CIA WaterBoarded Al Qaeda Suspect 183 Times

CIA WaterbBarded Al Qaeda Suspect 183 Times In 1 Month, Memo Reveals

By Jeremy Gantz
Posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Courtesy Of The Raw Story

Unless you're a fan of willful ignorance, you know all about the four Bush administration torture memos released Thursday by the Justice Department. Those memos revealed Bush lawyers authorized the use of insects in interrogations, among other shocking and disturbing strategies for getting detainees to talk.

But perhaps more shocking than these newly revealed torture methods is a memo's reference to the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (still in U.S. custody) was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah (the man who allegedly fears insects) was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

This insane frequency would seem to make (even more) self-evident the fact that waterboarding is not an effective anti-terror tool. Putting aside the moral and legal outrages for a moment, these statistics do not show waterboarding to be the ace in the hole "enhanced" technique Bush et al. claimed it was. Quite the opposite.

Firedoglake zeroes in on this startling detail:

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.

Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.

Over at Washington Monthly, Steve Benen parses these new hyper-waterboarding stats nicely:

For years, one of the unfortunate aspects of the "debate" over abusive interrogation policies is the concerns surrounding practicality -- as if torture would we justifiable, if we knew with some certainty that it would produce the results (i.e., useful intelligence) we wanted...

Now, we've known for quite some that the argument is not only morally bankrupt, it's also wrong. Torture "works" by compelling the abused to say what he/she thinks his/her captors want to hear.

And the KSM example seems to put the practical question to rest altogether. If waterboarding was an effective torture technique, why on earth did officials feel the need to administer it 183 times on one individual? What kind of sadist thinks, "We didn't get the information we wanted after torturing him 182 times, but maybe once more will do the trick"?