CIA’s Self-Authorization for Ice-Drowning Human Beings

The WaPo has a story that repeats what I’ve been harping on for over a year (and in some cases, has been clear even longer): the Senate Torture Report shows that CIA repeatedly lied to Congress.

There are, however, ugly new details about the torture (though it’s not clear whether they show up in the report): particularly regarding the treatment of Ammar al-Baluchi.

If declassified, the report could reveal new information on the treatment of a high-value detainee named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, the nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. The Pakistanis captured Ali, known more commonly as Ammar al-Baluchi, on April, 30, 2003, in Karachi and turned him over to the CIA about a week later. He was taken to a CIA black site called “Salt Pit” near Kabul.

At the secret prison, Baluchi endured a regime that included being dunked in a tub filled with ice water. CIA interrogators forcibly kept his head under the water while he struggled to breathe and beat him repeatedly, hitting him with a truncheon-like object and smashing his head against a wall, officials said.

As with Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating.

The report notes that two other prisoners — members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group — were subjected to similar treatment at the same time.

Two other terrorism suspects, from Libya — Mohammed al-Shoroeiya and Khalid al-Sharif — endured similar treatment at Salt Pit, according to Human Rights Watch. One of the men said CIA interrogators “would pour buckets of very cold water over his nose and mouth to the point that he felt he would suffocate. Icy cold water was also poured over his body. He said it happened over and over again,” the report says. CIA doctors monitored their body temperatures so they wouldn’t suffer hypothermia.

Ultimately, CIA got DOJ to authorize “water dousing” — in the manner that CIA always got DOJ to approve mere shadows of what they actually did, and the approval more closely matches the description of the LIFG prisoners — in the Bradbury Techniques Memo (see page 10). But not before it got used over and over at the Salt Pit (the same place where water dousing had already contributed to Gul Rahman’s death).

Which is, I’m quite certain, one thing that CIA was doing with the Legal Principles document, a set of legal guidelines the CIA wrote for itself (with John Yoo’s freelance help) as the CIA’s legal problems started to mount. As I’ve noted, the first draft of the memos got hand-carried to John Yoo on April 28, 2003, just as these detainees were in the Salt Pit. There were several more discussions internally at CIA in anticipation of litigation before they tried (unsuccessfully) to create a fait accompli with Pat Philbin on June 16, 2003. At that point, the document only generally approved techniques equivalent to those already approved. As CIA would later explain,

We rely on the applicable law and OLC guidance to assess the lawfulness of detention and interrogation techniques. For example, using the applicable law and relying on OLC’s guidance, we concluded that the abdominal slap previously discussed with OLC (and mentioned in the June 2003 summary points) is a permissible interrogation technique. Similarly, in addition to the sitting and kneeling stress positions discussed earlier with OLC, the Agency has added to its list of approved interrogation techniques two standing stress positions involving the detainee leaning against a wall.

I guess, in similar fashion, John Yoo and his CIA buddies believe ice-drowning is equivalent, as another kind of simulated drowning, to waterboarding, which had been approved?

Then the next year, when Scott Muller tried the same trick with Jack Goldsmith — trying to get him to sign off on the techniques CIA had freelanced its own legal opinion — he asked to include water dousing (and another water-based technique and one still-redacted technique) explicitly. Of course, the description of water dousing fell far short of what the CIA was actually doing — dunking men in ice-water repeatedly — though the outlines, especially the concern about detainees ingesting water and hypothermia — show the outlines of the torture such language was meant to gloss.

To understand the CIA’s torture program, you have to understand what these bureaucratic maneuvers were meant to cover.

Now we know they were intended to authorize controlled drowning of men in ice water.

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17 replies
  1. orionATL says:

    well, now we know for sure.

    the strenuous years-long effort of the cia to deep six the torture program was not, as so often implied by cia officials, “to protect our guys – our field people involved” – cia attorney and torture-tape destroyer rodriguez’s claim.

    no, that effort was to protect cia officials like tenent and black, complicit doj officials like john yoo and steven bradbury, and major republican political leaders like ag’s ashworth and gonzales, nsc head rice, v-p cheney and aide david addington, as well as prez-by-his-fingernails, g.w. bush.

    faithful to the presidential omuerta, current prez obama is covering up for past prez g.w. bush and hismerry gang of torturers.

  2. solbushka says:

    So what about Mitchell and Jenson? Did they invent this technique as well?

    Were they also measuring cortisol levels along with core temperature? That’s damn near Mengele territory.

  3. chronicle says:

    quote”To understand the CIA’s torture program, you have to understand what these bureaucratic maneuvers were meant to cover.”unquote

    Wait….wait..”you have to understand what these bureaucratic maneuvers were meant to cover.” ummm, what does it take to understand the word TORTURE. Plain and simple. The CIA TORTURED human beings. There is no legal rational on the face of this planet that can absolve these war criminals for their crimes against humanity. You know it. They know it. All they are trying to do is what every LEGAL IMPERIALISM has done since time immortal. COVER THEIR ASS by using the same thing the Japs, the Nazi’s, and the Facists did in WW 11. Write “legal writs”. If you have enough power, then you will NEVER be held accountable for crimes against humanity. However, if you don’t, and another sovereign entity manages to bring charges against you in an international court, your only defense is…I was following orders based on “legal writs”. Of course, we all know how that worked out in Nuremberg. In this case, this is EXACTLY why that scumbag Senator Jesse Helms, within days of 9/11, introduced the Protect American Service Members Act. They already knew that war crimes would possibly be committed by the American military WAY before the Iraq war, especially once the Patriot Act was passed, and given the international community might try and prosecute American soldiers, the USG passed a law authorizing military force to be used, even against the Hague in the Neatherlands.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act

    youbetcha..the USG KNEW it was going to torture people, as the CIA had been doing it already for 50 goddamned years. If the world really knew what this insidious group of sub-human pond scum has perpetrated against human beings…they would be lined up and shot. Of course, Feinstein already knows the power of the CIA..and Congress can’t do a fucking thing anymore. All I know is America should be hanging it’s stinking head in shame.

  4. DWBartoo says:

    If the CIA REPEATEDLY lied to Congress, as it no doubt did, one wonders when, or if, Congress began to have suspicions. Beyond a certain point, Congress had and has an obligation, an “oversight” obligation, to ask very pointed and serious questions, to fail to do so, to refuse to do so, for whatever “reasons”, cannot fail to suggest, to outside observers, that Congress, in its inaction, in its reticence to probe, to question, to raise holy hell – begins to look complicit in what Congress cannot yet publicly term “torture”.

    If Congress was AFRAID to act, afraid to question, then we have quite another crisis, well beyond torture, hard as that may be to grasp, and that crisis is one of actual “function” and accountability. Such a crisis is Constitutional and cannot be ignored or semantically evaded without severe consequence.

    Is there the stomach to ask the questions that now must be asked?

    DW

    DW

    • wendy davis says:

      I agree, DWBartoo, and had wondered: how do we know to what degree, and about which specific issues, techniques, did the CIA lie to Congress. Hasn’t it been discovered several times that the Gang of Eight covered up egregious criminal behavior?

      Emptywheel: do you mean that ice-water dunking is the formerly redacted torture, or is there still another one or ones coming?

      Also: who are the ‘Current and former U.S. officials who described the report spoke on the condition of anonymity’ and for what purpose have they talked to the Washington Post?

      • wendy davis says:

        The simplest answer would be that some of the ‘officials’ who objected to the torture, and to the claims of its efficacy would have been anonymous sources. And yet…the simplest answer isn’t *always* the true one.

    • DWBartoo says:

      Among those questions are these: How much of a “security state”, how much “secrecy”, and what level of failed, deliberate or otherwise, “oversight” IS acceptable in a, now, negligible “democracy” …. and how much or what level of these things become completely inimical to the very idea of democracy at all?

      If these questions are not raised … and answered, it will be damned difficult to pretend that anything at all has been learned … or understood.

      And, these questions are not for “experts”, or for attorneys such as Yoo or Bybee, nor may Executive Orders obviate the need of these questions or answers, for these questions go to foundational principle and to the very nature of the rule of law, itself.

      DW

  5. lefty665 says:

    But looking forward, always looking forward, with climate change there will be so much less ice left in the future it will not be a problem. CIA can eliminate the expense of having doctors monitor core temps. May they all be re-assigned to measuring core temps at Fukushima. It would be more honorable.

    So what’s happening? Are CIA and the Administration stonewalling and the Senate leaking to force the issue?

  6. GKJames says:

    Sick stuff; just what we’ve come to expect. It’s also obvious that the CIA et al, including the legal minions, convinced themselves that “water dousing” isn’t the same as “water-boarding” and, hence, not illegal. Now just waiting for “spritzing”…

    Does anyone have a rational explanation for why Congress tolerates this? Sure, half the place has no problem with our torturing people. But you’d think there’d be a consensus that misleading the legislative branch represents institutional and Constitutional problems of a whole different magnitude irrespective of politics.

    • chronicle says:

      quote”Does anyone have a rational explanation for why Congress tolerates this?”unquote

      Yes. Jim Garrison. I keep posting this in the hopes people will finally realize one thing..the CIA and the Pentagon ARE the government now. …..

      quote:”Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of
      war conditions; and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn’t the test.The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same. I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I’ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America…

      in the name of national security.”unquote

      Why do you think the CIA can get away with what they do? All over the world. The proof of the pudding is what becomes of the Torture report. If we never see it, that should tell you something.

      • GKJames says:

        @chronicle: I appreciate the extensive reply. While I agree in general with the description of the ailment, it’s still frustratingly fuzzy as to how the individuals in Congress contribute to it. It may be a quixotic quest, but what I want to know is how each member of Congress justifies his/her position. Yes, I can go to the Congressional Record for canned speeches and recitations of talking points. But that’s not the same as someone’s going to toe-to-toe with these people to compel them to articulate a substantive argument for or against. Maybe I’m alluding to a broader issue, namely, the elusive nature of representative democracy itself. If there’s no forum in which the people’s choice can be required to explain — not least when it comes to checks-and-balances basics — what’s ultimately the point of the exercise?

        Seems to me that there are only three legitimate positions to take: (1) I have no problem with CIA’s misleading Congress, especially in connection with such petty matters as enhanced interrogation of bad guys; (2) I very much have a problem with the CIA’s misleading Congress, and a special Congressional committee with subpoena powers should investigate further; or (3) I’m not sure whether the CIA misled Congress, but we should investigate further. What do we get instead? Mostly silence.

  7. lysias says:

    From the Wikipedia entry Nazi Human Experimentation:

    In 1941, the Luftwaffe conducted experiments with the intent of discovering means to prevent and treat hypothermia. There were 360 to 400 experiments and 280 to 300 victims indicating some victims suffered more than one experiment.[8] One study forced subjects to endure a tank of ice water for up to five hours.

    . . .

    Another study placed prisoners naked in the open air for several hours with temperatures as low as −6 °C (21 °F). Besides studying the physical effects of cold exposure, the experimenters also assessed different methods of rewarming survivors.[10] “One assistant later testified that some victims were thrown into boiling water for rewarming” [8]

    The freezing/hypothermia experiments were conducted for the Nazi high command to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front, as the German forces were ill-prepared for the cold weather they encountered. Many experiments were conducted on captured Russian troops; the Nazis wondered whether their genetics gave them superior resistance to cold. The principal locales were Dachau and Auschwitz. Dr Sigmund Rascher, an SS doctor based at Dachau, reported directly to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and publicised the results of his freezing experiments at the 1942 medical conference entitled “Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter”.[11] Approximately 100 people are reported to have died as a result of these experiments.[12]

    Section also has this caption to a photo:

    A cold water immersion experiment at Dachau concentration camp presided over by Professor Ernst Holzlöhner (left) and Dr. Sigmund Rascher (right). The subject is wearing an experimental Luftwaffe garment.

  8. klynn says:

    This takes me back to original EW posts on the subject and long discussions with Jeff about induced hypothermia and controlled hypothermia being used to prolong torture because the state of controlled hypothermia can reduce evidence of damage to the body; thus, having the potential of allowing for more torture while hiding the effects of torture from a medical exam perspective.

  9. klynn says:

    (BTW love the look of the new set-up. Still trying to figure out if there is a way to edit comments and search for past posts. If I figure out how to search, I will link to my comments about induced/controlled hypothermia from way back.)

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