More details on waterboarding

Salon has a special feature up on waterboarding that collects a lot of information from various documents that have been made public in the last year, but don't read too far into it if you are squeamish, because some of it is very detailed.

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 – 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 – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

More on Yoo and Bybee

Good overview and criticism by David Luban of the Margolis decision to not refer Yoo and Bybee for disciplinary action by the bar association. He includes lots of links to additional commentary.

Yoo and Bybee

Lots of reporting about the Office of Professional Responsibility report that was released yesterday. The previously top secret documents, including the OPR report, the final decision to clear Yoo and Bybee of professional misconduct, and Yoo and Bybee's responses to earlier drafts of the report can all be found here.

From the New York Times.

The ethics lawyers, in the Office of Professional Responsibility, concluded that two department lawyers involved in analyzing and justifying waterboarding and other interrogation tactics — Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge, and John C. Yoo, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley — had demonstrated “professional misconduct.” It said the lawyers had ignored legal precedents and provided slipshod legal advice to the White House in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture. That report was among the documents made public Friday.

But David Margolis, a career lawyer at the Justice Department, rejected that conclusion in a report of his own released Friday. He said the ethics lawyers, in condemning the lawyers’ actions, had given short shrift to the national climate of urgency in which Mr. Bybee and Mr. Yoo acted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Among the difficulties in assessing these memos now over seven years after their issuance is that the context is lost,” Mr. Margolis said.

Washington Monthly on Torture

The Washington Monthly has just published a special issue on torture. While TWM is a liberal opinion journal, the writers are political figures and academics from across the political spectrum, all of whom oppose the use of torture.

In a related note, the House failed to override Bush's veto of the intelligence authorization bill which included a ban on torture, requiring all interrogations to meet the Army's published standards on interrogations.

DoJ - Waterboarding illegal today

A Justice Department lawyer will testify today that the DoJ has never found waterboarding to be legal under US law and that it would not be legal under current guidelines. This should be interesting testimony to watch, if you are near C-SPAN.

Updated: In today's testimony, Steven Bradbury actualkly argued that CIA waterboarding wasn't torture because it wasn't the same as what the Japanese did during WWII or what the Spanish did.


I had forgotten this, I believe some of you have read it before, but a former Navy instructor describes waterboarding and how it is used. In the New Yorker, Jane Mayer investigated the ways in which survival training provided source material for interrogation techniques at Guantanamo.

Waterboarding

This is a brief clip of a waterboarding demonstration. It is disturbing.



And it would be smart to ask prospective employers if they think waterboarding employees as a teambuilding exercise is a good idea. If they say "yes, all of our employees show that sort of loyalty to our firm" then you should run away.

Torture

As we get ready to discuss torture, here's some linky goodness to give an idea of where some major players in the debate over torture stand today.

In Return of the 9/11 President, Dan Froomkin suggests that if the President wants to claim that torture has provided information that has prevented attacks in the past then he needs to put up or shut up and tell us something specific. I won't hold my breath for that day.

Torture is sometimes used in situations that don't involve ticking time bombs (David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo) and now an FBI "clean team" has spent the last 16 months trying to get the 6 suspects charged today in cases related to 9/11 to repeat incriminating statements possibly first made under torture.

Scalia: "Freedom tickling not prohibited by 8th amendment." Since torture isn't punishment for a crime, it can't be "cruel or unusual punishment" which I suppose is true, if one ignores that this would mean that it is only after conviction that individuals have rights to humane treatment, and ignores the 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination. Scalia's argument is simply weird when one considers that we have to read the 8th amendment along with the 5th amendment. It seems clear in the history of the 5th amendment that it prohibits torture of suspects in order to induce self-incriminating testimony. Would Scalia think it was fine to seize the cars of speeding suspects - that as long as they are not convicted of the speeding offense then the seizure of their car is not an "excessive fine" under the 8th amendment or a violation of 5th amendment due process? (Please ignore that, in fact, this absurd state of affairs does exist under RICO and property of those suspected of drug crimes is seized all the time.)