By Dr. Harold Pease
Supposedly the tip identifying the courier who led intelligence services to Osama Bin Laden’s hideout came three months after intensive interrogation of a terrorist in Guantanamo Prison. President George W. Bush has strongly defended enhanced interrogation and Barack Obama condemned it so, in light of the above, should we continue to do it?
Techniques to extract information from an enemy are not new. An acquaintance shared with me what was required of him to extract information from the enemy in the Vietnam War. If the enemy did not disclose the information requested he was thrown from a helicopter in flight. His friends, riding with him, watched with horror until it was their turn to be thrown. My acquaintance, whose job it was to throw them, said that they usually had the information needed before the last prisoner.
But what is enhanced interrogation today? According to ABC News, the CIA has used the following techniques: waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, abdomen strikes, slapping, and shaking. In waterboarding the prisoner is “bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Material is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over them, asphyxiating the prisoner,” who believes that he is drowning. In hypothermia the prisoner is “left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius), while being regularly doused with cold water in order to increase the rate at which heat is lost from the body. (A water temperature of 10 °C (50 °F) often leads to death in one hour).” In stress positions the prisoner is forced to stand, handcuffed and with his feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor, for more than 40 hours, causing his “weight to be placed on just one or two muscles. This creates an intense amount of pressure on the legs, leading first to pain and then muscle failure”(ABC News, CIA’s Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described, Brian Ross, Nov. 18, 2005). Violent abdominal strikes, slapping, and shaking are self-explanatory. A bipartisan Congressional Report issued December 2008 added forced nudity and sleep deprivation up to 40 hours to the list that we have used.
The George W. Bush administration did not define these techniques as torture. The rest of the world did, however. In two separate pronouncements the United Nations “denounced the U. S. abuse of prisoners as tantamount to torture” on Feb. 16, 2006, and on May 19, of the same year it viewed “the U.S.-termed enhanced interrogation techniques … as a form of torture” (UN Calls for Guantanamo Closure, BBC, Read the Full UN Report into Guantanamo Bay, February 16, 2005).
Only one man in Congress actually knows what torture is and that is Senator John McCain and he opposes the practice as the information extracted is unreliable (the victim will say anything to ease the pain) and it is just plain wrong. He says that we should be on a higher plain. He was shot down over Hanoi, Vietnam sustaining two fractured arms and a broken leg sustained in the fall then was bayoneted and beaten by villagers who first found him. Although these wounds were not torture inflicted they were not treated for some time thus they became torture related. His beatings and interrogations lasted periodically for five years and included two years in solitary confinement. At the height of their attempt to break him he was bound by tight ropes in very painful positions and beaten every two hours for four days, breaking teeth and bones (Politics in America, by Thomas R. Dye, 2009, p 280). He finally broke.
Oh! About our locating the secret courier leading us to Osama bin Laden by enhanced interrogation. It never happened. McCain asked CIA Director Leon Panetta if that were true and he said: “The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda” (CIA Director Leon Panetta to Sen. John McCain: “Torture Not Key to Finding Bin Laden” by Joan McCarter, May 16, 2011, Covey Views).
If you do not like our practice of enhanced interrogation you will be less pleased with our practice of “extraordinary rendition” covered in my next column. This is the practice of sending to other countries prisoners not broken by our techniques; countries that have no problem calling torture torture. We also send a list of the questions we want answered.
Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 25 years at Taft College.