Waterboarding for dummies

[Eugen Leitl]

It seems quite a lot of people have earned to be waterboarded to death.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/09/waterboarding_for_dummies

Waterboarding for dummies

Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal
than Dick Cheney's "dunk in the water"

BY MARK BENJAMIN

Salon/AP

In background: Former Vice President Dick Cheney

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a
2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But
recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced
interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's
description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a
special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show.
The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect
angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth,
intensifying the sense of choking b and to be lifted upright quickly in the
event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in
each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start
pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not
air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and
prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six
separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session b and
could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a
day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit
during a session b a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding b the
prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen,
co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown
University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human
Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or
any legitimate purpose. They are saying, bThis is how risky and harmful the
procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy,"
he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a
disgrace to medicine."

These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government
documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of
Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department's Office of
Professional Responsibility released late last month.

Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later
reviewing the agency's "enhanced interrogation program" haven't been mined
for waterboarding details until now. While Bush-Cheney officials defended the
legality and safety of waterboarding by noting the practice has been used to
train U.S. service members to resist torture, the documents show that the
agency's methods went far beyond anything ever done to a soldier during
training. 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.

(After this story was published, Salon learned that Marcy Wheeler, the author
of the blog Emptywheel, and several other bloggers have written about many of
the documents released over the past year.)

These memos show the CIA went much further than that with terror suspects,
using huge and dangerous quantities of liquid over long periods of time. The
CIA's waterboarding was "different" from training for elite soldiers,
according to the Justice Department document released last month. "The
difference was in the manner in which the detainee's breathing was
obstructed," the document notes. In soldier training, "The interrogator
applies a small amount of water to the cloth (on a soldier's face) in a
controlled manner," DOJ wrote. "By contrast, the agency interrogator ...
continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the
detainee's mouth and nose."

One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a
saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive
quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners
inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid b enough to conceivably kill them
from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous
quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in
the blood. Generally a concern only for marathon runners , who on extremely
rare occasions drink that much water, hyponatremia could set in during a
prolonged waterboarding session. A waterlogged, sodium-deprived prisoner
might become confused and lethargic, slip into convulsions, enter a coma and
die.

Therefore, "based on advice of medical personnel," Principal Deputy Assistant
Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote in a May 10, 2005, memo authorizing
continued use of waterboarding, "the CIA requires that saline solution be
used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia."

The agency used so much water there was also another risk: pneumonia
resulting from detainees inhaling the fluid forced into their mouths and
noses. Saline, the CIA argued, might reduce the risk of pneumonia when this
occurred.

"The detainee might aspirate some of the water, and the resulting water in
the lungs might lead to pneumonia," Bradbury noted in the same memo. "To
mitigate this risk, a potable saline solution is used in the procedure."

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 b and accumulate in b the detainee's
mouth and nasal cavity, preventing him from breathing," the memo admits.

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 te.
In other words, breathe in his own vomit. The CIA recommended the use of
Ensure Plus for the liquid diet.

Plowing through hundreds of pages of these documents is an unsettling
experience. On one level, the detailed instructions can be seen as helping to
carry out kinder, gentler waterboarding, with so much care and attention
given to making sure detainees didn't stop breathing, get pneumonia, breathe
in their own vomit or die. But of course dead detainees tell no tales, so the
CIA needed to keep many of its prisoners alive. It should be noted, though,
that six human rights groups in 2007 released a report showing that 39 people
who appeared to have gone into the CIA's secret prison network haven't shown
up since. The careful attention to detail in the documents was also used to
provide legal cover for the harsh and probably illegal interrogation tactics.

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,
theines say that after a case of "psychological resignation" by a detainee on
the waterboard, an interrogator had to get approval from a CIA doctor before
doing it again.

The memo also contains a last, little-noticed paragraph that may be the most
disturbing of all. It seems to say that the detainees subjected to
waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of
the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That
paragraph reads as follows:

"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."

Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in Washington, D.C.
Read his other articles here. More Mark Benjamin