Conclusion: Waterboarding is Torture

In case you missed it last night on MSNBC I have the entire “waterboarding experiment” as seen on Countdown embedded below.

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Waterboarding is torture. This not from the lips of a “bleeding heart librul”, but from a guy whose bile and invective against liberals of every stripe is heard on the radio every morning.

Waterboarding is torture. Americans tortured prisoners in order to extract information.

Now that all of that is settled, who is responsible for this and when do we see him clapped in irons?

Good Is Lots, More Is Better

The title of this posting is an axiom of mine that describes how I like my Mexican cuisine.

And apparently it’s what those in the Bush Regime thought in reference to how one should administer a waterboarding,

Or more to the point, how many hundreds of times.

Now I distinctly recall when all of this was discussed a couple of years ago that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a guy we have in custody who was one of the 9/11 planners, was waterboarded exactly once. It was this, they said, that underlined just how effective waterboarding is in getting information from “high value” terror targets.

The story spun back then was that when he was tortured there was a woman present to witness the act, and this was something that humiliated him. It was for that reason, the CIA claimed, that he stuck it out for a phenomenal 2 minutes.

And then was never waterboarded again. From ABC News (9/13/2007)

“Then KSM started talking, in idiomatic English he learned as a high school foreign exchange student and polished at a North Carolina college in the 1980s, sources said.”

“‘It was an extraordinary amount of time for him to hold out,’ one former CIA officer told ABCNews.com. ‘A red-headed female supervisor was in the room when he was being water-boarded. It was humiliating to him. So he held out.’”

“‘Then he started talking, and he never stopped,’ this former officer said. KSM was never water-boarded again, and in hours and hours of conversation with his interrogators, often over a cup of tea, he poured out his soul and the murderous deeds he committed.’”

Well I guess it’s “Liar, liar pants on fire” isn’t it?

Now we find that instead of getting waterboarded only once, and this resulted in our getting tons of valuable information from a guy who became so highly motivated not to get waterboarded again, he was actually waterboarded 183 times.

In a single month.

Lies. So many lies.

Revealing to us that not only is waterboarding so NOT an effective tool of torture, but we had people who were committing these heinous acts of terrorism actually spreading anecdotal lies about how superior it is, and what great results you get from it.

Think of it. These people knew about the ineffectiveness of the tool and not only kept on doing it, but spreading bald-faced lies about it all.

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Revelation 12:9

Is anyone still wondering why America is referred to in the Islamic world as “The Great Satan?”

To Waterboard or Not To Waterboard, That IS the Question

Waterboarding is again in the news as the Senate asks Bush’s choice for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey whether he equates waterboarding with torture. As reported on the Voice of America, “Mukasey told the committee that he personally considers waterboarding repugnant but could not say whether it constitutes torture because he has not been briefed on classified information as he is still a private citizen.”

In other words, he’s all for it but doesn’t want to say so because some people think that waterboarding is torture.

Those “some people” include the people who wrote the US Army Field Manual, FM 34-52 Intelligence Interrogation. From Chapter 1:

“The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor. condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

I think that waterboarding would come under the notion of “unpleasant and inhumane treatment”. They say it produces a sensation of drowning, but you never drown.

And see? I got that off the internet in 3 minutes of Googling. Mukasey is an idiot if he expects us to believe that he can’t offer an opinion because he hasn’t been briefed on it.

There are those who say that waterboarding saves lives as in the case of the waterboarding of Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Yes, maybe, but you have to ask at what price? If waterboarding is torture and the Field Manual says it is, then we have lost our moral authority in the world’s eye. We can no longer decry human rights abuses in other countries when our agencies of government ignore our own military’s interrogation guidelines, as well as the agreement made by all countries who signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

And then there are the nutjobs who claim that waterboarding is OK in this case because those we are waterboarding are not soldiers in a war, they are terrorists. They exist outside of the agreements. But that’s because they haven’t read the agreements. Terrorists do not exist outside of the UN Convention Against Torture. Article 2:

“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

But in the end, the argument will be made that since waterboarding takes place within the authority of the CIA and the CIA is an agency that operates without the rules that are binding on the rest of us, it’s all copasetic.

Really. That’s what they are saying.

In a discussion of this very subject this morning on CNN, Diane Feinstein D-CA suggested that an amendment to the soon to be considered FISA bill should be included that requires the CIA to operate under the Army Field Manuals. Arlen Spector R-PA claimed that he did just that less than a year ago only to have that bill go down in defeat by a vote of 53 to 46.

I say that there is no way that this is going to be fixed this year or next. Not when you have a supreme court that refuses to hear a case, a lawsuit brought by a man who was abducted, tortured and then released by the CIA when they discovered that they had the wrong man. The reason? State secrets would be revealed if the case were allowed to proceed.

How can you argue against logic like that?