrogation videotapes or their destruction. Still, multiple news outlets accepted Kiriakou’s account, and his claim legitimized the argument of those who supported the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.
The recent finding—that two detainees were waterboarded 266 times—negated Kiriakou’s claim. It remains unclear whether Kiriakou knew in 2007 that his story was inaccurate.
“I think he was saying what he had been told,” said Scott Shane, who reports on waterboarding for the New York Times, though this contradiction “shows the hazard of writing about classified information.”
Regardless of Kiriakou’s intentions, a recent New York Times article highlighted the oversights in reporting back in 2007. ABC News—and the many other networks that covered this story—depended on Kiriakou as the sole on-the-record source, even though he based his knowledge on field accounts he had read. The CIA claimed in April 2009 that Kiriakou was not authorized to speak on its behalf, but the agency did not seek to correct Kiriakou’s story in 2007.
In February 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed the agency’s use of waterboarding to Congress. He named three individuals who the CIA waterboarded and claimed the agency had not used the technique in five year. Hayden told the House Intelligence Committee that waterboarding may no longer be legal, though he never conclusively stated it was illegal. The same week, the White House claimed the technique could still be used if necessary. A White House spokesman told the Washington Post that George Bush authorized Hayden’s statement
[edit] Obama Administration
At Eric Holder’s confirmation hearing in January 2009, Barack Obama's attorney general nominee explicitly stated that waterboarding is torture. Shortly after, in early April, the New York Times’ coverage became more condemnatory. For the first time, Shane referred to interrogation techniques as “brutal,” rather than “harsh” as he had in past articles. Clark Hoyt, the newspaper’s public editor, devoted an entire column to this “linguistic shift.” According to Hoyt, editors and reporters from both Washington and New York were involved in this decision, and the word “brutal” has since appeared repeatedly in the New York Times.
On April 16, 2009, after much debate, the Justice Department released the infamous interrogation memos. The highly detailed memos included the size of the board to be used—four feet by seven feet—and the height from which water should be applied—twelve to twenty-four inches. The preciseness of the waterboarding description indicated the attention given to this subject by the Justice Department in 2002.
[edit] Gaining Traction
As described by the New York Times, “the cloak of secrecy that long concealed the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program and its legal underpinnings has gradually broken down.” One obvious explanation for the initially slow reporting is the government’s effort to conceal information, but other factors contributed as well.
Christopher Hitchens attributed the initial absence of news to the emotional state of the country after the September 11 attacks.
“After 2001, I think the government realized it could count on a certain amount of public sympathy—and press sympathy,” Hitchens said. “No one particularly wanted to know about it.”
One explanation for the weak reaction to the 2004 article is timing, for the New York Times published the article shortly after the public learned of the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib. The plethora of references to Abu Ghraib may have diverted attention away from the specific mention of waterboarding.
Shane ascribed the slow reporting after 2004 to the initial lack of public understanding about waterboarding’s history.
“I do think it took a while for people to understand the dark history of the method,” he said, “that it was not something invented by the CIA in 2002 but had been used by despotic regimes for centuries.”
Shane also cited the reporting process itself as a reason for the slow but eventual increase in information.
“It was very difficult to get people to talk,” he said of his initial reporting, noting that people who had left the government were “under less scrutiny” and more willing to talk to reporters. Shane explained that he used each piece of information he acquired that get the next source to speak.
“Once someone mentions there are memos,” he said, “it becomes a little bit easier.”
Darius Rejali, author of “Torture and Democracy,” said the use of the name waterboarding affected the public’s reaction to the technique. Previous names for the technique included water torture and the water cure.
“There is a special vocabulary for torture,” Rejali told the New York Times in 2008. “When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit…Torturers create names that are funny to then.”
[edit] Use by Journalists and Government Officials
Journalist Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded, August 2008
Levin was not the only individual who personally underwent waterboarding. In 2008, Hitchens underwent the experience in writing an article for Vanity Fair magazine.
“By the time I decided to do a piece on waterboarding,” Hitchens said, “the editor-in-chief [Graydon Carter] and I decided that the only way to write something new about this was to see what it was actually like.”
“I got as near as I could get to guessing what the real thing would be like,” Hitchens said. “Though of course,” he added,” I could stop it,” marking a stark contrast from the experience of actual Al Qaeda detainees.
Hitchens’ article, accompanied by a video clip of his experience, offered the American public a firsthand view of the technique. The article’s title, “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” explicitly stated Hitchens’ conclusion.
Former SERE instructor Nance explained that even the best attempts still differed from the experiences of actual suspected terrorists. According to Nance, a 90-second film produced by Amnesty International in April 2008 was the “most visually accurate” portrayal of waterboarding available to the public. Amnesty International referred to the film, titled “The Stuff of Life,” as “‘the film the CIA doesn’t want you to see.’” It was part of the organization’s campaign against the use of waterboarding.
“That’s pretty close to how it’s done,” Nance said, “but even they did not have the exact device.”
"The Stuff of Life," ad campaign by Amnesty International, April 2008
[edit] 266 Times
Even individuals informed on the subject—including Hitchens, Shane, and Nance—offered diverging interpretations of the recent discovery that interrogators waterboarded two detainees 266 times. Hitchens said he had both read and heard that 266 was the number of times interrogators poured water, not the number of times the procedure took place. Though Shane said he did not know for sure, he too assumed that 266 referred to the number of times the CIA poured water.
In contrast to this interpretation, Nance explained that the waterboarding process was actually “a continuous flow of water,” suggesting that 266 individual waterboarding sessions occurred.
Regardless of which explanation is correct, Shane emphasized the relative significance of this number.
“I don’t think it makes a big difference,” he said, adding that the CIA inspector general’s office provided the number used in the memo. “The number suggests that waterboarding was by no means immediately effective, as some had claimed, and it probably has legal implications for the definition of torture.”
All three sources emphasized how much information is still unknown.
“I’ve heard stories that the worst is yet to come,” Hitchens said.
One lingering question is how many people the CIA actually waterboarded. When asked if he thought the current reported number was truthful, Nance reiterated Hitchens’ emphasis on the unknown.
“We won’t know until there’s an investigation,” he said.
[edit] Related Sources
First recent mention of waterboarding, May 13, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/politics/13DETA.html
Video, Michael Mukasey's confirmation hearing, October 18, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt8v_GAgOK4
Michael Mukasey's letter to senators, October 30, 2007, http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200710/10-30-07%20Mukasey%20to%20Dems.pdf
Malcolm Nance's article on waterboarding, October 31, 2007, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/
History of waterboarding, November 2, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html
Daniel Levin's waterboarding experience, November 2, 2007, http://abcnews.go.com/WN/DOJ/story?id=3814076
NPR's "On the Media" segment about waterboarding, November 9, 2007, http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2007/11/09/segments/88663
Destruction of videotapes, December 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/washington/07intel.html
Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou said waterboarding torture but necessary, December 10, 2007, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=3978231
CIA Director Michael Hayden's discussion of waterboarding, February 5, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/TheLaw/story?id=4244423&page=1
Christopher Hitchens' article on waterboarding, August 2008, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808
Video, Eric Holder's confirmation hearing, January 15, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdAt1GcIs6E
Justice Department interrogation memos, April 16, 2009, http://documents.nytimes.com/justice-department-memos-on-interrogation-techniques/search/266
Release of interrogation memos, April 16, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17detain.html
First mention, waterboarding used 266 times, April 18, 2009, http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/18/khalid-sheikh-mohammed-was-waterboarded-183-times-in-one-month/
Two detainees waterboarded 266 times, April 19, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.htm
Recent discussion of Kiriakou's claims in 2007, April 28, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/media/28abc.html
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's knowledge of waterboarding, May 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15cong.html
Conservative radio host Mancow gets waterboarded, May 22, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUkj9pjx3H0
WATERBOARDING
Waterboarding was like a watched pot for the media – it did not come to a roaring boil until everyone was not looking. Scott Shane, who reports on terrorism and intelligence for the New York Times, first saw the tiny bubbles of waterboarding in May 2004 after his colleagues at the Times – James Risen, David Johnston, and Neil Lewis – first used the term in an article on the CIA interrogation of suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
More bubbles rose to the surface, slowly and sporadically, for the next three years. In Shane’s opinion, the public simply was not interested in waterboarding and the media consequently did not turn its attention on the subject.
Then suddenly, in October 2007, Shane wrote another story on waterboarding and finally, the pot began to boil. “It was a peculiar pattern,” Shane says. “Four years after waterboarding stopped, we finally went crazy.”
He attributes the sudden rise in coverage to a change in public opinion. After September 11, he said, the press reflected the popular mood that focused on the threat posed by Al-Qaeda. As time passed and we gained distance from 9/11, the emphasis shifted to critiquing the government.
“The public mood changed – it’s less fear and more concern about ‘is our response appropriate and in harmony with American values?’” Shane said. More specifically, Americans began questioning whether the government had acted in excess in the name of the War on Terror.
Shane remembers that when he first heard the term waterboarding, he pictured in his head something like a seesaw. There would be a guy strapped to one end of it and he would be dunked into water. While Shane now has a better idea of how the process works, he concedes that the concept remains swathed in mystery, mostly because the media has given contradictory accounts.
Origins
Research suggests that the technique originated centuries ago with the Chinese water torture, a process by which practitioners would slowly drop water onto a prisoner’s head until he went insane.
Over time, the process has changed. While many variations exist today, the basic technique involves strapping the suspect to a board, binding him so he cannot move, and then forcing a deluge of water down his nose and throat to create the sensation of drowning. Sometimes, interrogators may drape a towel or sheet of cellophane over the suspect’s face to force the mouth to remain open and take in more water.
The United States first used this method of interrogation in 1901, when U.S. forces practiced the “water cure,” as it was then known, on Filipinos. Historians who have attempted to document the use of waterboarding during the Philippine-American war differ as to how President Theodore Roosevelt felt towards the technique. One report, by Eric Weiner of National Public Radio, concluded that Roosevelt supported the technique, writing in a 1902 letter that the “old Filipino method” left no one “seriously damaged.” But William Safire of the New York Times quoted the same letter but added that Roosevelt disapproved of the method and dismissed the general who had been in charge. After his comments that no one had been damaged by the waterboarding, Roosevelt had added: “Nevertheless, torture is not a thing we can tolerate.”
Weiner and Safire trace the practice through World War II and Vietnam, even citing domestic cases in which the method was used by police officers. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for waterboarding prisoners in an attempt to obtain confessions.
“Its fair to say that given the history, it’s a tough case to make that it’s all of a sudden not torture,” Shane said.
He finds great irony in how the United States adopted the practice of waterboarding. While researching its history, Shane focused on the creation of the Sierra program in the 1950s. One of the reasons why the program was created, Shane said, was concern for what treatment captured soldiers might face from Cold War foes like North Korea and the Soviet Union. Pilots and special ops forces were waterboarded to “give them a taste of what they might face,” Shane said.
In 2002, the CIA and military turned to the Sierra program for ideas on how to interrogate and ended up utilizing Soviet techniques.
“We used these techniques to prepare our military for what an unscrupulous, immoral enemy might do,” Shane said. “Then we adopted those practices as our own.”
Recent uses
The CIA used waterboarding in 2002-2003 (the exact dates are not known) for interrogating high-level Al-Qaeda operatives. Officials have acknowledged that the practice was used on three suspects, including Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Zubaydah is said to have been Al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and Mohammed, known as KSM, is described as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks . The third subject’s identity is not certain, but is rumored to be Abd Al-Rahim al-Nashiri, believed to be the mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole bombing.
John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, boasted to ABC news in a Dec. 10, 2007 interview that Zubaydah had previously been uncooperative but broke after 35 seconds of waterboarding. “From the day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou told ABC. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
Debate about legality
Kiriakou’s remarks typify the Bush administrations’ general approach to the waterboarding issue: they refuse to distinguish whether waterboarding is or is not torture, but conclude that it is a necessary step in order to obtain information that can save American lives from future terrorist attacks. In the war on terror, the gloves have come off and anything goes.
Despite intense public criticism, the administration has not ruled out waterboarding. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the Department of Justice drafted a memo, written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee, that authorized the CIA to use harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, sleep-deprivation, so-called “stress positions,” freezing temperatures, and withholding of food or water.
Under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, adopted into US law as 18 USC 2340, prisoners must be “treated humanely.” It specifically prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” It does not, however, provide a specific list of what techniques are acceptable and which are not.
As early as February 2002, President Bush set out to establish loopholes. He declared that because the war on terror was fought against individuals and terrorist organizations and not nation states, the provisions of the Geneva Conventions did not cover the prisoners detained in this war. He termed these prisoners “enemy combatants” and set them outside the laws.
Bybee’s memo, written largely by Yoo, advised that torture must be pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Mental pain inflicted by torture must last for several months or years to constitute severe pain or suffering.
Under this interpretation, the techniques described above were termed “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the Department of Justice advised the President that their use was legal.
Mukasey controversy
In late 2007, President Bush nominated Michael B. Mukasey to be the new U.S. Attorney General. Many congressmen, including Democrats, supported his appointment. However, during his confirmation hearings, Mukasey continually danced around the subject of waterboarding, refusing to say whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture.
For Mukasey to say waterboarding is illegal, Shane said, would open up a can of worms. Not only would it raise questions about prosecuting people for acts that the Justice Department had earlier said were legal, it raises problematic issues of who would face criminal prosecution.
“Who to prosecute?” Shane asked. “The low-level people who actually did the waterboarding? Or the chain of command that authorized it, all the way up to the President? Or the lawyers who told the chain of command that it was legal? Can you even prosecute a lawyer for giving bad legal advice?”
Mukasey drafted a letter dated October 30, 2007, to address demands that he clarify his position on waterboarding, in which he both condemned the practice yet refused to call it illegal.
“These techniques seem over the line or, on a personal basis, repugnant to me, and would probably seem the same to many Americans,” Mukasey wrote. “But hypotheticals are different from real life, and in any legal opinion the actual facts and circumstances are critical.”
With this equivocal answer, Mukasey left open a loophole for the Bush administration to continue using waterboarding. In fact, all of the legislation passed in the past four years since the news of “enhanced interrogation techniques” began to emerge has provided loopholes. Reactions
Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war during Vietnam and has since become an outspoken critic of harsh interrogation techniques, sponsored the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 that attempted to prohibit the inhumane treatment of prisoners. The legislation, which passed the Senate 90-9, confines military interrogations to techniques described in the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogations. The field manual consists of mostly verbal interrogation techniques such as “good cop/bad cop” routines or the “pride and ego” routine. However, the Act only limits the interrogation practices of the military, not the CIA. Even McCain voted against an anti-torture bill that would limit CIA interrogators to methods listed in the field manual.
Although the public has known about waterboarding since the New York Times first broke the story in May 2004, the CIA did not officially admit that it had waterboarded anyone until February 2008 . However, Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, had announced a ban on waterboarding in 2006. Still, Hayden too had left a loophole: waterboarding may be used if authorized by the president and the attorney general.
John Yoo, author of the 2002 Bybee memo, says the option to waterboard must be left open in the event that a “ticking time bomb” situation might arise. According to Yoo in his memoir War by Other Means, these are times when torture might be necessary.
“What if, as the popular Fox television program 24 recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon in an American city,” Yoo wrote. “Should it be illegal for the President to use harsh interrogation short of torture to elicit this information?”
A CNN poll conducted in November 2007 shows that most Americans believe waterboarding is torture but a substantial portion also believe that it could be necessary at this time. Of the 1,024 people polled, 69 percent responded that they believe waterboarding is a form of torture and 29 percent said it is not. Out of the same group, 40 percent said that the procedure should be used to get information from suspected terrorists.
As this history of waterboarding suggests, media coverage of enhanced interrogation techniques is usually framed not as a human rights issue but rather as a legal issue. The articles about waterboarding do not interview victims who describe the horrors they endured.
Still, Shane has found that even the definition of waterboarding causes great controversy.
“People always ask me, ‘Why don’t you just call it torture?’” Shane said. “But I’m a reporter and I can’t assume one side of the argument is right.”
Shane says he has struggled to find an appropriate term. For a while, he wrote about waterboarding as “simulated drowning,” but felt that that was not entirely accurate. Simply “drowning” did not work either, he said. The interrogators are not actually drowning their subjects. “You’re not much good to them drowned,” Shane said. At the same time, the process is not simulation either – the body believes it is drowning and acts accordingly.
“I try, when there is space, to give more a more detailed description,” Shane said. “Explain that it’s no high-tech method, the head is below the feet at an angle, things like that. But sometimes we [reporters] take for granted that people understand waterboarding and forget to explain terms. I am quite explicit when describing waterboarding, if I have the space.”
After covering waterboarding over several months, Shane decided the best description of the process is “suffocation” or will write “waterboarding, which critics describe as torture.”
First-hand accounts
Since the issue gained recognition last year, a handful of news organizations have found and interviewed people who have experienced waterboarding.
Last December, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an article about Arthur McCants, a 60-year-old veteran who claims he was waterboarded as part of his Navy survival training 30 years ago . McCants describe his experiences vividly: Strapped to a board slanted at a 20-degree angle, his feet on the high end and head on the low end, instructors poured water over his head until he passed out. After he woke up, they began again, this time with a cloth draped over his face.
“They put a t-shirt over my face and began pouring water over it,” McCants told the Star Tribune. “I was now sucking water through the T-shirt. I was trying to break the straps, and my whole body was arcing. My whole body was trying to break the straps.”
Instructors threatened McCants with a third waterboarding, but he broke into tears.
“My knees buckled,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t handle it again. I would have lost my mind.”
Even after 30 years, McCants said he still dreams about drowning many nights.
The account of former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin’s experience with waterboarding has been reported more widely. ABC news first reported, and Shane followed up, on a story about Levin going to a military base and requesting to be waterboarded.
Levin has never spoken publicly about what he experienced. Instead, soon after the experience took place, Levin wrote the December 2004 opinion that replaced the Bybee memo.
“Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms,” the memo read. While it seemed that Levin was condemning waterboarding, the memo also included a footnote at the insistence of the White House and CIA, according to Shane. The footnote concluded that all interrogation acts authorized by the previous Justice Department officials remained legal, including waterboarding.
“I don’t know what Levin literally concluded from his experience,” Shane said. “My impression is that he’s not to thrilled with these techniques. But to say it’s not legal is a radical step. To change advice is tricky.”
Shane said that the vague wording of the new memo, including the ringing condemnation of torture and the mysterious footnote, allowed Levin to “have it both ways.” He backed away from the techniques while not officially changing the policy.
Four years after the CIA stopped using waterboarding, media coverage of the issue continues to gain traction. Shane attributes this in large part to the nature of waterboarding.
“It’s vivid and physical and catches people’s imagination,” Shane said. “It’s become a symbol for all the other techniques that are still being used.”
After spending months covering the waterboarding issue, Shane still struggles to understand why it took so long for it to obtain widespread coverage.
“It just didn’t capture attention when it was first revealed,” he said. “It’s puzzling to me. Then it became like an epidemic or a fashion. Once one news outlet wrote about it, one after another picked it up.”
As for why the coverage has focused largely on waterboarding as a legal question, not as a human rights abuse, Shane thinks that the way in which the legal reasoning played out causes popular concern.
“Since the War on Terror was conceived and carried out, the administration has looked to lawyers to make decisions and set limits,” Shane said. “The lawyers simply say ‘here are the legal limits of what you can do,’ not ‘here’s what you should do.’ When the government makes decisions in areas as treacherous as this, you wouldn’t want to be governed by the question of what is legal.”
Videos
[http://www.youtube.com/v/5dLccPF5E2o&hl=en
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http://www.youtube.com/v/5dLccPF5E2o&hl=en
Relevant readings and resources
Bybee, Jay C. Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, Washington, DC. 1 Aug. 2002. (download < http://www.tomjoad.org/bybeememo.htm>).
“Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War,” International Humanitarian Law – Treaties and Documents. Geneva, 12 August 1949 <http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/385ec082b509e76c41256739003e636d/6756482d86146898c125641e004aa3c5>.
Eggen, Dan. “White House Defends CIA’s Use of Waterboarding in Interrogations.” Washington Post February 7, 2008: A03. < http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/05/AR2008020502764.html>.
Eggen, Dan and Michael D. Shear. “Vote Against Waterboarding Bill Called Consistent.” Washington Post February 16, 2008, Suburban edition: A10.
Espositio, Richard and Brian Ross. “Coming in from the Cold: CIA spy calls waterboarding necessary but torture.” ABC News.com. 10 December 2007. ABCNews Internet Ventures. 19 May 2008 < http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3978231>.
Gellman, Barton. “The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light.” Washingtonpost.com. 20 June 2006. Washington Post Company. 6 June 2008 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901211_pf.html>.
Liptak, Adam. “Suspected Leader of 9/11 Attacks is Said to Confess.” NYTimes.com. 15 March 2007. New York Times Company. 6 June 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/us/15gitmo.html>.
Mukasey, Michael B. Letter to Patrick J. Leahy, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Dianne Feinstein, Charles E. Schumber, Benjamin L. Cardin, Edward M. Kennedy, Herb Kohl, Russell D. Feingold, Richard J. Durbin, and Sheldon Whitehouse. 30 October 2007. Pdf copy available <http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/20071031_Mukasey.pdf>.
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