The drowning technique called waterboarding

It's good to see that the New York Times has finally decided to call a spade a spade. For years it has followed the Bush administration’s lead in using euphemisms and circumlocutions to describe the notorious and plainly illegal interrogation techniques inflicted on prisoners held overseas and accused of terrorist activities. Though it has expressed some pride in the alleged candor of its terminology, the Times had always avoided calling torture by its name.

In particular, the Times employs several evasive phrases to describe so-called waterboarding: ‘the near-drowning technique’; ‘the simulated drowning technique’; and most bizarrely ‘the controlled drowning technique’. Collectively, they ratify the position adopted by the Bush administration by insinuating that drowning can be something other than drowning in the right circumstances. But drowning describes the filling of lungs with liquid, nothing more or less. It’s not something that can be ‘simulated’ or ‘near’, and ‘control’ is beside the point. You wouldn’t apply any of those terms to castration, say, if the government inflicted that on prisoners and then worked to reverse or mitigate the damage done. So why did the Times try for so many years to soften the plain fact that the US government was having men drowned?

Now at least the Times is starting to find the courage or sense to state the plain truth. In just the last day in an editorial as well as in an article reviewing Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir the NT Times has taken to using the unadorned expression "the drowning technique called [or 'known as'] waterboarding".

It seems that the Times made a recent decision to permit, perhaps even to prefer, honest language in this regard. On Jan. 19th of this year it posted an article on Guantanamo prosecutions by Charlie Savage that also used the same frank expression.

It appears that the Times was feeling its way tentatively toward candor back in November of 2010. On Nov. 14th it referred to "the drowning technique called waterboarding" in an article about an investigation of Dr. James E. Mitchell, a rogue psychologist who promoted torturous interrogation techniques under the Bush administration. However 4 days earlier it had used and subsequently retracted that language in an article on the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute anybody for destroying CIA videotapes of several interrogations that employed torture.

This appears to be an interesting case study in the Times’ timidity in the face of Orwellian language. The article as originally published contained the following details [highlighting is mine]:

The role of once-secret memorandums about interrogation techniques by politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has been controversial. The documents, which leaked in 2004 when the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was in the headlines, asserted that the president, as commander in chief, has the constitutional power to override anti-torture statutes. The memos also claimed that certain techniques — like stripping prisoners naked, keeping them awake for long periods, slamming them into walls, and subjecting them to the drowning technique called waterboarding — did not amount to torture

More than two months later (sometime after Jan. 15, 2011) At some later stage the article was revised. Only the newer version is available at the Times’ website. The most extensive alteration, indeed the only one that I find (this is not indicated by the Times), is that the foregoing paragraph was edited down to produce the following:

Mr. Holder was referring to once secret Justice Department memorandums asserting that certain interrogation techniques, like stripping prisoners naked, keeping them awake for long periods, slamming them into walls and subjecting them to waterboarding, would not violate antitorture laws.

In the original version I highlighted the parts that were removed subsequently. You can see how much that is purely factual has been stripped out of the original, all of it quite unflattering to the Bush administration. The later omissions included the phrase "the drowning technique", which was not even replaced by one of the Times' traditional evasive phrases.

It seems that the Times wasn’t quite ready last November to see the stark language of truth being used. But the policy of evasion regarding waterboarding (at least) has now been reversed.

Admittedly, the Times has twice in the past described waterboarding as “the torture technique”, in an editorial from 2008, and in a second one from 2009. But as far as I can determine it has never stated that candidly as a fact in a news story. And in any case it is only quite recently that the Times has become willing to go on record describing waterboarding as “the drowning technique”.

So two cheers for the new found courage of the New York Times’ sort-of convictions.

Update: It's not certain when the editing down of the Nov. 10 article happened, so the wording was revised to reflect that.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Is honesty a “known, unambiguous obligation or standard”?

The final Justice Department assessment of the professional conduct of the torture memo authors (PDF) has been dumped released unceremoniously this Friday afternoon. The assessment is not posted, nor is there a press release about it, at the DOJ website.

The draft report(s) by the Office of Professional Responsibility had found John Yoo and Jay Bybee guilty of misconduct – rather remarkably, given that OPR investigations of wrongdoing by Justice Department officials almost always lead nowhere. However, as anticipated (see here), in its final assessment the DOJ softened the draft (OPR) findings to the point that Yoo and Bybee were found only to have exercised “poor judgment”. Absent a finding of misconduct, they will not be disbarred or in Judge Bybee’s case, face impeachment. Indeed it looks like there’ll be no penalty at all for having given the green light to the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody.

David Margolis, an associate deputy attorney general, is the man who decided to let Yoo and Bybee off with a slap on the wrist. His reasoning? Essentially he argues that “a finding of misconduct depends on application of a known, unambiguous obligation or standard to the attorney’s conduct. I am unpersuaded that OPR has identified such a standard.”

I’ll have more to say later about this final assessment and the politics behind Margolis’ decision once I’ve digested the whole thing. For now, I’ll simply note that Margolis (who is said to be extremely sensitive to which way the political winds are blowing in DC) is talking through his hat here. The memos generated by Yoo and Bybee are rife with gross inaccuracies and demonstrable falsehoods. Is it not a known and unambiguously accepted standard that attorneys are obligated to be honest and scrupulous in their representations of law and jurisprudence? At a minimum?

To cite but one example, which I reported on here last August, John Yoo falsified what the UN Convention against Torture says in his memo from April 28, 2003. In that memo, Yoo claimed that …

"the [Torture] Convention permits the use of [cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment] in exigent circumstances, such as a national emergency or war."

Yoo’s memo added no qualifications, no evidence, no citation, and no argument to justify that statement. The statement is absolutely false, as I documented in my post last August. In other words, Yoo lied in order to provide the Bush administration with a back-door justification (“national emergency”) for torture where none exists legally.

Whatever else one may think of the dubious propositions advanced by Yoo in that memo, it could not possibly be any clearer that he has engaged in misconduct in this instance.

Why does David Margolis not recognize honesty and factual accuracy as an unambiguous obligation for Justice Department attorneys?

Update: In his assessment of the OPR report, Margolis does in fact get around to the question of honesty - admitting that professional rules obligate DOJ attorneys to refrain from provinding to a client advice that is knowningly or recklessly false or issued in bad faith. Their legal work also must be competent.

Nevertheless, Margolis goes on to consider and dismiss all the evidence that the OPR report assembled to show that John Yoo's work to justify the torture and abuse of prisoners was incompetent and knowingly or recklessly false or issued in bad faith. It's a tour de force of seeing-no-evil. I simply cannot imagine how any candid investigation of John Yoo's legal output could avoid the conclusion that he knowingly falsified both law and case law in the baddest of faith.

crossposted at unbossed.com

CIA torture pitchman admits he scammed the public

Remember John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who popped up in December 2007 to tell America how wonderfully effective – and expeditious – the CIA’s torture of the prisoner Abu Zubaydah had been? Kiriakou said that he knew for a fact that Zubaydah revealed all manner of dangerous al Qaeda plots after being waterboarded a single time.

It was music to the ears of right-wing torture apologists…though Kuriakou’s most important assertions couldn’t be squared with the other information we already had about Zubaydah’s torture (in particular that it had generated all manner of unreliable allegations).

Now Kiriakou is back, hawking a book. Guess what? On the next to last page, he admits that it was all a campaign of misinformation.

At the time of his first interview on ABC News, I argued that Kiriakou’s account was full of bizarre contradictions because “it is an elaborate game of spin gone badly awry”.

If you listen to this long, multi-part interview at ABC, you can’t help but notice the mountain of BS that Kiriakou piles up. It’s quite clear that what he’s attempting to do is to provide cover for the CIA and, perhaps, the Bush administration.

For example, he admits just enough of what we already know about the facts of this program, while larding it with slabs of self-justifying circumstantial assertions, as to slip into “evidence” a range of unproven and, on closer inspection, dubious propositions. All of these dubious propositions tend in one direction, to excuse or mitigate any of the kinds of charges that are being directed against those who engaged in, acquiesced in, or ordered the torture of prisoners in CIA custody.

It was a crude campaign of misinformation. The US news media (ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito especially) conducted themselves deplorably in propagating this nonsense uncritically.

Indeed, as Jeff Stein documents, when evidence subsequently trickled out that Kiriakou wasn’t actually present in Thailand during Zubaydah’s interrogation, and that the prisoner was in fact waterboarded at least 83 times, ABC began to backtrack quietly by posting an endnote on line to its report – in which Kiriakou tried to explain his false assertions.

"When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being water boarded on one occasion. It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."

So there you are, dear reader, just in case you happened to go back recently to the original 2007 ABC report to see what revisions had been made to it. Quietly. But don’t go looking for the videos of the interview with Kiriakou, which ABC promoted like mad back in 2007. ABC has taken those videos down.

And Kiriakou himself still isn’t very forthcoming. At the very end of his new memoir he admits offhandedly that he didn’t know what he was talking about when, with the imprimatur of various news outfits, he presented himself as having first-hand information about the effectiveness of torture. It was all just hearsay that he was embellishing:

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

For what it’s worth, Kiriakou now claims that he himself was duped into becoming the frontman for a CIA misinformation campaign. Believe that at your peril. There were many accessories to torture, and Kiriakou can’t be eager to be placed in their ranks.

A harvest of shame all around.

Cheney is afraid of the DoJ torture investigation

You might reasonably have surmised that Dick Cheney fears where an investigation into the torture and mistreatment of terrorist suspects could eventually lead. Until now Cheney has restricted himself to lying about the effectiveness of the CIA and DoD interrogation programs, claiming to know decisive information that remains classified, and denouncing those who seek to investigate the government officials who abused prisoners under the color of law. But now we have some direct evidence of how rattled Cheney has become by Attorney General Holder's decision to initiate what is after all an extremely limited investigation. Its scope currently is limited to the CIA interrogations that employed even more abuse than the torture memos had actually authorized.

In an interview that will be aired on Sunday, Cheney made a couple of really remarkable statements according to McClatchy's Warren Strobel. First, Cheney endorsed the behavior of CIA officers who blatantly ignored the restrictions placed upon interrogators by government lawyers. This only a few days after the release of a 2004 CIA Inspector General report that revealed lurid details of prisoner abuse! Cheney had to know that he would be derided and denounced for coming out in favor of such things as mock executions, promises to rape and murder the family members of suspects, and threats with a gun and electric drill.

And secondly, Cheney rather transparently tried to build distance for himself with regard to the use of waterboarding, for which he has been the most vocal public advocate since at least 2006 (his original endorsement of waterboarding was a story broken here at unbossed). Cheney wants us to believe that though he was aware of the existence of the practice in general, he wasn't informed about any particular applications of waterboarding to specific prisoners. This even though reams of evidence have accumulated that interrogators who employed waterboarding were in very regular contact with CIA headquarters, and that the White House was deeply interested in the progress of those particular interrogations to the point of asking for multiple updates for days on end!

Here is how Strobel describes the Cheney interview:

Cheney, who strongly opposes the Obama administration's new probe into alleged detainee abuse, was asked in the Fox News interview whether he was "OK" with interrogations that went beyond Justice's specific legal authorization.

"I am," the former vice president replied.

"My sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks," he said. "It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well."

[...]

Cheney said in the interview with Fox's Chris Wallace, according to a transcript, that he was aware of the waterboarding, "not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved."

What Cheney fears is pretty obvious. First, he believes that the investigation into a few CIA officers who scandalously flouted the torture memos' rules for coercive interrogations could provide the sharp edge that might pry open the whole sordid program of systematized abuse and expose it to judicial and public scrutiny. It was a program that Cheney apparently sponsored and helped to design.

Secondly, Cheney fears that he could then become a target of investigation. He is especially vulnerable to prosecution because of the close interest he took in the most abusive interrogations. One might be able to persuade a slightly gullible grand jury that the "conditioning" or "exploitation" of prisoners (hypothermia, for example) does not constitute torture. But waterboarding universally has been considered torture since at least the times of the Great Inquisition. Cheney seems to think now that he needs to build a case that he was no more aware of actual instances of waterboarding than anybody else who was briefed on the CIA program.

Cheney may also be aware that his likeness has now been put on one of the "Torture Team" playing cards that the Center for Constitutional Rights has created ("Collect and prosecute them all"). He's in the big leagues now.

crossposted at unbossed.com

What our beliefs reveal

My friend Milo told me of a strange thing he heard on le Show. A little digging turned up this news account from Utah about a company named Prosper Inc.:

A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe...

["Team" leader Joshua] Christopherson led the sales team to the top of a hill near the office and told [employee Chad] Hudgens to lie down with his head downhill...Christopherson then told the rest of the team to hold Hudgens by the arms and legs.

Christopherson poured water from a gallon jug over Hudgens' mouth and nostrils - like the interrogation strategy known as "waterboarding" - and told the team members to hold Hudgens down as he struggled...

"At the conclusion of his abusive demonstration, Christopherson told the team that he wanted them to work as hard on making sales as Chad had worked to breathe while he was being waterboarded"...

This is ironic almost beyond belief. A motivational coaching business using waterboarding to motivate its own employees. Its motto:

"We strive to make the road to personal achievement meaningful, rewarding, and enjoyable."

It turns out that Milo and I weren't the only people interested in this story. Several bloggers had already commented on the report. What's most striking about all the commentary I've seen is that everybody assumes that the waterboarding story is accurate. Think of that.

At almost any time in the past I'd have said that, if somebody gave me a story about a boss waterboarding his employee for any reason, my assumption would have to be that it was a joke. And yet here we are, inhabiting a present in which many of us accept that an employer might well do such a thing. And it's not as if the news report doesn't give us some grounds for skepticism. For one thing, the allegation is the basis for a civil suit by this former employee. And for another, the company claims it investigated the charge.

Prosper president Dave Ellis responded that the allegations amount to "sensationalized" versions of events that have gone uncorroborated by Hudgens' former coworkers. "They just roll their eyes and say, 'This is ridiculous . . ."

So what does our belief in this story of casual waterboarding say about us and about American society under George W. Bush's Torture Inc.?

As for Dave Ellis' Prosper Inc., don't shed any tears for the outfit. You see, they do seem to employ waterboarding after all. It's just that the torture is voluntary, as it turns out.

Ellis said the exercise was a dramatization of a story in which a young man asks Socrates to become his teacher. Socrates responds by plunging the student's head underwater and telling him he will learn once his desire for knowledge is as great as his desire to breathe.

However, Ellis said Christopherson explained the exercise before Hudgens volunteered, no one held Hudgens down and Hudgens was free to get up if he was uncomfortable. "It was meant to be a team-building exercise," Ellis said. "Everybody was . . . involved and enthusiastic."

So it's the Socratic method of waterboarding, something every American should be able to get enthusiastic about.

You too may be waterboarded

So says John Bellinger, Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the NSC, and a close aide to Condoleezza Rice. When asked whether foreign governments could be permitted to waterboard American citizens, Bellinger declared that he couldn’t rule it out.

The logic of permitting George Bush to do whatever he wishes to suspected terrorists, regardless of the law, also means that you have lost your legal rights too. It requires that you’re no longer a citizen, but instead a subject. The American government can’t be counted on to defend your human rights because you don’t have them any longer.

Terrifying, sure, but Bellinger’s position is nothing if not rigorously logical.

The logic follows from Bellinger’s first principle, that George Bush can do no wrong. We can deduce that Bellinger takes that view from his long, ugly record of justifying and promoting Bush’s every wish. For example in 2003 he was instrumental in bending the British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, to Bush’s desire for war against Iraq.

On February 11, 2003, as war approached, and with Mr Blair close to panic over the legal fiasco, Goldsmith flew to the White House to meet US National Security Council legal chief, John Bellinger.

His message was clear: the US had no legal worries because Congress had already given Mr Bush the power to rule the war legal. In addition it believed there was no need for a second UN resolution.

Mr Bellinger later boasted: "We had a problem with your Attorney General who was telling us it was legally doubtful under international law. We straightened him out."

So, a State Department lawyer who cares little for international law, is Mr. Bellinger.

Mr Bellinger said the US did practice rendition, by which some terror suspects were sent to a third country to be questioned. But he added that even transferring a prisoner to a country which had been criticised over its human rights record was not a violation of international law.

"We as a state department have got problems with the human rights records of some countries... but this does not mean per se that you may not transfer a person to those countries," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Mr Bellinger insisted that if there were such questions, the US would seek reassurances that a prisoner would not be subjected to torture. But he said some practises had been wildly exaggerated.

"Some of the allegations more broadly about all sorts of things are ludicrous, [like one] about hundreds of flights from European cities taking people to be tortured," he said.

He repeated that Washington did not condone or practise torture but would not comment on whether some prisoners had been subjected to interrogation techniques such as waterboarding - when a suspect is made to feel that they are drowning - to extract information. The lawyer said he could not comment on speculation about so-called enhanced interrogation techniques or the existence of secret prisons.

The reason Bellinger would not discuss waterboarding with the BBC is quite obviously that the BBC believes, rightly as it turns out, that waterboarding is torture.

It’s not permissible, you see, to acknowledge that the President has authorized illegal acts. Thus even when the Army banned waterboarding in its new manual, Bellinger insisted that it was not an admission that the banned practice had ever been actually practiced.

It’s worth recalling that Bellinger has threatened European leaders that they should shut up about the CIA’s spiderweb of secret prisons.

A senior U.S. administration official on Wednesday warned that ongoing inquiries into secret CIA activities in the European Union may undermine intelligence cooperation between the United States and European nations…

John Bellinger, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called the European Parliament report ''unbalanced, inaccurate and unfair'' and called on the EU governments to challenge the suggestion that Europeans need to be concerned about secret CIA flights.

''I can understand concerns about specific incidents but we should not somehow suggest that all intelligence activity is something illegal or suspicious,'' he said.

Germany, Italy and several other EU countries have been carrying out their own inquiries into secret CIA activities in Europe, probes Bellinger said ''have not been helpful with respect to necessary cooperation between the United States and Europe.''

''I do think these continuing investigations can harm intelligence cooperation, that's simply a fact of life,'' Bellinger told reporters after meeting legal advisers to EU governments in Brussels…

“We have seen many statements from European governments saying Guantanamo must be closed immediately. It's not clear how Guantanamo would be immediately closed. Europe has been prepared to criticize ... but has not been prepared to offer a constructive suggestion,'' Bellinger said.

In other words, according to Bellinger, any of Bush’s policies that come in for criticism have to become everybody’s policies…if not our allies, then at least Congress must take responsibility for his lawlessness. That’s because George W. Bush cannot be in the wrong.

In particular, Bush cannot be wrong in authorizing waterboarding. If Bush does it, then it must be legal.

Therefore since it’s permissible for Americans to waterboard foreigners, then there is no obvious basis on which to object to the waterboarding of Americans by foreign governments.

Here is Bellinger’s admission that Americans too must be subject to waterboarding, in a debate with Philippe Sands as published today by Guardian America. Before this exchange Bellinger has been playing cute, saying that he would not discuss any specific interrogation techniques and denouncing reporters for exaggerating the tendency of the US to extradite and torture people.

Philippe Sands: Are there any circumstances in which you could imagine the use of water boarding to be consistent with international law?

John Bellinger: Again, we've decided that we just don't want to get engaged in hypotheticals and applying the law to the facts of these particular cases.

Philippe Sands: Let me put it in yet another way. Could you imagine any circumstances in which the use of water boarding on an American national by a foreign intelligence service could be justified?

John Bellinger: One would have to apply the facts to the law, the law to the facts, to determine whether any technique, whatever it happened to be, would cause severe physical pain or suffering.

Philippe Sands: So you're willing to exclude any American going to the international criminal court under any circumstances, but you're not able to exclude the possibility of water boarding being used on a United States national by foreign intelligence service? I mean, that just strikes me as very curious.

John Bellinger: Well, I'm not willing to include it or exclude it, I mean, these are issues that our justice department as a matter of interpreting both the domestic law on torture and international law, has concluded that just don't want to get involved in abstract discussions of applying the law to any set of facts.

I can certainly tell you as a State Department official that it makes it very difficult to explain to the world and to provide the important assurance of what we're doing or not doing if we can't talk about intelligence activities or we can't even talk about hypotheticals.

But the decision has been made at least so far and maybe Judge Mukasey, if he's confirmed as attorney general, will make a different decision, that he would talk more about techniques. But at least, so far, the conclusion that we should not talk about specific techniques even in terms of hypotheticals.

Bellinger tries to pull a veil across his brutal admission by quibbling in the margins: He would have to know the circumstances of the waterboarding before judging whether it was acceptable; US policy has changed during Bush’s presidency and maybe it will change again to outlaw waterboarding; and gosh darn it, it’s hard to discuss waterboarding without being permitted to discuss it.

But the simple fact is that one of the government’s top lawyers is willing to permit American citizens to be waterboarded.

Of course, if foreign governments may waterboard American citizens abroad then there’s little to stop the US government from the doing the same here at home. It isn’t any longer considered torture, we’re told, and how can it be “unusual” if the entire world may practice waterboarding against any of us?

As for “cruel”, the Bush administration is never cruel.

In the case of the Convention Against Torture, our Constitution already prohibited cruel and unusual punishment, which we interpret as encompassing torture. The United States directly enforces our obligations under Article 15 of the CAT by prohibiting the use of statements obtained through torture in legal proceedings, including military commission proceedings. Congress also adopted a statute imposing criminal sanctions on persons who commit torture, consistent with our obligations under the Convention. I should add that contrary to what you might hear from some critics, no one in the United States government has sought to disregard or avoid these obligations.

Nobody, indeed. Therefore you may be waterboarded.

crossposted from unbossed.com

CIA finally fessing up to waterboarding

Unless I'm mistaken, the CIA and the Bush administration generally have always refused to confirm or deny that they employ the torture technique to which they've applied the euphemism "waterboarding". Even after Dick Cheney endorsed it in a radio interview last October (a story broken at unbossed.com), the administration tried to pretend that he had done no such thing.

This evening, ABC News is reporting that (anonymous) current and former CIA officials have stated that the CIA has now banned the use of waterboarding. It would seem to be the closest thing yet to official confirmation that the Bush White House authorized waterboarding of prisoners.

The controversial interrogation technique known as water-boarding, in which a suspect has water poured over his mouth and nose to stimulate a drowning reflex, has been banned by CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, current and former CIA officials tell ABCNews.com.

The officials say Hayden made the decision at the recommendation of his deputy, Steve Kappes, and received approval from the White House to remove water-boarding from the list of approved interrogation techniques first authorized by a presidential finding in 2002.

The officials say the decision was made sometime last year but has never been publicly disclosed...

While new legislation reportedly gave the CIA the leeway to use water-boarding, current and former CIA officials said Gen. Hayden decided to take it off the list of about six "enhanced interrogation techniques."

I'm not sure how to reconcile the last two sentences quoted, since the "new legislation" in question dates to 2007 rather than 2006. Perhaps the penultimate sentence should more accurately read "...sometime within the last year..."?

Anyone, one cheer for the CIA torture regime:

While welcoming the move, some critics say the CIA did not go far enough.

"I can say it's a good thing, but the fact remains that the entire program is illegal," John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told ABCNews.com.

As a result of the decision, officials say, the most extreme techniques left available to CIA interrogators would be what is termed "longtime standing," which includes exhaustion and sleep deprivation with prisoners forced to stand, handcuffed with their feet shackled to the floor.

"It is a very severe form of torture which causes tremendous psychic toll to people," said Sifton.

Regarding psychological torture, I'll draw your attention to this excellent opinion piece by James Ross of HRW

The crystal blue waters and bright, hot day begged for a jump in the surf. But my friend, a refugee from Ethiopia, just wouldn't go near the ocean. "I haven't gone swimming for years," he said, shaking his head sadly, "Ever since the regime tortured me when I was a student. They stuck my head in dirty water until I thought I would drown."

People tend to think of torture as physical...

But torture is as likely to be mental as well as physical. The iconic photo of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal -- the hooded man on a box with outstretched arms -- was being subjected to psychological torture. The wires attached to his arms went nowhere -- he merely believed he would be subjected to electric shock.

It's worth noting that today's revelation comes only one day after ABC revealed some other embarrassing information about the use of waterboarding, which likewise appeared to confirm that the CIA has been using that form of torture:

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was strapped down to the water-board, he felt humiliated -- not by the treatment but by the fact that a woman, a red-headed CIA supervisor, was allowed to witness the spectacle, a former intelligence officer told ABC News...

A current CIA official says that KSM actually told interrogators the only reason he confessed was because of the water-boarding.

So on two consecutive days we see current and former CIA officials confirming in different ways that the CIA has been using waterboarding.

What are we to make of today's revelation? There's a real chance that CIA types decided that yesterday's leak didn't look very good, and they set about trying to reassure the public that all that torture is a thing of the past. I notice, for example, that ABC says the okay to ban waterboarding came from "the White House", rather than from a named official.

Could be true, then, that waterboarding has been banned by somebody or other...but one should never believe anything coming from the CIA without independent evidence. In any case, the CIA did not say that it has ceased contracting out waterboarding or any of the other currently favored forms of torture, whether to free-lancers or to foreign countries. Nor has the CIA necessarily closed down its secret prisons around the globe. It also left most of its preferred list of tortures intact.

So maybe less than one cheer for the CIA's torturers; considerably less than one.

crossposted from unbossed.com