It's up to us

There was an interview (talk about a reporter with an agenda) done this week with our dear, sweet, caring, lovable Vice President, ol' Shoot-you-in-the-face.

Hennen: ... And I've had people call and say, please, let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?

Cheney: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation ...

Hennen: Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

Cheney: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in ...

If W had said this, the phrase "no-brainer" would be an easy target, but we all know that Cheney's alien brain is quite sophisticated. It's his heart that doesn't work right.

It's nice to know that waterboarding is apparently just like the dunk tank at the county fair, where the high school principal gets splashed a few times for charity. Frankly, I don't even see why that would get a terrorist to spill secrets, if that's all it was, unless they were the Wicked Witch of the West. So for waterboarding to be a useful interrogation tool, it has to be more than a "dunk".

Here's a picture, from the Washington Post of US soldiers waterboarding a North Vietnamese soldier in 1968. In an article, about the passing of the Military Commissions Act, we learned that

[T]he practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make people talk while still not causing permanent injury."

The picture reportedly led to an Army investigation.

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

"Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.

A CIA interrogation training manual declassified 12 years ago, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963," outlined a procedure similar to waterboarding. Subjects were suspended in tanks of water wearing blackout masks that allowed for breathing. Within hours, the subjects felt tension and so-called environmental anxiety. "Providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role," the manual states.

...Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presented "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation." When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."

In the post-Vietnam period, the Navy SEALs and some Army Special Forces used a form of waterboarding with trainees to prepare them to resist interrogation if captured. The waterboarding proved so successful in breaking their will, says one former Navy captain familiar with the practice, "they stopped using it because it hurt morale."

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the interrogation world changed. Low-level Taliban and Arab fighters captured in Afghanistan provided little information, the former intelligence official said. When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods.

These were cleared not only at the White House but also by the Justice Department and briefed to senior congressional officials, according to a statement released last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Waterboarding was one of the approved techniques.

Approved techniques, eh? In 1947, we prosecute the Japanese for doing it to us, now it's just a little dunk. Well, let's examine some other people who have used this "technique." Like the Khmer Rouge (and if ever there was a group of people one would want to emulate, it would be them).

From David Corn: The similarity between practices used by the Khymer 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 Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

That's an interesting conclusion – our government doesn't torture people (for that is what waterboarding is, not withstanding the delusional dunking theory) for information, it tortures them to get confessions.

Confessions lead to convictions.

Convictions lead to W and Darth and Rummy saying "We got the badguys, we'll keep you safe."

That leads to more Republican victories and more power for their small group of "elites". As with the Khmer Rouge and other dictatorships, power isn’t to be used to help the people, to protect the people, or any of the other standard functions of government. It’s used to keep those in power safe. It’s used to give those in power more power. And it will keep on doing that until stopped.

If we don’t stop it now, the mechanisms we have to prevent the torture and death of the many for the benefit of the few become more violent, more bloody, and more destructive to our world.

On November 7, vote. Vote not just to send a message, or to get rid of the corrupt or the evil (though those are necessary things). Vote to safe the weak. Vote to save our national soul. Vote to prevent the armed revolutions of the future, putting right much too late what we can put right now with our choices at the polls.