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Joseph L. Galloway | Is Waterboarding Torture? Yes    [

    Two Democrats Move to Outlaw Waterboarding
    By Renee Schoof
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Thursday 08 November 2007

    Washington - The practice of waterboarding would be outlawed specifically, along with other extreme interrogation techniques, under legislation pushed by two Democratic senators.

    The measures would repudiate the Bush administration's policy on torture. The CIA reportedly has used waterboarding - or simulated drowning - when questioning terrorism suspects. It's also used exposure to extreme temperatures and other methods that are expressly forbidden by the Army Field Manual. The proposed bills would require that all U.S. personnel - including the CIA - use only interrogation techniques authorized by the Army manual.

    Last month, President Bush's choice for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, refused to say whether waterboarding was torture and therefore illegal. And an executive order that President Bush released in July on what techniques the CIA could use was silent on whether waterboarding and other extreme measures were among them.

    Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., have offered separate bills that make the Army manual the standard for all U.S. interrogators. All members of the military by law already must abide by the manual. The proposed law would require civilians to do the same.

    However, it's unlikely that the Senate will debate the matter before the end of the year. The legislative calendar is jammed, sponsors of these measures must round up support and Republicans may be reluctant to tie the CIA's hands against the Bush administration's will.

    Similar legislation is expected soon in the House of Representatives.

    "We need to send a clear message that torture, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees, is unacceptable and is not permitted by U.S. law. Period," Biden said in a letter to senators.

    Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, argued at a Council on Foreign Relations talk in September that the CIA shouldn't be limited to the Army Field Manual's requirements on interrogation.

    "It's clear that what it is we do as an agency is different from what is contained in the Army Field Manual. I don't know of anyone who has looked at the Army Field Manual who could make the claim that what's contained in there exhausts the universe of lawful interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Convention," he said.

    U.S. law and international treaties have long banned torture. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 said all U.S. personnel must not treat detainees in cruel, inhuman and degrading ways. But backers of the proposed bills say they're needed because the Bush administration has interpreted the law in a way that leaves open the possibility that the CIA can use the extreme techniques.

    Biden said his bill would end "the administration's semantic games on what constitutes torture. . . . There is no place for the administration's bad faith interpretation - of waterboarding and other forms of torture - to gain a toehold." He also warned that "continuing to equivocate about torture" would weaken the coalitions needed to fight terrorism, fuel terrorist recruitment and place Americans in jeopardy.

    Biden's legislation also would close the "black sites" outside the United States where detainees have been held, grant detainees at Guantanamo the right to challenge their imprisonment in court and require the administration to go to a special court and make the case that any non-American terrorist suspect it wants to send to another country wouldn't be tortured there. Kennedy's bill is limited to interrogations.

    "This involves taking on the administration in a very big way," said Elisa Massimino, an international rights expert with the advocacy group Human Rights First.

    The White House's July order allowed the CIA to restart its secret detention and interrogation program, which had been put on hold in 2006, Massimino said.

    Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the proposed restrictions on CIA interrogations were unnecessary. Graham, a judge advocate general in the Air Force Reserves, said he was briefed on how the CIA interrogates suspected terrorists. "I think the president's CIA program has found the right balance," he said "It's lawful; it's effective. It's different from the military's, but still within bounds."

    Graham said he believed that waterboarding was illegal for any branch of government.

 

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    Go to Original

    Is Waterboarding Torture? Yes
    By Joseph L. Galloway
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Wednesday 07 November 2007

    Did Bill Clinton have sex with that woman? Is Elvis Presley really dead? Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear do his ablutions in the woods? Is waterboarding torture?

    The answer to all of these questions, put simply, is yes.

    All of Judge Michael Mukasey's artful dodging and word play to avoid acknowledging the obvious to the august members of Senate Judiciary Committee does nothing to change the fact.

    When you hog-tie a human being, tilt him head down, stuff a rag in his mouth and over his nostrils and pour water onto the rag slowly and steadily to the point where his lungs fill with water and he's suffocating and drowning, that is torture.

    Four decades ago in the field in Vietnam, I saw a suspected Viet Cong waterboarded by South Vietnamese Army troops. The American Army advisers who were attached to the Vietnamese unit turned their backs and walked away before the torture began. It was then a Vietnamese affair and something they couldn't be associated with.

    The victim was taken to the edge of death. His body was wracked with spasms as he fought for air. The soldier holding the five-gallon kerosene tin filled with muddy water from a nearby stream kept pouring it slowly onto the rag, and the victim desperately sucking for even a little air kept inhaling that water instead.

    It seemed to go on forever. Did the suspect talk? I'm sure he did. I'm sure he told his torturers whatever he thought they wanted to hear, whether it was true or not. But I didn't see the end of it because one of the American advisers came to me and told me I had to leave; that I couldn't watch this interrogation, if that's what it was, any longer.

    That adviser knew that water torture was torture; he knew that it was outlawed by the Geneva Convention; he knew that he couldn't be a part to it; and he knew that he didn't want me to witness such brutality.

    Every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee knows that waterboarding is torture, even the majority who voted to send Judge Mukasey's nomination to be attorney general, America's chief law enforcement official, to the floor for a vote.

    Waterboarding was torture when it was used during the Spanish Inquisition; it was torture when it was used on Filipino rebels during the 1890s; it was torture when the Japanese Army used it on prisoners in World War II; it was torture when it was used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; and it's torture when CIA officers or others use it on terrorists.

    When George W. Bush was the governor of Texas, the state investigated, indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison for 10 years a county sheriff who, with his deputies, had waterboarded a criminal suspect. That sheriff got no pardon from Gov. Bush.

    Waterboarding is torture in the eyes of all civilized peoples, no matter how desperately President George W. Bush tries to rewrite the English language, with which he has only a passing familiarity, anyway. No matter how desperately his entire administration tries to redefine the word "torture" to cover the fact that not only have they acquiesced in its use, but they also have ordered its use.

    The president, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their cronies and legal mouthpieces such as David Addington, John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales are doing all they can to avoid one day facing the bar of justice, at home or in The Hague, and being called to account for crimes against humanity.

    They want a blank check pardon, and they'll continue searching for attorneys general and judges and justices and senators and members of Congress who'll hand them their stay-out-of-jail-free cards.

    As they squirm and wriggle and lie and quibble and cut deals with senators, they claim that "harsh interrogation methods" are necessary to prevent another 9/11. But as terrified as they are by terrorists, they also fear that one day they may be treated no better than some fallen South American dictator or Cambodian despot or hapless Texas sheriff; that they might not be able to leave a guarded, gated compounds in Dallas or Crawford, a ranch in New Mexico or the shores of Chesapeake Bay for fear of arrest and extradition.

    No more shopping trips to Paris. No vacations on the Costa Brava. No interludes on some billionaire buddy's yacht in the Caribbean. No jetting around the world making speeches to fat cats at $1 million a pop like other former presidents. Even Canada would be off-limits.

    Now the Democrats, or some of them, are conspiring with them to seat an attorney general who will help facilitate the ever more frantic search for ex post facto immunity for their crimes. Shame on them! There's such a thing as too loyal an opposition; too cowardly an opposition; too craven an opposition.

    Waterboarding is torture. Decent people have acknowledged that for centuries. We sent Japanese war criminals to the gallows for using it. We sent a Texas sheriff to prison for using it. One day, an ex-president and those who helped him and those he ordered to torture fellow human beings may have to plea bargain for their lives and their freedom.

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