Categories: Need to know

Terrorism suspect waterboarded 83 times

New documents makes liars out of the CIA

by macleans.ca on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 11:51am - 3 Comments

Americans have long known that their government was torturing terrorism suspects, but many accepted it as a necessary evil that got results. That perception was shaped by some timely media managing, like an interview ABC News broadcast in late 2007 with a former CIA operative. The agent, who was involved in the interrogation of an Al Qaeda member captured in 2002 said the terrorist became cooperative after just “20 or 30 seconds” of waterboarding. New documents show the man in question was actually waterboarded 83 times.

The New York Times

elixelx

bulls**t! What the NYT fails to tell you is that there were not 83 separate sessions of waterboarding, but 5 sessions, and that each dunking lasted 15-20 seconds MAXIMUM.
Of course we all know that there are 1,500 droplets of water in a cupful, and 16,500 molecules (approx. I haven’t done a meticulous count!)in a droplet making it 83X1500X16,500 (You do the Math, the NYT is too shameless to!) waterboardings….
The deceptive logic in all this is…If it took this many sessions to get something from the guy, and they actually did get something in the end, wouldn’t it have been careless and incompetent to stop after the first or second session?
The other aspect is…Is fear always an immediate spontaneous reaction, or is it something that builds up? G.M:Hopkins wrote “More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring” John McCain told us, wrenchingly, that fear comes both ways and the day arrives when the fear of what is to come breaks you….
Finally, and most important…there are those who accuse these interrogators of receiving pleasure out of the fear they inflict, and that it is unproductive, even counterproductive. The frightened threatened man will say whatever he thinks the interlocutor wants to hear (The Chomsky Subtend) But isn’t giving the wrong info still giving info. If you say that nothing is being plotted and nothing happens…haven’t you given me info? If the info you give me is actionable I act, but not before I’ve squared it with a thousand pieces of other info to determine if it is actionable or not. Then the next time I dunk you I WILL KNOW, from the circumlocutions you use, whether you are or are not telling me what I want to hear!.

James Connors

It is probably no coincidence that your advocacy for torture is incoherent.

Where torture stalks the landscape all humanity is debased and diminished in its presence.