Posts Tagged: ‘water boarding’

So, last week we learned that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had 10 favorite means of forcibly extracting said intelligence from detainees in the war on terror. Widely condemned as a checklist of U.S.-approved torture techniques, the list included water boarding. Now news has broken that a 2005 CIA memo states that water boarding was used 266 times on two detainees.

For those unfamiliar with the practice, water boarding involves pouring water over a victim’s face to simulate the sensation of drowning — a terrifying and anxiety-ridden experience to say the least. If you need a more visual idea of what this entails, click to view the full post and watch the video clip from Amnesty International. WARNING: Features a disturbing recreation of torture.

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By now, you guys have heard about the four memos that the U.S. Department of Justice released yesterday detailing and approving interrogation techniques for use by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. If you want to read the memos in all their horrifying detail, the ACLU has posted them on its Web site here. It’s scary and surreal to see 10 U.S.-government approved torture techniques in cold, hard PDF print. But there they are, detailed in Jay Busbee’s (then Assistant Attorney General, OLC) Aug. 1, 2002, memo to John A. Rizzo (General Counsel CIA).

Without further ado, here are the 10 methods:

1. Attention grasp, which consists of “grasping the individual with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion.”

2. Walling, which, as best as I can understand it, consists of slamming a person against a wall. The wall is false, and the person’s head and neck are supported to prevent whiplash. Great.

Plus eight more.

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