A few days ago, I was talking to a Senate aide about Afghanistan and the lack of a coherent US policy regarding the rising troubles there. Toward the end of the conversation, this aide, Jonah Blank (who is also an anthropologist), mentioned as an aside that he had photographs of an actual waterboard.
For those of you not paying attention to the debate in the United States over suitable practices for interrogating a terrorism suspect, waterboarding has been a central example of what critics of the Bush administration's policy oppose. Last week, as members of Congress considered legislation favoured by the White House that would govern (to a limited degree) how suspects are interrogated and how evidence obtained during brutal interrogations (or some might call torture sessions) could be used against suspects in military tribunals, there was much talk about the practice of waterboarding. But waterboarding was usually described in the media in a matter-of-fact manner. The Washington Post simply referred to waterboarding recently as an interrogation measure that "simulates drowning". That is, few people knew what waterboarding entails or looks like - myself included.
So when Blank offered me copies of his photos of a waterboard and of a painting depicting a waterboarding session, I quickly accepted. When I received them, I asked if I could post the images on my blog. Blank gave me permission. Inside a day, my blog - a modest operation - received nearly 80,000 visitors, and other sites ran the photos as well. They were a mini-sensation. One expert on torture told me that there are few images of waterboarding in the public domain and that Blank had done a tremendous public service.
Blank, a former senior editor of US News & World Report and the author of the books Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God and Mullahs on the Mainframe, took the photos last month at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The prison is now a museum that documents Khmer Rouge atrocities. And the shots show one of the waterboards that had been used by the Khmer Rouge. Here's the first:
Here's another view:
How did they work? Here's a painting by a former prisoner that shows the waterboard in action:
In an email to me, Blank explained the significance of the photos. (His observations are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the senators for whom he works.) He wrote:
The crux of the issue before Congress can be boiled down to a simple question: Is waterboarding torture? Anybody who considers this practice to be "torture lite" or merely a "tough technique" might want to take a trip to Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge were adept at torture, and there was nothing "lite" about their methods. Incidentally, the waterboard in these photos wasn't merely one among many torture devices highlighted at the prison museum. It was one of only two devices singled out for highlighting (the other was another form of water-torture - a tank that could be filled with water or other liquids; I have photos of that too.) There was an outdoor device as well, one the Khmer Rouge didn't have to construct: chin-up bars. (The prison where the museum is located had been a school before the Khmer Rouge took over.) These bars were used for "stress positions" - another practice employed under current US guidelines. At the Khmer Rouge prison, there is a tank of water next to the bars. It was used to revive prisoners for more torture when they passed out after being placed in stress positions.
The similarity between practices used by the Khmer Rouge and those currently being debated by Congress isn't a coincidence. As has been amply documented (The New Yorker had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies - the states where US military personnel might have faced torture - were not designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit confessions. That's what the Khmer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.
The bottom line is: Not only do waterboarding and the other types of torture currently being debated put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half-century; they're also designed specifically to generate a (usually false) confession, not to obtain genuinely actionable intel. This isn't a matter of sacrificing moral values to keep us safe; it's sacrificing moral values for no purpose whatsoever.
These photos are important because most of us have never seen an actual, real-life waterboard. The press typically describes it in the most anodyne ways: a device meant to "simulate drowning" or to "make the prisoner believe he might drown." But the Khmer Rouge were no jokesters, and they didn't tailor their abuse to the dictates of the Geneva convention. They - like so many brutal regimes - made waterboarding one of their primary tools for a simple reason: it is one of the most viciously effective forms of torture ever devised.
The photos, of course, made no difference. The Republican-controlled Congress passed Bush's detainee legislation. The act explicitly permits the use of evidence obtained through waterboarding and other forms of torture. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and other top al-Qaida leaders have reportedly been subjected to this technique. They might certainly note - or try to note - that at any trial. But with this legislation, the White House has declared the use of waterboarding (at least in the past) as a legitimate practice of the US government - which puts the Bush administration in the good company of the Khmer Rouge.