Word: waterboard
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.' JESSE VENTURA, former Minnesota governor, saying the former Vice President should be prosecuted for approving "torture...
...available methods effective? According to a retired operative, some at Langley "are convinced that [Obama] has thrown out the baby along with the waterboard." More generally, some veterans say that the rules of the war on terrorism in the Obama era are no longer clear. "It's very much in flux," says Paul Pillar, a former top agency official who now teaches at Georgetown University. "So much is unresolved - like the various habeas cases involving Gitmo detainees. There are lots of shoes yet to drop...
...what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques. On that occasion, although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within CIA headquarters still believed he was withholding information ... At the direction of CIA Headquarters, interrogators therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah. . . . [I]n the Zubaydah example, CIA Headquarters dispatched officials to observe the last waterboard session. These officials reported that enhanced techniques were no longer needed...
...Most of the blame for these heinous acts lies with the politicians and OLC lawyers who concluded that “[t]he waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.” As a result, one of the most iconic forms of torture—recognized as such since the Spanish Inquisition—was used by the Bush administration 183 times on a single prisoner over the course of a month. Ironically, the United States has long recognized these methods as torture, prosecuting and convicting...
...also cites the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS) in saying that the "the expertise of the SERE psychologists/interrogators ... was probably misrepresented." The IG concluded: "Consequently, according to OMS, there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used ... was either efficacious or medically safe." In fact, the IG report also hints that the CIA didn't consult the OMS on waterboarding until quite late: "OMS was neither consulted nor involved in the initial analysis of the risk and benefits of [enhanced interrogation techniques...