Posted on 12/12/2007 6:37:32 AM PST by UKrepublican
'Waterboarding broke al Qaeda captive in 35 seconds,' says former CIA agent defending torture
Use of the interrogation technique known as "waterboarding" was approved by the White House and gets results, a former CIA agent admitted yesterday.
The technique - which simulates drowning - was used against Al Qaeda captives with success, John Kiriakou told a U.S. TV network.
The one-time CIA interrogator is the first to speak out about the "torture" methods that have earned President George Bush's administration worldwide condemnation.
The White House has denied torture is used on terror suspects, but Mr Kiriakou said waterboarding "broke" one stubbornly silent Al Qaeda recruiter after just 35 seconds.
Waterboarding involves wrapping plastic or fabric around a detainee's face then pouring water over the top until it is forced up the nose and down the throat to simulate drowning.
Suspects are told they will die if they do not talk.
And although the technique is supposed to be low-risk, critics say it can result in long-lasting psychological damage, injury to the lungs and even, in extreme cases, death.
Mr Kiriakou told the ABC network that he had fought an "intellectual battle" in his mind over the use of waterboarding, and had concluded that it is justified as it saves lives by preventing terror attacks. "This isn't something done willy-nilly," he added. "This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department."
Mr Kiriakou told how waterboarding was used on Zayn Abu Zubaida, the first high-ranking Al Qaeda member captured after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Abu Zubaida was seized in a gun battle in Pakistan in the spring of 2002. For weeks he refused to talk and remained ideologically zealous, defiant and unco-operative. Then he was flown to a secret CIA prison - believed to be in Afghanistan - and strapped to a board with his feet in the air.
Cellophane was wrapped around the Al Qaeda man's face and water was forced up his nose and into his throat to make him think he was drowning.
The suspect lasted only 35 seconds before he broke.
"It was like flipping a switch," said Mr Kiriakou.
"From that day on, he answered every question. The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.
"Like a lot of Americans, I'm involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get.
"I struggle with it.
"At the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do."
Mr Kiriakou said he did not interrogate Abu Zubaida, but learned the details from colleagues.
His account came as the U.S. Congress began questioning CIA director Michael Hayden yesterday about why the agency destroyed at least two videotapes of controversial interrogations.
Many senators believe it was done to hide evidence of illegal torture that could have been used against CIA agents in a war crimes tribunal.
General Hayden, speaking to the closed-doors Congress hearing yesterday was expected to say that CIA lawyers ruled that the interrogations were legal and the tapes were destroyed in 2005 to protect the identities of CIA employees who appear on them.
The torture scandal is likely to become a major issue in next year's presidential election.
Abu Zubaida - who says he was coerced into making false confessions - was eventually moved to the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he is now held in solitary confinement.
He is likely to be tried next year on terrorism charges and the CIA expects that he will spend the rest of his life in custody.
Mr Kiriakou, a 14-year veteran of the CIA who worked in both the analysis and operations divisions, left in 2004 and works as a consultant for a private Washington-based firm.
I gotta big kick out of the fella who said you had chosen your name appropriately. Sooooo funny.
If you would allow them to use our own mores, beliefs and institutions, against us due to misguided cultural ethics; if you let yourself be defeated by them, just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won't be any methods *but* Radical Islamic methods!
If you preach the Rules of the Game while they use every foul and filthy trick against you, they will laugh at you! They'll think you're weak, decadent! [as they have been doing for generations]
You have failed to learn your lesson through the years, especially in 1983, 1993 and 2001, and now you seek to have us pay the school fees again. Some will learn quicker than others, some will never learn - because you've been educated to be gentlemen and sportsmen, in peace and in war.
Dear old Dumb Ox - this is not a gentleman's war. This time you're fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain - Islamic fascism, the modern scourge of humanity, and if you lose, there won't be a return match... perhaps not even for a hundred years.
Christus vincit. Be not afraid. If we abandon ethics because of fear of death, we are cowards. Do you want to be a coward on the Last Day?
This time you're fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain - Islamic fascism, the modern scourge of humanity, and if you lose, there won't be a return match... perhaps not even for a hundred years.
Perspective time: more people have been killed in my state in the past decade by violent atheists than by violent muslims. More Americans have been killed by abortion than Bin Laden could ever hope to kill.
Al Qaeda is a pissy little terrorist sect unworthy of all the apocalyptic hype you're lavishing upon it. We can beat them easily.
But we'll never neuter Islam back into its habitual quiescent decadence if people like you keep puffing up its reputation. You talk of its omnipotence like one of their recruiters.
Oh, didn't your quote come from some conservative film site about Colonel Blimp? I once read those passages through Kathy Shaidle. Dramatic films past and present, whatever their other virtues, don't strike me as credible authorities when it comes to ethical or military analysis. They are shadows on a wall.
Your name brought a smile to my face. How’s Beryl and the matchbox collection?
I don’t think anyone has said they are an ‘entusiast’ for torture - even if you are classifying water boarding as that.
Ultimately - you either believe in sanctioning it in the hope of saving potentially thousands of lives, or you take the high moral ground and say no.
If anything, waterboarding is the safest form of real workable torture there has ever been - forget actual phyical amputations etc - it is a decent and effective middle way.
Condemned by who?
God? Your twisted logic reaches the conclusion that God should condemn Himself since He advocates total war.
Judea/Christian world would have been a flash in the pan if not for “doing evil so that good may come”. War is a necessary evil they say and God sure laid a groundwork for total war.
Torture is used for gathering info in order to defend yourself. Do you have a problem with self-defence?
It’s your logic that’s twisted. I do not know what you mean by “total war”, or if you even know what the term means.
God takes life every day, frequently in ways that are hard for us to accept. That is because he is the Lord and Giver of life; man isn’t. Being the Lord of life means the He exercises dominion over it.
Sacred Scripture is a whole; it’s an abuse to read it piecemeal. We see that God commands the Israelites at some points to wage wars of conquest. Elsewhere we see the Israelites as the victims of war, also at the command of God. The Old Testament is a record of prophecy, fulfilled in the New Testament. Prophecy doesn’t mean fortune-telling; it means using veiled speech and act to indicate things that are distant and hidden. God used war prophetically, to reveal things about the rupture between himself and man, and to indicate the supreme importance of his salvific plan. The time before the coming of the Savior was a time of wrath between God and man. We were not reconciled to him, as we now are. God used war to demonstrate how man in his fallen nature clings to death. He used it to demonstrate the single-mindedness he demands in the building up of his Son’s kingdom, and the single-mindedness we must have if we’re to enter it. He used mysteriously it to convict us of our sin, even as he preserves the Jews till the end of time.
If man had not disobeyed God at the beginning, there would never have been death, much less war. War is the fruit of man’s choice for evil, not God’s.
When you start to wonder about “necessary evil”, that’s the devil whispering to you. Rebuke him.
Hey if you have a death wish perhaps you should keep it to yourself and let the rest of us sane people defend our lives.
If you haven't seen all the pompous Jack Bauer wannabes talking gleefully about ripping fingernails out of terrorists' fingers, your eyes are closed.
If anything, waterboarding is the safest form of real workable torture there has ever been - forget actual phyical amputations etc - it is a decent and effective middle way.
Torture should be safe, legal, and rare?
If the American government accepts waterboarding, how can we protest effectively when our own boys are waterboarded by some present or future enemy?
What planet have you been on?
Beheading has been the method of our enemies.
We waterboard a few savages to prevent mass killing of civilians.
Do you advocate letting perhaps millions of innocents being killed to not inconvenience a few barbarians?
Millions? How scared must you be to engage in this hyperbole?
The thousands of lives that are hypothetically saved by these waterboarding techniques have other costs. By gaining torture, we lose limited government, the high ground in the defense of American POWs, and a populace too principled to let itself be taken in by fearmongering.
Bullseye. And who scared him, and to what end?
...a populace too principled to let itself be taken in by fearmongering.
How many so called "infidels" do you estimate the Minions of Islam have murdered in the last fifty years? All around the world, in Malaysia, the Philippines, East Timor, Chechnya, The Sudan, Kashmir, Thailand, the list goes on and on. The unrest and death is growing and spreading every day. On September the tenth you would have denied that 9/11 could happen. How many women and children are abused and beaten? How many three year old boys, with blood flowing from razor cuts on their pate, do you have to see to know that killers are being bred for your anticipated destruction?
How long will you be able to deny reality?
If this is such a threat, why hasn't the government sealed the borders?
Show me where our enemy has extended ANY POW courtesies.
I'm not talking about Al Qaeda or Iraqi irregulars, I'm talking about the next war or even the next minor detention.
Say some American special forces get captured in Iran. Iran waterboards them, and only waterboards them, for intelligence information. Having dismissed moral concerns and international consensus about waterboarding, on what grounds can the US govt. bring international pressure to help those troops? Replace "Iran" with Colombia, or Venezuela, or China.
Privately perhaps, but not publicly.
I don’t know where you have been but Special Forces are waterboarded as part of their training. I believe that doctrine has changed and POW’s are not supposed to resist as much because the enemy is going to get the information somehow. That doctrine changed decades ago.
I think you need to fight the war we are in right now and not worry about a possible war 30, 40, 50 years from now. Circumstances then will be entirely different and all your planning will irrelevant.
Your lack of concern for PERHAPS MILLIONS of innocent lives is stunning. The military knows what they are up against and that they are fighting for us selflessly. Such brave souls we are fortunate to have.
Smoketree, smoketree...what are we fighting for? Why is our country at war?
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