Time.com is covering a number of aspects of the horrifying reports that two detainees were tortured by various techniques, including waterboarding.
One of the Time reports states that “Defenders of waterboarding say that the procedure, while awful for the prisoner, is relatively safe and has few long-term effects. But doctors and psychologists who work with torture victims disagree strongly. They say that victims of American waterboarding—like the Chileans submitted to the submarino under Pinochet—are likely to be psychologically damaged for life. ‘This is an utterly terrifying event’, says Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/New York University School of Medicine Program for Survivors of Torture”…
This Time.com report continues: ‘Psychologically this can result in significant long-term post traumatic stress, and produce anxiety and depression’ … Years after they were tortured, submarino victims were still haunted. A 2007 study in the International Review of the Red Cross found that ‘the acute suffering produced during the immediate infliction of the submarino is superseded by the often unbearable fear of repeating the experience. In the aftermath, it may lead to horrific memories that persist in the form of recurrent ‘drowning nightmares’. As one Chilean who was tortured by submarino under Pinochet put it:'”Even today I wake up because of having nightmares of dying from drowning’ “… Brad Olson, a research professor of psychology at Northwestern University told Time that ‘Done 183 times on a single person, each flood of water, each subsequent near-death experience, increases the possibility of debilitating and irreparable harm. The cumulative impact of this waterboarding is tremendous. It’s going to produce permanent psychological damage even in the most resilient human’ “.
And, Time writes. “to truly gauge the long-term psychological impact of torture, psychologists need to follow up with victims well after they are released. That may never happen with detainees like Zubaydah and Mohammed—meaning we may never know the final wages of what CIA agents did in dark rooms under our name”.
This can be read in full here .
In another story, Time.com reports that the CIA gave misleading information “when it sought a legal opinion on the use of waterboarding. An Aug 1, 2002, memo by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee says the CIA had ‘indicated that these acts will not be used with substantial repetition, so that there is no possibility that severe physical pain could arise from such repetition. Accordingly, we conclude that these acts neither separately nor as part of a course of conduct would inflict severe physical pain or suffering with the meaning of the statute’ … According to two OLC memos in May [2005] by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury, the Agency had informed the lawyers the waterboarding technique was being used on a detainee on a maximum of five days during a single 30-day period. On each day, there could only be two ‘sessions’, in which the detainee was strapped to an inclined bench, a cloth placed over his nose and mouth, and water poured over the cloth — to induce a sense of drowning. In each ‘session’,”there could be no more than six applications of water to the cloth lasting 10 seconds or longer. No session was to exceed 40 seconds. The Agency also seems to have told the OLC that the waterboarding technique was routinely used by the U.S. military to train thousands of service personnel in Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) — and that those who went through the training had not suffered any lasting physical or mental health effects. In the 2002 memo, Bybee notes the CIA’s assurance that “a medical expert with SERE experience will be present” when Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded, to prevent severe mental or physical harm. However, the IG investigation found that the waterboarding technique used on the CIA’s detainees was significantly different from that used in the SERE program: most notably, the Agency’s interrogators used much larger volumes of water. The IG also cites the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS) in saying that the ‘the expertise of the SERE psychologists/interrogators … was probably misrepresented’ … In fact, the IG report also hints that the CIA didn’t consult the OMS on waterboarding until quite late: ‘OMS was neither consulted nor involved in the initial analysis of the risk and benefits of [enhanced interrogation techniques]’.” This story was published on Time.coml here
The memos justify abusive interrogations by the completely discredited “ticking time-bomb” defense — that if we don’t torture a suspect when we know there is an imminent threat, we stand to lose many, many American lives. But what ticking bomb? In one memo it states that it was thanks to waterboarding 9/11’s mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who was, according to the memo, subjected to the procedure 183 times) that we learned about a “Second Wave” of attacks. There has been little heard since about the “Second Wave,” so without more documents declassified, it can be assumed that KSM made it up to stop the waterboarding. In another memo, it is noted that senior Al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah was tortured into admitting KSM was the 9/11 mastermind. The memo does not note that early on KSM freely admitted his role in an interview with al-Jazeera. This report can be found here.
In still another story, a former CIA field officer who had been assigned to the Middle East, Robert Baer, who is now an intelligence columnist for Time.com, pointed out that “The memos justify abusive interrogations by the completely discredited ‘ticking time-bomb’ defense — that if we don’t torture a suspect when we know there is an imminent threat, we stand to lose many, many American lives. But what ticking bomb? In one memo it states that it was thanks to waterboarding 9/11’s mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who was, according to the memo, subjected to the procedure 183 times) that we learned about a ‘Second Wave’ of attacks. There has been little heard since about the ‘Second Wave’, so without more documents declassified, it can be assumed that KSM made it up to stop the waterboarding. In another memo, it is noted that senior Al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah was tortured into admitting KSM was the 9/11 mastermind. The memo does not note that early on KSM freely admitted his role in an interview with al-Jazeera”
[Shouldn’t we wonder: could it be that perhaps Abu Zubayda even saw KSM’s interview on Al-Jazeera ???]
Baer also wrote on Time.com that “in an Aug. 1, 2002 memo there is a passing reference to ‘chatter’ that suggests there’s about to be another 9/11, the underlying message to Justice being that unless it approves the abusive interrogation techniques, the deaths of thousands of Americans will be on its head. Someone objective needs to take a close look at the exact wording of the ‘chatter’, and tell the President whether there really was an imminent threat. The complete raw interrogation reports should also be reviewed by the same commission to compare it to follow-up investigations, in particular leads generated inside the United States. We cannot take anyone’s word for it that the interrogations saved lives; someone objective needs to take a good hard look at the facts. On a more public level, a thorough clearing of the air will go a long way toward discrediting the idea that we either torture terrorists or die. This false choice is played out week after week in the popular TV show 24, leaving people with the notion that had the FBI somehow caught one of the hijackers in the hours leading up to 9/11, torture would have led to the arrest of the other 18 before those planes took off. We need to put the last nail in the coffin of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz’s idea of torture warrants”.