A Lesson For Mukasey: Why I Had Myself Water-Boarded

As a journalist for Current TV, a former military officer, and a student of public policy I have been involved in the debate about the War on Terror from the frontlines in Afghanistan to the policy discussions of academia. In the spring of 2006 a battle was brewing between the Bush Administration and some influential members of Congress over the use coercive interrogation techniques. The conflict over what techniques were legally and morally permissible had been a subtext of the War on Terror for years, but for the most part the debate was occurring inside of the intelligence community, the human rights community, and in small legal circles. It was outside the purview of the American public.

Make your point at current.com

By April of 2006 the debate about coercive interrogation and its most controversial technique, water-boarding, had started to spill into the headlines. I was in graduate school at the time. As I watched the debate unfold, and listened to both pundits and policymakers give their opinion on whether this technique constituted torture, I was struck by the strangeness of the debate. All of these people were lobbying opinions about a subject they had never seen or witnessed, and that struck me as problematic in a healthy democracy. See, in full disclosure I had a unique knowledge of water-boarding. I had the technique performed on me during my time in the service as part of my SERE training (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape). I, like all Special Forces operatives who deploy overseas, was sent to a training camp where we learned to resist interrogation and survive captivity, god forbid that ever happened to us overseas. Ironically, one of the many techniques we learned during this training was to assert our rights as told under Article III of the Geneva Convention. So, because I was familiar with water-boarding, I was intrigued by this national conversation that was going on about this thing that few people really understood. But, like many Americans, the pre-occupations of everyday life, for me the pressure of mid-terms and exams, pushed the controversy to the back of my mind.

Then, in mid March I traveled to Cambodia for Spring Break. While there I visited the Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21) prison in Phnom Penh. The Tuol Sleng prison had been converted to a museum and memorial for the victims of the Cambodian Genocide under the Pol Pot regime. As I walked through the museum and saw the photographs of the victims of the genocide, I was shocked to see a picture of the Khmer Rouge Water-boarding a Cambodian villager. At that moment I saw a throughline between the debate we were having domestically and the picture I was standing in front of. I was spurred into action, and upon my return to the United States, I decided to have myself water-boarded, this time on national TV, as a public service, so that this controversial technique could be judged in the court of public opinion.

Kaj Larsen's water-boarding video airs Wednesday at 7pm PST/10PM EST in a one hour special report on Current TV.

Comments

[retiredSEAL]

Kaj cannot properly demonstrate waterboarding for a number of key reasons:

1. He is a voluntary "victim." Arranging the event, hiring the former SERE instructors, and defining the parameters, he knows how far they will go.

2. He is an experienced "victim." He's been waterboarded before in SERE school, so he knows what to expect.

3. He is an extensively, thoroughly trained former service member. He was a SEAL, trained as a combat swimmer who underwent scores of events and tests in training that conditioned him to maintain his composure and self control under durress in the water. He could not possibly demonstrate the bone-melting trauma an otherwise inexperienced, involuntary, and uncertain detainee would display.

Kaj was one of my students at the Naval Academy. He was an exceptional swimmer, water polo player, and an excellent SEAL. His calm endurance throughout the staged waterboarding event is a textbook response for what he was trained to do in those situations, but few are. Be assured anyone else would have responded in greater distress. For better examples, check out Jeanie Moss's piece on waterbording on CNN. Then you'll see what happens to amateurs, and they are still volunteers for the procedure!

[Newsguy]

I never thought torture was something we would ever be debating in this country.

What's next? Concentration camps and Zyklon B "showers"?

[Necron99]

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
...
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

George Orwell
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.html

[ohjaygee]

Reading the responses to Kaj Larson's blogs on 'waterboarding' and being exposed to the ongoing, although too often glossed over, debate about what constitutes torture and what doesn't, what's morally acceptable or what isn't, whether 'times of war' or 'the pursuit of global terror' can be regarded as exceptional circumstances demanding similiar techniques, etc., etc. is all somewhat bizarre and more than a little surreal - especially to one who is neither an American citizen nor lives in the USA, but rather in Africa (South Africa to be precise), the continent where such abuses to one's fellow human beings are invariably regarded or often assumed by those in 'the first world' to be the norm, rather than the exception. I am not for one moment suggesting that it doesn't and hasn't and isn't taking place in Africa, it's totally unacceptable in whatever form, reasons or circumstances. Torture is torture is torture, period, irrespective of the cute labels, clever words and disingenuous arguements expended on this topic. Ironically we in the 'third world' still recognise these principals, thanks in no small part to the leadership of the likes of Mandela and others, despite convenient perceptions to the contrary. As I said all of this '...is somewhat bizarre and more than a little surreal...'

[Ramirez]

Fortunately there have been more Americans volunteering for waterboarding than there have been detainees waterboarded for information.

From ABC News:

"For all the debate over waterboarding, it has been used on only three al Qaeda figures, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

As ABC News first reported in September, waterboarding has not been used since 2003 and has been specifically prohibited since Gen. Michael Hayden took over as CIA director.

Officials told ABC News on Sept. 14 that the controversial interrogation technique, in which a suspect has water poured over his mouth and nose to stimulate a drowning reflex as shown in the above demonstration, had been banned by the CIA director at the recommendation of his deputy, Steve Kappes.

Hayden sought and received approval from the White House to remove waterboarding from the list of approved interrogation techniques first authorized by a presidential finding in 2002."

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/11/exclusive-only-.html

[Arielman]

In the Ossining, New York State Urban Cultural Park (there's 14 in New York state, i.e., Buffalo Theater District, Sackett's Harbor, Erie Canal Lock in Syracuse, NY, etc.) next to the Sing Sing prison, there's a small museum of the prisoner treatment in the past. One artifact is a stone basin that fit around a prisoner's neck and then was filled with water until the prisoner could drown in a "puddle". This might be the original water torture technique. A small former cell is shown and other artifacts, including a current bag of "shanks" tagged with evidence tags in current cases apparently. On some days one can visit the inside of the original Croton Aqueduct, running nearby, which with the Bronx Historical Society we hiked many sections of on Saturdays. It was what made NYC thrive and erroneously attributed to the cause of the presence of the cockroach or "water bug". I would have thought this form of water torture, i.e., simulated drowning, had been left in the museums of the world.

[girlgoneriled]

I think this is a brilliant piece, a concise gem. Larsen's shown us this particular technique (waterboarding), along with the arguments for and against torture (without leaving any weasel room for the neocon crowd to pretend this somehow ISN'T torture.)

Those of you who think it was a "stunt", and those of you who whine that it doesn't go far enough because the real thing is even worse, are all missing the point. The point is, this is what's going on, in the name of our government. Stop playing with words; call it what it is (torture), and face the questions raised.

And Larsen is absolutely right: It's not about who "they" are. It's about who we are. And who we want to be.

[drlenamarie]

The underlying theme of the literal definition of empathy is the strongest component in this piece of work. Through feeling and experiencing anothers pain, we may become more tolerant and understanding of them. Hopefully, that was the intention behind this clip--

That being said, I'm not sure if we get the clearest picture of what waterboarding really is. There is a difference between a trained Navy SEAL and your average person, and what they are able to physically handle, for multiple reasons. The circumstances are also quite different. Paying someone to 'torture' you versus being held against your will in a prison and interrogated mercilessly by your enemies aren't exactly situations within the same context.

The debate that should be spawned from what we've watched here is not necessarily the credibility or intent of the journalist, or his knowledge on the subject matter based upon his life experiences, but rather where are we empathically as a society? Can we learn from the simple, yet trite saying, 'you don't know someone until we've walked in his shoes?' Can we apply this to why conflict is happening all over the world and in our own backyards?

If you are against waterboarding or torture in general, no matter who it is used upon, apply the same rules to your own life and start readjusting your own pre conceived biases and judgments about who is 'good' or 'bad.' We need to look at our similarities as people rather than our differences and see that if we don't start respecting another persons basic human rights or start approaching individuals or groups of people from a place of empathy then the world will continue to head in a downward spiral.

[rboylern]

There's all this talk that these enhanced iterrogation techniques (torture) have yielded a ton of information about terrorists and God only knows what else. We have yet to see one shred of evidence that this is true. Torture is just plain wrong and it never produces the results expected. We've known this since the days of the Spanish Inquisition; but Bush and his chum Dick "The Darkness" Cheney seem to have forgotten their history lessons.

[Ragtimer]

Torture for what? Waterboarding or not! Is or isn't it torture?

It seems to me everyone has been distracted again by the the media hype and their protesters themselvers with this torture concern. It all just buys more time for Bush to bait and switch the core concern which is Why are they torturing anyone....for some alledged "intellegence"... about what?

The torturers are lead to believe they are trying to get vital imformation on......what? "Anything?

Here's what I think. The only reason to force anyone to give up "secrets", "intellegence" is to find out "who" knows the truth about Georges relationship with the perpetrators of 911 and where they are, so they can be silenced. Those are the ones that will put the nail in Bush's coffin.

It is only these people that Bush is scared to death of, for they can turn the whole United States credibility straight into the toilet.

Any other "intellegence" is of no use, because the Bush machine wants an endless war. Therefore what and why do we need torture people for "intellegence" for?

The only answer is to hide the truth.

[knosiswar]

The ultimate question seems to be, and I would like other's points of view. Are you willing to say, that you would rather give/sacrifice your life, and the life of friends and family, children, parents, siblings and co-workers before you would allow your government to waterboard one person who if given the chance, (regardless of his reasons and/or motivations), would see to the destruction of those things dear to you.
If you had captured an individual, on September 10th, 2001, and you had intelligence that was leading you to believe that a major attack that had the potential to kill thousands, and effect the lives of tens of thousands of victims family and friends, and rob the country of its peace and security, that you would be opposed to waterboarding an individual who could save those lives if he was so inclined, but instead he is anticipating the carnage and destruction that is to be inflicted by his hands and those of his co-conspirators. If you walked into your child's room with your loaded shotgun to find an intruder has killed or assaulted your child, would you spare him any pain or suffering?

I think the war was wrong, but we could accept this technique with OVERSIGHT, and get this AG into office, and straighten out the Justice Department. We have to make Bush find a way out, but this 'TECHNIQUE' is not painful or intentionally fatal, it sucks but so does terrorist attacks that kill and maim, but this a distraction if we are not going to IMPEACH this President, we will ultimately have to allow an AG that's not going to prosecute the President.

[HawkInUsAll]

Waterboarding is without a doubt an important “technique” that needs further attention and examination, especially in light of Mukasey’s recent comments. However, I felt this demonstration was rather self-indulgent. Giving the world a vague picture of what water boarding looks like is a noble endeavor, but staging it is simply misleading and irresponsible. Is this what passes for journalism at Current TV? Looks more like an ex SEAL looking for an alternative to working for Blackwater.

[splashy]

The key is that you get much farther with creating friends than you do creating enemies. You get farther with gaining truth by connecting with others than you do by frightening others. ANYONE would say ANYTHING to get torturers to stop, so it is all suspect information. All torture is about is intimidating others, not getting information.

Want the truth? Be friendly, relaxed, encourage others to relax and feel like they can say anything and you will understand why they do what they do and have done. It may SEEM to take longer, but what you get is far more useful.

[Bob Egan]

It is interesting that we often criticize other countries while ignoring our own crimes! All we need is one more administration like this one and we will be able to witness public executions.
Maybe they will hold them in ‘Arenas’ with our hired mercenaries doing the job like the ‘Gladiators’.
Of course, we would have to admit to torture, as the ’subjects’ condition would be a dead giveaway!!
(Pun intended)
The way to correct most of this is to join ‘The World Court’. This will never happen because shortly after joining, a lot of our government officials would probably be facing war crimes charges.

[llozano]

It is one thing to do it when you are in a protected environment and know that you will be safe and quite another when the people inflicting the torture are unknown to you and are trying to force some type of admission from you. Waterboarding is torture. Whether we use it or make it legal is the real question. The current nominee for AG should be able to answer that question. If he cannot he should not be Attorney General.