"We Don't Torture"- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Waterboarding in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. Painting by a former prison inmate, Vann Nath, at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month

According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.


http://digg.com/d1p41N

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: April 19, 2009

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?_r=1&hp

The president did not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to such interrogations, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said yesterday.

Asked on Sunday about the fate of those officials, Emanuel told ABC's This Week programme that Obama believed they "should not be prosecuted either and that's not the place that we go".

"I've said to the people that we don't torture, and we don't."

- George Bush, Sept. 5th 2006 to Katie Couric


"This agency does not do torture. Torture does not work. We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture."

- CIA Director Porter Goss

When asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley if “there’s anything that’s happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?”

Obama responded by saying, “No, I don’t believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn’t keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I’m much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards.” The United States, Obama told Crowley, “remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world.”

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

1. And this today on Morning Joe they ran a parody ad with exactly your OP

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month"

followed by

"Mulitple waterboardings can be so drying to the skin. That's why KSM uses Netrogena for his dry skin care needs" (summary, but very close)

I don't know the source of the parody. But it's clear that there is a real drive afoot to make torture acceptable and mainstream. It's a coarsening and a brutalizing of the American soul and the dowsing of the flicker of shared humanity that we hope exists in all of us.

Dick Cheney is out there right now touting the "effectiveness" of torture as though it were a fuel additive to give you higher mileage.

Sickening

[eShirl]

2. that parody ad was from David Letterman last night

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

3. I didn't know the source, but finding it out that it's Letterman doesn't make it funny or funnier

It's like using Auschwitz as a prop for a fake Easy Off oven cleaner ad. Just not funny. I'm sorry to hear that David Letterman and his staff get amusement from American waterboarding.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

4. Link to the Bradbury memo

http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/missing_memos/28OLCmemofinalredact30May05.pdf

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

5. kick!

[TBF]

6. Completely disgusting. 2 recs in 24 hours is equally appalling -

have we forgotten that democrats are supposedly against this sort of behavior.

:kick: