[Ppnews] Two Questions for Michael Hayden On Waterboarding

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington02072008.html
February 7, 2008


Two Questions for Michael Hayden


On Waterboarding

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

The media is buzzing with the news that Michael 
Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted in an 
open session of Congress on Tuesday that 
waterboarding -- a long-reviled torture 
technique, which produces the perception of 
drowning -- was used on three "high-value" 
al-Qaeda suspects in CIA custody in 2002 and 
2003. The three men -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 
Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri -- are 
discussed in my book The Guantánamo Files: The 
Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison.

My questions for Mr. Hayden are simple. Firstly, 
if it's true that only three detainees were 
subjected to waterboarding, then why did a number 
of "former and current intelligence officers and 
supervisors" tell ABC News in November 2005 that 
"a dozen top al-Qaeda targets incarcerated in 
isolation at secret locations on military bases 
in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe" were 
subjected to six "Enhanced Interrogation 
Techniques," instituted in mid-March 2002?

According to the ABC News account, the six 
techniques used by the CIA on the "dozen top 
al-Qaeda targets" were "The Attention Grab," 
"Attention Slap," "The Belly Slap" and three 
other techniques that are particularly worrying: 
"Long Time Standing," "The Cold Cell," and, of course, "Waterboarding."

"Long Time Standing" was described as "among the 
most effective [techniques]," in which prisoners 
"are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their 
feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for 
more than 40 hours." The ABC News report added, 
"Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective 
in yielding confessions." In "The Cold Cell," the 
prisoner "is left to stand naked in a cell kept 
near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell 
the prisoner is doused with cold water."

The description of "Waterboarding" was as 
follows: "The prisoner is bound to an inclined 
board, feet raised and head slightly below the 
feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's 
face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, 
the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of 
drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt."

The article proceeded with recollections of the 
waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who 
apparently "won the admiration of interrogators 
when he was able to last between two and 
two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess" 
(the interrogators tried it on themselves, but 
"only lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in").

According to the ABC News report, one other 
detainee who was waterboarded was Ibn al-Shaykh 
al-Libi, the director of the Khaldan training 
camp in Afghanistan, who was captured in November 
2001. His current whereabouts are unknown, 
although there are suspicions that he was finally 
delivered to the Libyan government. Having 
slipped off the radar, the government clearly 
does not want his case revived, not only because 
it may have to explain what has happened to him, 
but also because, as a result of the application 
of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," al-Libi 
claimed that Saddam Hussein had offered to train 
two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Al-Libi's "confession" led to President Bush 
declaring, in October 2002, "Iraq has trained 
al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and 
gases," and his claims were, notoriously, 
included in Colin Powell's speech to the UN 
Security Council on February 5, 2003. The claims 
were of course, groundless, and were recanted by 
al-Libi in January 2004, but it took Dan Cloonan, 
a veteran FBI interrogator, who was resolutely 
opposed to the use of torture, to explain why 
they should never have been believed in the first 
place. Cloonan told Jane Mayer, "It was 
ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would 
have known anything about Iraq ... The reason 
they got bad information is that they beat it out 
of him. You never get good information from someone that way."

My second question for Mr. Hayden concerns an 
allegation made by Murat Kurnaz, the German 
detainee who was released from Guantánamo in 
August 2006. In an article in the Washington 
Spectator last July, focusing on Kurnaz's story, 
as described in his book Fünf Jahre Meines 
Lebens: Ein Bericht Aus Guantánamo (Five Years Of 
My Life: A Report From Guantánamo), the following 
passage came after Kurnaz's recollections of 
being hung by his wrists for "hours and days," 
interrupted only by a doctor who came to "check 
his vital signs to determine if he could 
withstand more enhanced interrogation," and his 
recollections of seeing, in the neighboring cell, 
another detainee who had died as a result of this ordeal:

"Kurnaz said he was also subjected to 
waterboarding and electric shock. And that 
beatings were routine and constant. He theorizes 
that much of the torture was a result of the 
failure of the American soldiers and agents to 
capture any real terrorists in the initial 
sweeps. (He was told that he was sold to the 
Americans for $3,000 by Pakistani police, who 
identified him as a terrorist.) 'They didn't have 
any big fish. And they thought that by torture 
they could get one of us to say something. "I 
know Osama" or something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish.'"

In light of the comments made by CIA sources in 
November 2005, and by Murat Kurnaz in his book, I 
can only wonder how it's feasible for Mr. Hayden 
to assert that the use of waterboarding was 
restricted to three of the 14 "high-value" 
detainees who were transferred to Guantánamo in 
September 2006, and, by extension, to claim that 
waterboarding was not used elsewhere in the "War 
on Terror" prisons; specifically, as Murat Kurnaz 
alleged, in one of the US prisons in Afghanistan, 
which, with Guantánamo, provided the template for 
the well-chronicled riot of torture and abuse 
that later migrated to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Andy Worthington 
(<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk) 
is a British historian, and the author of 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (to be 
published by Pluto Press). He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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