Torture Memo Questions

by: Daniel De Groot

Wed Apr 22, 2009 at 00:01


A couple things that didn't fit anywhere else on this topic:

From the footnote to page 9 of the 46-page May 10, 2005 Bradbury memo:


13 In Interrogation Memorandum, we also addressed the use of harmless insects placed in a confinement box and concluded that it did not violate the statute.  We understand that--for reasons unrelated to any concern that it might violate the statute--the CIA never used that technique and has removed it from the list of authorized interrogation techniques; accordingly, we do not address it again here.

1.  Is that true?  Did CIA really never try this?

2.  Why not?  Did someone have a fit of conscience?  I think there's a story worth knowing here.

From the same memo page 13, section 13 on "the 'Waterboard'" (the numbering is quite appropriate):


[...]In addition, you have indicated that the detainee as a countermeasure may swallow water, possibly in significant quantities.  for that reason, based on advice of medical personnel, the CIA requies that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia (i.e., reduced concentration of sodium in the blood) if the detainee drinks the water.

3.  Just how much water are we talking about here?  CIA is clearly talking from experience here.  It takes a very large amount of water to induce hyponatremia.  Litres, I would imagine.  I take this as a sign that OLC knew just how barbaric this practice was - the detainee might die of over hydration.  

Daniel De Groot :: Torture Memo Questions

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Water Poisoning... (4.00 / 3)
Most of the sources that I found (this change to a saline solution really bothered me - so I blogged it..lol) indicated that it usually takes around 2 1/2 to 3 gallons of water over a short period of time to cause ill effects.  Obviously, this would be lessened if the detainee wasn't being fed properly, ill health, etc...  

It's all sick.  We have become what we always swore we were better than.


regarding the use of an insect in a box (4.00 / 2)
to break a terror suspect's will, Charles Lemos wrote a must-read post on Friday.

Join the Iowa progressive community at Bleeding Heartland.

I was thinking of 1984, too. (4.00 / 1)
Wasn't it actual the fear of rats that BigBrother's torturers exploited? I guess the CIA psychologists who came up with the idea have read Orwell...

[ Parent ]
it was each person's deepest fear (4.00 / 2)
rats for the protagonist of 1984, but other things for other victims sent to room 101.

Join the Iowa progressive community at Bleeding Heartland.

[ Parent ]
More damning informations in the NYT (4.00 / 1)
"According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans."
False confessions? Those are not helpful in fighting terrorism! So,why use those techniques at all?

"The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia."
Prosecuted by the US in war-crimes trials! Why wasn't this mentioned in the judicial reviews? Didn't the devil's advocates of the Bush Administration know about this, or did they deliberately omit this importat precedent?

"After years of recriminations about torture and American values, Bush administration officials say it is easy to second-guess the decisions of 2002, when they feared that a new attack from Al Qaeda could come any moment."
Blah! This excuse doesn't hold water. The policy was active for years without any proper review. They had more than enough time to reverse their false decisions. They never second-guessed it.

"The Communists do not look upon these assaults as 'torture,' " one 1956 study concluded. "But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture."
Did any high level official ever raise the serious question if the US really wants to act as inhumane as 1950s communists? No ethical struggles were ever reported.

"Vicki Divoll, general counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2002 and a former C.I.A. lawyer, would have been a logical choice to advise senators on the legal status of the interrogation methods. But because of the restricted briefings, Ms. Divoll learned about them only years later from news media accounts."
We already know that the legislative, both Reps and Dems, totally failed in oversight. but it's still shocking that they obviously didn't see the need for a judicial review of the own and didn't press for security clearings for Ms. Divoll. Pathetic.

The full NYT story, a must read (also linked by Hopeful in NJ), is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04...


On the matter of why those memos were written .. (0.00 / 0)
With the dates of those memos now released and the revelations of the over 200 water-boardings in addition to all the other forms of torture used, along with Cheney's recent retort that it did yield beneficial information, given the fact that the Bush Administration essentially dropped the search for Bin Laden after 9-11 can't we clearly imply that those memos had nothing do with national security or 9-11 or the hunt for al-Qaeda and everything to do with Bush, Cheny and their cronies trying to justify their war with Iraq by finding  some link -- any link --to al Qaeda and Iraq?

That is now the case.  The Senate has just confirmed it as I wrote this. (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/22/benjamin/index.html)

As one who once thought CIA agents who acted for the sake of our national security and under the orders of the President should not be severely punished, all bets are now off..if..

What if  -it can be easily proven that Bush and Cheney tortured purely for political purposes?

Nationalism is not the same thing as terrorism, and an adversary is not the same thing as an enemy.


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