“So, the terrorists’ names are Zlatan, Beckham and Maradona? Ok, let’s arrest them!”
Posted by: Jenny Penny in Human rights, The "war on terrorism", USASo, CIA has admitted that they have used the torture technique known as waterboarding. Of course, they emphasize that it was a long time ago, and only in three cases, and only on the really bad guys. Yeah right. And they admit it on “super Tuesday”, when the news are likely to drown in the flood of primary election frenzy. Hm.
And they “may” use it again.
John McCain, the republican presidential candidate who seems likely to win his party’s nomination, has spoken out against torture. McCain is a Vietnam veteran and was a prisoner of war for over five years. In November 2005, in a piece for Newsweek called “Torture’s terrible toll” he wrote:
Obviously, to defeat our enemies we need intelligence, but intelligence that is reliable. We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear-whether it is true or false-if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. But I did not refuse, or repeat my insistence that I was required under the Geneva Conventions to provide my captors only with my name, rank and serial number. Instead, I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse. It seems probable to me that the terrorists we interrogate under less than humane standards of treatment are also likely to resort to deceptive answers that are perhaps less provably false than that which I once offered.
About waterboarding, he wrote:
For instance, there has been considerable press attention to a tactic called “waterboarding,” where a prisoner is restrained and blindfolded while an interrogator pours water on his face and into his mouth-causing the prisoner to believe he is being drowned. He isn’t, of course; there is no intention to injure him physically. But if you gave people who have suffered abuse as prisoners a choice between a beating and a mock execution, many, including me, would choose a beating. The effects of most beatings heal. The memory of an execution will haunt someone for a very long time and damage his or her psyche in ways that may never heal. In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.
The whole piece is available at Truthout.
In a study from 2007, Metin Basoglu and Maria Livanou from King’s College in London, UK and Serbian psychiatrist Cvetana Crnobaric, asked whether there was any difference between physical and psychological torture. The study is published in Archives of General Psychiatry (payment required to access the article). The subjects, who had experienced torture during the civil war in former Yugoslavia, stated that the worst experiences were fake executions (such as waterboarding - my comment), watching someone you know being tortured, rape, and isolation. A text about the study, in Swedish, is available here.
CIA hasn’t said anything about what kind of “intelligence” they got from waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Nothing about how it averted terror attacks or gave them the location of Osama bin Laden. Maybe all they got was the latest Green Bay Packers lineup.
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