Posted by Damozel | With Mukasey confirmed, we now need legislation that bans waterboarding with sufficient backing to override the inevitable veto. Will Malcolm Nance succeed in shocking the conscience of a sufficient number of members of Congress to make this possible? House members have introduced a bill that "would extend a ban on severe interrogation tactics by military personnel to all employees of the U.S. government, including the CIA's."(WaPo via Memeorandum) Will House members who, like Mukasey, aren't sure waterboarding is really torture allow themselves to be persuaded by experts?
Waterboarding (simulated drowning) most definitely is torture and those who experience will say anything at all to make it stop, Malcolm Nance told a House oversight committee on torture and enhanced interrogation techniques. (WaPo) Such information is therefore useless. Nance---who spoke out earlier this week---is a counterterrorism instructor who taught at the Navy's Survival, Evasion, and Resistance School (SERE). (WaPo) His opinion might therefore be presumed to mean something.
"In my case, the technique was so fast and professional that I didn't know what was happening until the water entered my nose and throat," Nance testified yesterday at a House oversight hearing on torture and enhanced interrogation techniques....
"It then pushes down into the trachea and starts the process of respiratory degradation. It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts. As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening: I was being tortured." (WaPo)
Yesterday Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force intelligence official "with decades of experience," stated that waterboarding is an ineffective means of getting information and that even in the GOP's favorite "ticking time bomb scenario," experienced intelligence personnel wouldn't use it because it doesn't work.
Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ)---who said, like so many others who begin by saying "I am personally against torture," evidently favors the use of waterboarding in the right circumstances (?)---argued that waterboarding had been effective against Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who after 90 seconds of waterboarding gave up useful information. (WaPo) Nance didn't think so. He reckons that Mohammed gave up information that meant nothing to him and his organization. I don't care either way because I don't want my government to violate the law to obtain information. As I've said before, it's wrong because it's wrong because it's wrong. We're the good guys, meaning we're different from Mohammed and his organization. What makes us the good guys is that we do things differently from them.
Nance said unequivocally that waterboarding is a long-standing form of torture used by history's most brutal governments, including those of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. (WaPo)
This should never have happened to anyone at our government's hands:
If Mohammed faced waterboarding for 90 seconds, Nance said, about 1.2 gallons of water was poured down his nose and throat while he was strapped to a board. Nance said the SERE school used a board modeled after one from Southeast Asia, though it had leather straps instead of metal clamps. (WaPo)
"If you're sure the person has knowledge...." "If you know he really is one of their top guys...." No.
"If the threat is imminent...." No. "If it could prevent the
possibility of American deaths...." No. No, no, no.
I'm not soft on terrorism; in fact, I deplore the American public's soft-headed, lazy, passive cessation of all responsibility to the Bush Administration to deal with it. But waterboarding is not the way to deal with it. You don't have to be a soppy, soft-on-terror liberal to believe this: numerous experts say the same.
The topic is currently under discussion at Memeorandum.
Shamanic at Newshoggers points out that waterboarding is already illegal.
The military has been shamed by this administration, and frankly I'm surprised that we've seen so few high-level resignations from the noble corps of men and women who lead the services. They know better, and too many have played along these last years in order to protect careers that are sadly rendered worthless by these activities.
George Bush's government authorized torture in our name. It isn't only the military that has been shamed. It's all of us. It's time for the Congress to actually represent us, to exact justice in our name and mitigate, however slightly, the stain that Bush's leadership has left on the United States.
At Captain's Quarters, Ed Morissey doesn't think Mukasey is required to know whether waterboarding is torture in all circumstances (i.e., to give an opinion on it). His argument on this score is so carefully nuanced, even for him, that I didn't understand it the first time, but I was uneasy after my first go so I went back and reread it (and then revised this post). Now I think I've got it: he's saying that the issue itself is so nuanced that Mukasey could not fairly have been expected to give an answer to the "waterboarding: torture?" question.
Given that Congress has left a loophole or possible loophole in the applicable legislation (which I agree, it has), the Captain argues that Mukasey can fairly claim not to be able to say that it is legal and in fact shouldn't be required to do so. Except, of course, what the questioners wanted him to say was whether he thinks the loophole violates international law and the Geneva Convention, not simply to respond to a narrow question about whether current statutes sufficiently cover the case.
Morissey---whose exact position on waterboarding I do not know--- interviewed a different SERE instructor who
says that Nance's description is "exaggerated." (Is it? Oh well,
that's all right then.) Though Morissey's point is different: he's trying to show that the issue is more nuanced than the media and others have represented, that reasonable experts differ, and that Mukasey might therefore truly not have been able to form an opinion. But I disagree. If he could say that torture is antithetical to whtat America stands for---as he most certainly did--- he can also say whether a particular practice is antithetical. That's what people wanted to know. And after all, "waterboarding is a long-standing form of
torture used by history's most brutal governments, including those of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union and the
Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. (WaPo)
The Captain concludes his argument in support of Mukasey's silence with the following:
Nance's testimony highlights exactly why Mukasey had to answer as he did. If waterboarding under all circumstances is torture, then we torture our own soldiers. Will Mukasey prosecute SERE instructors, too? Or does it demonstrate that context and circumstances make a difference when deciding whether an ambiguous standard has been violated?
And who profits by that ambiguity? Certainly not the instructors or the interrogators, who now have to worry whether one AG may determine their activities illegal when a long line of AGs before then didn't do so. (Mukasey Confirmed)
There is, as Nance actually pointed out to the committee, a wide difference between voluntary submission to waterboarding under controlled conditions and for your own training and preparation and between involuntarily having it done to you by people who aren't necessarily going to stop if it looks as if you are in severe distress or on the point of dying. We're not talking about waterboarding willing volunteers who go to a facility to be trained to resist it; we're talking about using it as a means of extracting information from an "enemy combatant" or "terror detainee."
Why are certain conservatives---even including some of the decent and intelligent ones--- so desperate
to defend or at least suspend judgment regarding a practice which is illegal in all civilized nations, which
military officials say will endanger our troops, and which
distinguished Republicans have argued violates our core values and
international law?
Fear of seeing "their" guys even further repudiated and discredited? Too many hours watching the ludicrous comic book television fantasy "24", where the hero always knows who the enemy is, what he or she knows and how long before the ticking time bomb goes off? Do they simply see themselves as being pragmatic in the face of times that require us to jettison our basic values? I don't know. I can't tell. When I see I've been mistaken about someone---for example, I initially thought Mukasey should be confirmed---I just revise my opinion to fit the facts and go on to the next thing.
RELATED BN-POLITICS POSTINGS
Military Interrogator: Torture isn't Operationally Effective
Waterboarding: Learn What It's Like & Why It's Good for You in Two Easy Lessons
US Military & Intelligence Officials Weigh in on Torture Issue (Deaf Ears Dept)
Bush Administration Blocked Critic Who Experienced Waterboarding
I say 'Torture'; You Say 'Harsh Interrogation Techniques'.... (Updated)
LINKS
Waterboarding Is Torture, Says Ex-Navy Instructor (WaPo)
The topic is currently under discussion at Memeorandum.
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