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of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess." [2]
Today, the Bush administration has bragged that the techniques, including water-boarding were instrumental in giving them the information they needed to "protect Americans." But the problem is the use of water boarding wasn't designed to get accurate information, but to extract confessions. This is a technique that we adopted from the worst regimes in the world: the Khymer Rouge, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans and the Stalinists.
David Corn published some pictures and commentary from Jonah Blank in regards to his visit to a museum in Cambodia that shows the actual water boards used by the Khymer Rouge.
Jonah: "The similarity between practices used by the Khymer Rouge and those currently being debated by Congress isn't a coincidence. As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information."
And this explains a large part of the problem. People who have subjected themselves to torture are more than likely ready to subject others to it. Just as many who were abused as children, grow up to be abusers because they need to identify with the powerful, and not the victims. Others including our President are attracted to harsh techniques because they are enamored with the sheer sense of power one gets when they indulge in brutal force.
But people who have lived under regimes that use torture warn that when a society condones torture, the outcome is not safety. Decent and good people will not work in an organization that allows these actions and so, what you are left with are the sadists and morally compromised who are incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. What you have is a society where brutality and cruelty takes over and no one is safe from the arbitrary and capricious capos who someday could decide that you or your children are guilty of some imaginary crime.
The worst part of the bill is that our Congress -- made of people who grew up in a free society with all the privileges and protections of the Constitution, a Constitution that they've sworn to protect and defend -- voted to say that the right of habeas corpus could be tossed aside. The right to habeas corpus is the oldest and most traditional of all our civil liberties having been hard won by the English people early in the 14th century and it is the one essential barrier to tyranny because it holds rulers accountable.
Yet, our Congress voted to allow the government to essentially "disappear" people forever. And when people are "disappeared", never to be seen again, then the most horrific things can happen to them and no one will ever know. It is in this poisoned environment where secret, unaccountable brutality is condoned that the worst of human nature will thrive and undermine whatever was good about this land.
Thomas Jefferson once said, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his Justice cannot sleep forever." Today, I too tremble for my country.
Arnold Toynbee, Human Savagery Cracks Thin Veneer, Los Angeles Times, Sept 6, 1970, http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1103-05.htm
CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described, ABC News, November 18, 2005, http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/print?id=1322866
This Is What Water Boarding Looks Like, DavidCorn.com, September 28, 2006, http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php
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