US Feature: Countering Rumsfeld's Lie --- Detainees Were Waterboarded (Kaye)

In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News' Sean Hannity recently that "no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo, period."

In his memoir, "Known and Unknown," Rumsfeld maintained, "To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees,not at Guantanamo or anywhere else in the world." But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.

Others have insisted as well that the military never waterboarded anyone. Law and national security writer Benjamin Wittes wrote in The New Republic last year that "the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody." Harper's columnist Scott Horton also noted last year, "There is no documentation yet of waterboarding at Gitmo, but the case book is far from closed on that score, too."

Yet, though not widely reported and scattered among various articles and reports on detainee treatment by the military, including first-person accounts, there are a number of stories of forced water choking or drowning, both at Guantanamo and other US military sites.

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The Punishment for Torture? Former US Intelligence Officials Take a Caribbean Cruise (Shephard)

About 30 minutes into an interview on an outdoor deck aboard the “spy cruise,” the issue of Osama bin Laden arises.

“What can you do with him?” asks Porter Goss, the former head of the CIA, as he settles back in a padded lounge chair.

“Are we going to sit him on a deckchair and ask him to cooperate? Or are we going to put him in a place where he can’t leave?”

Goss’s point is this: Now that the Obama administration has outlawed harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, shut the CIA covert “black sites” around the world and frowned upon renditions, what are the options open to America’s intelligence service?

He insists the CIA “enhanced” methods worked.

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George Bush's Torture: Taking Apart the President's Claims

He’s back. He's unrepentant. He's proud.

President George W. Bush, re-emerged into the media spotlight to plug his memoirs, has made headlines with his justification of waterboarding as an interrogation tool. “Damn right,” said Bush when asked to approve the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9-11 attacks. His argument, which the media has repeated with varying degrees of skepticism, is that it isn’t torture, it worked, and it saved lives.

Let’s take a look at these one at a time.

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George Bush's Torture: History's Road --- The US and the Philippines (Cullinane)

For many people, torture is “cruel and unusual punishment”, an act expressly outlawed by the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution.  However, according to George W. Bush, in his November 8 interview with NBC television, torture is a technique that has saved the lives of Americans at home and fighting abroad, an act he is proud to have authorised and would do so again.

Bush’s legal rationale for torture remains less than compelling --- “because the lawyers said it was legal” --- but he does have more powerful backing: that of historical precedent. More than a century ago, the US Government and military, in the name of civilising progress abroad, embraced the techniques that the 43rd President still promotes.

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A Friendly Reminder: Why George W. Bush Was A Terrible President

An admission: while I spent years watching and writing about the Bush Administration, I have not rushed out to buy a copy of George W. Bush's ghost-written autobiography. I have not watched or listened to one of his many media interviews.

All it took was Bush's take-away headline yesterday morning --- the false claim that his approval of torture via waterboarding prevented Terrorist Attacks in the United Kingdom --- to  reinforce years of conclusion that the 43rd President was/is a) lying b) immoral c) blissfully ill-informed d) all of the above. 

And I do not think that hundreds of pages of text can do more than this Bushian comparison, made in his television promotion on Tuesday: 1) Torture was not wrong 2) What was wrong was pouring vodka into my sister's aquarium, killing her goldfish.

Stephen Walt, however, did have the patience to go beyond the puffery to offer an incisive critique of Bush's "Delusion Points". He begins with an essential case for not giving in to historical revision/forgetting:

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