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Water and Sleep
For years now, the FCM has largely succeeded in trivializing "water torture." So who's afraid of a little water? Don't those Muslims know how to hold their breath, like we do at Rehoboth? And besides, we waterboarded our own troops in training, without adverse effect. Are Americans so dumbed down that they cannot see the difference between a U.S. military training exercise, during which a simple gesture will stop the torture, and the real thing?
And how well did torture work on KSM? If one examines the record more carefully, it turns out that the alleged 9/11 mastermind was uncooperative and deceptive during the torture. When U.S. authorities finally let KSM be interviewed by the Red Cross, he said this (which was shoehorned onto page 6 of the Post, presumably to provide the article some semblance of "balance"):
"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive.
"I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time."
Ask FBI investigators and others sent on wild goose chases to check out such "information"; in candid moments they will corroborate what KSM has to say on that key point.
Getting What You Want
It boggles the mind what information one can extract by torture. A U.S. Army interrogator with long experience in conducting interrogations, and in training others in traditional Army techniques, recently told me this:
"Give me no restrictions, and allow me to use non-traditional techniques, and I promise you I can get a detainee to confess to having launched, solo, not one but two successful suicide bombings!"
The FCM's dismissive attitude toward waterboarding goes in spades for sleep deprivation. One hears things like: We've all gone without sleep -- preparing for exams, for example. We know what it's like, and it's no big deal. And, anyway, these are bad guys.
Not so fast. It's difficult to say that sleep deprivation is worse than waterboarding, but it is just as torturous. Much can be learned from Darius Rejali, a scholar who is one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on torture and its consequences. The paragraphs that follow are drawn largely from his book, Torture and Democracy.
Israeli terrorist and later prime minister, Menachem Begin, describing the sleep deprivation inflicted on him when he was a prisoner of the KGB as a young man, observed that anyone subjected to this condition knows that "not even hunger or thirst are comparable to it."
Experts now agree that sleep deprivation is a basic, and potentially dangerous, physiological-need state, similar to hunger or thirst and as basic to survival. Sleep-deprived people are highly suggestible (a condition not unlike drunkenness or hypnosis), making sleep deprivation ideal for inducing false confessions.
Rejali gives a 15th-century Italian lawyer "credit" for introducing this technique into the Inquisition's toolkit. But Inquisitional interrogators soon became aware of the unreliable character of information acquired through sleep deprivation, and the preferred technique became the rack.
The Gestapo used sleep deprivation among other "Verschäfte Vernehmungen" -- sharpened interrogation techniques. Against whom? You guessed it; against "Terroristen."
Sleep deprivation also was in the quiver of British interrogators in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and is still included in current Israeli procedures. And after 9/11, the CIA and the military were authorized to take the technique out of mothballs and apply it in interrogations -- with terrific results, if you believe Page One of the Washington Post.
