Karl Rove "proud" U.S. tortured detainees

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Karl Rove says he is "proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists... Yes, I'm proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They're appropriate, they're in conformity with our international requirements and with US law."

Of course, the U.S. did a lot of nasty things to its detainees, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and a lot of what it did amounted to torture as defined by any decent human being.

What Rove was specifically focusing on, though, was waterboarding, which he does not consider torture. This is how they get around it. Bush repeatedly said the U.S. doesn't torture, but it only doesn't torture if you don't consider waterboarding torture. It's just a form of "enhanced interrogation," a horrible euphemism.

But it is simply incorrect to assert that what the U.S. did conforms with "international requirements" (under the Geneva Conventions) and American law. Unless, of course, you define waterboarding down -- that is, unless you lie about what waterboarding is.

Well, a lot has been written about waterboarding, but Mark Benjamin's recent "Waterboarding for dummies" piece at Salon exposed the brutal truth about waterboarding and the use thereof by U.S. interrogators. It's a must-read, though a deeply disturbing one.

It's hardly the harmless "dunk in the water" Cheney said it was:

[R]ecently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

And so on.

Remember that the use of this "enhanced" technique, a favourite of the Nazis, was approved at the highest levels of the Bush Administration.

You have to be an utter idiot to think waterboarding isn't torture. (Maybe Rove has convinced himself it isn't, or maybe he knows it is but spins his denials anyway, or maybe he really is an ignorant fool.)

And you have to be an utterly despicable human being, not even really human at all, to be "proud" of using torture, this and other forms of it, to inflict pain and suffering on, and to break, another human being.