Every time I think I have a handle on how awful our treatment of GWOT detainees has been, it turns out to be worse. Not only was it torture, it was calibrated to take its victims as close to the point of death as could be managed without actually losing them. (For that matter, we can't verify that they didn't waterboard anyone to death.) And finally, as the quote in the header says, our torturers apparently found that at least some of their victims considered this regimen so unbearable that death was preferable.
That particular Bradbury memo laid out a precise and disturbing
protocol for what went on in each waterboarding session. The CIA used a
"specially designed" gurney for waterboarding, Bradbury wrote. After
immobilizing a prisoner by strapping him down, interrogators then
tilted the gurney to a 10-15 degree downward angle, with the detainee's
head at the lower end. They put a black cloth over his face and poured
water, or saline, from a height of 6 to 18 inches, documents show. The
slant of the gurney helped drive the water more directly into the
prisoner's nose and mouth. But the gurney could also be tilted upright
quickly, in the event the prisoner stopped breathing.
Detainees
would be strapped to the gurney for a two-hour "session." During that
session, the continuous flow of water onto a detainee's face was not
supposed to exceed 40 seconds during each pour. Interrogators could
perform six separate 40-second pours during each session, for a total
of four minutes of pouring. Detainees could be subjected to two of
those two-hour sessions during a 24-hour period, which adds up to eight
minutes of pouring. But the CIA's guidelines say interrogators could
pour water over the nose and mouth of a detainee for 12 minutes total
during each 24-hour period. The documents do not explain the extra four
minutes to get to 12.
Interrogators were instructed
to pour the water when a detainee had just exhaled so that he would
inhale during the pour. An interrogator was also allowed to force the
water down a detainee's mouth and nose using his hands. "The
interrogator may cup his hands around the detainee's nose and mouth to
dam the runoff," the Bradbury memo notes. "In which case it would not
be possible for the detainee to breathe during the application of the
water."
"We understand that water may enter – and
accumulate in – the detainee's mouth and nasal cavity, preventing him
from breathing," the memo admits.
But we've subjected American soldiers to waterboarding, so this is surely no big deal, right?
U.S. soldiers, for example, were generally waterboarded with a cloth
over their face one time, never more than twice, for about 20 seconds,
the CIA admits in its own documents.
And our soldiers were probably not having this comparatively quite mild version of waterboarding administered to them in the midst of week-long sessions of sleep deprivation enforced by being kept in a stress position the whole time, or being slammed against a wall in between waterboarding sessions, or being abused in various other ways:
As brutal as the waterboarding process was, the memos also reveal
that the Bush-era Justice Department authorized the CIA to use it in
combination with other forms of torture. Specifically, a detainee could
be kept awake for more than seven days straight by shackling his hands
in a standing position to a bolt in the ceiling so he could never sit
down. The agency diapered and hand-fed its detainees during this period
before putting them on the waterboard. Another memo from Bradbury, also
from 2005, says that in between waterboarding sessions, a detainee
could be physically slammed into a wall, crammed into a small box,
placed in "stress positions" to increase discomfort and doused with
cold water, among other things.
The CIA's
waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency
officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development:
detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. "In our
limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can
introduce new risks," the CIA's Office of Medical Services wrote in its
2003 memo. "Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or
psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing
excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness."
Hell, I'd give up too and seek death's release, rather than face a future of who knows how many repetitions of such agony.
And it's not surprising that victims would give up, given that the process was designed and calibrated to bring the victims of this torture as close to the point of death as possible before resuscitating them. If you're being forced to go through the agonies of death under torture many times without actually winding up dead, who wouldn't be ready to just take that last step over the line?
Should a prisoner stop breathing during the procedure, the documents
instructed interrogators to rapidly tilt the gurney to an upright
position to help expel the saline. "If the detainee is not breathing
freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately
moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his
mouth, nose, and nasopharynx," Bradbury wrote. "The gurney used for
administering this technique is specially designed so that this can be
accomplished very quickly if necessary."
Documents
drafted by CIA medical officials in 2003, about a year after the agency
started using the waterboard, describe more aggressive procedures to
get the water out and the subject breathing. "An unresponsive subject
should be righted immediately," the CIA Office of Medical Services
ordered in its Sept. 4, 2003, medical guidelines for interrogations.
"The interrogator should then deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the
water." (That's a blow below the sternum, similar to the thrust
delivered to a chocking victim in the Heimlich maneuver.)
But
even those steps might not force the prisoner to resume breathing.
Waterboarding, according to the Bradbury memo, could produce "spasms of
the larynx" that might keep a prisoner from breathing "even when the
application of water is stopped and the detainee is returned to an
upright position." In such cases, Bradbury wrote, "a qualified
physician would immediately intervene to address the problem and, if
necessary, the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy." The
agency required that "necessary emergency medical equipment" be kept
readily available for that procedure. The documents do not say if
doctors ever performed a tracheotomy on a prisoner.
The
doctors were also present to monitor the detainee "to ensure that he
does not develop respiratory distress." A leaked 2007 report from the
International Committee of the Red Cross says that meant the detainee's
finger was fixed with a pulse oxymeter, a device that measures the
oxygen saturation level in the blood during the procedure. Doctors like
Allen say this would allow interrogators to push a detainee close to
death – but help them from crossing the line. "It is measuring in real
time the oxygen content in the blood second by second," Allen explained
about the pulse oxymeter. "It basically allows them to push these
prisoners more to the edge. With that, you can keep going. This is
calibration of harm by health professionals."
And let's not forget to treat our quality control process as the groundwork of a system of continu improvements in the art of bringing a captive as close to the point of death as possible:
"NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and
recommendations, it is important that every application of the
waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the
entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process
(realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied,
if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what
sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between
applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment."
I've seen a couple of blog posts about this over the past week, but that's been about it, as far as I can tell. I don't get it: this is the smoking gun. This wasn't even close to not being torture, and it wasn't just a few 'bad apples' at Bagram or Abu Ghraib. There was no 'ticking time bomb.' This was institutionalized, routinized torture.
Even apart from our Administration's legal responsibility to do so, its failure to prosecute the persons responsible for this regime of torture is a moral abomination. To condone by inaction these things that have been done in our name, now that we are finally finding out something approaching the full truth about those crimes, is nothing short of appalling.
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