What The Admin/CIA Want To Hide: "It’s Not the Water-Boarding, It’s the Blows to the Head"

[kpete]

"I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room."

---shows that they were using physics, as well. By using a towel wrapped around the victim’s neck, they were essentially using arm extensions to increase the speed of the victim’s head as it hit the wall. The higher the speed at impact, the greater the force of impact. For the geeks around, the speed and force of impact go up with the square of the extension (linear speed of the head is rotation of the center point per unit time times pi times the radius squared). Net result: even the short arm extension provided by the towel results in a tremendous increase in the force of impact. “Techonology” at work. Can’t get much more disgusting than this.

.........................

It’s Not the Water-Boarding, It’s the Blows to the Head
By: emptywheel Tuesday April 14, 2009 8:06 pm

Just to lay out a few details based on this article explaining that Obama continues to waver on what parts of the 2005 Bradbury torture memos to reveal. (h/t Steve)
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB123975168816518691-lMyQjAxMDI5MzE5NDcxNTQxWj.html

---1. According to the WSJ, it's not the description of water-boarding that the CIA wants to hide. It's the description of how the CIA threw people against the wall.

--- Among the details in the still-classified memos is approval for a technique in which a prisoner's head could be struck against a wall as long as the head was being held and the force of the blow was controlled by the interrogator, according to people familiar with the memos.

2. We know from the ICRC report this technique had been used, three years before Bradbury wrote his OLC memos, with Abu Zubaydah.
http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf
.................

...these details have already been made public, in the ICRC report and elsewhere. What the intelligence officials want to hide is that--even after they did this damage to Abu Zubadaydah (though before the ICRC called it torture in 2007)--Steven Bradbury wrote an OLC memo declaring this treatment legal.

more at:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/14/its-not-the-water-boarding-its-the-blows-to-the-head/