WTF Friday, 10/30

Our beloved Intern Chris tells it like it is:

• If we can't trust our poets, who can we trust? (no one).


• Semi-old news: British mining company 'Monterrico Metals' assets frozen after allegations of torture of protesters in Peru in 2005. No proof (yet) that they were actually "involved," but protesters say Monterrico director Andrew Bristow was giving orders. Either way, when a guy is left bleeding to death for 36 HOURS at your mining site, it's tough to give you benefit of the doubt.


• And, just in case you thought it was just police and big business doing messed up shit. Though, and call me old fashioned, shouldn't claims about a rise in vigilantism be coupled with, say, a statistic? (sigh).


• Too sad to be cute? Your call.


• Somali pirates doing their best Captain Planet (not even sure if our readership gets that reference). (via Global Dashboard)

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In Case You Were Wondering What Trent Reznor's Up To These Days

I'm sure you were all devastated by the news last month that Nine Inch Nails will no longer be touring. But don't worry, Trent Reznor has found something else to occupy his time: closing Gitmo.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past few years, Guatanamo Bay is a place where, in violation of all standards of moral decency and international law, the work of innocent musicians is cruelly subverted for the purposes of breaking detainees. I know, I know, those poor musicians.

Well, Reznor and other American recording artists, including R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Roseanne Cash, and the Roots, have declared that they will be victimized no longer. They've joined the campaign to close the detention facility and are filing a FOIA request for any documents detailing the use of loud music to aid interrogation.*

Man, don't you just get a warm fuzzy feeling when you hear about oppressed people finally standing up for their rights?

(Thanks for the tip, Payal!)

*Apparently, the British are way ahead of us on this one, with a dedicated NGO that aims to "end the suffering caused by music torture."
**Photo of Trent Reznor by Rob Sheridan taken from the Nine Inch Nails wikipedia Entry.

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Ask a Basiji Militiaman?

A few days ago, the Jerusalem Post ran an article detailing a "shocking and unprecedented interview" with an anonymous member of the Iran's Basiji paramilitary.

Most of what he describes is pretty standard support for the argument that 14 year old boys should never be given weapons or power, but the blogosphere pricked up its ears at his stories of raping female death row prisoners so they could be executed. (In case that went by you too fast: It is illegal to execute female virgins in Iran. Presumably because they'd get to go to heaven afterward.) The money quote:

"I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die."

This is all over the Internets now, accompanied by comments like "Let it be a reminder of how evil they truly are."

I have no reason to doubt the Jerusalem Post's reporting (and, unfortunately, this doesn't even make my top 10 "terrible things that happen in jails" list), but as far as the sensationalist secondary coverage goes... um, maybe we don't want to set a precedent for an entire society's moral worth to be judged by the behavior of its torture-loving, rapey prison guards? Or, for that matter, the regime officials / former U.S. Vice-Presidents who support their actions? Just saying...

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Crimes Against Humanity's Grammar

General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, on the release of the torture memos:

"It describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond."

Apparently that's a bad thing:

"To me, that’s very useful for our enemies, even if, as a policy matter, this president at this time had decided not to use one, any, or all of those techniques."

So, if I've got this straight: there's a torture box, and if Americans stay within it, they'll be stuck in Bed and Bath forever, and never achieve their dreams of getting into Beyond? Yikes!

But the President might not have even authorized their trips into Bed & Bath, much less Beyond. No high-end household goods for our brave men and women! Or maybe he did, and they've been frolicking amongst the copper-bottomed frying pans and shower caddies for years. Hayden's not saying. Because of National Security.

But he is able to reveal that, as we all have feared, Al Quaeda has tired of 400-threadcount sheets and chenille bathmats, and begun a clandestine search for their own path to Beyond. And now they will use the recently released torture memos to get there, probably even to that awesome section up by the checkout, where they will purchase vibrating, self-warming fleece booties, and paraffin-wax baths for their hands, and 4-foot long tubes of giant gum-balls, and use them to Destroy Our Freedom!

Oh, Obama administration, what hath you wrought?

*Photo of Gen. Hayden via Wikimedia Commons

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Breaking: Chucky Taylor Sentenced to 97 Years in Prison

Prosecutors had requested a sentence of 147 years.

According to the BBC, Taylor showed no emotion or reaction at his sentencing, and said that his "sympathies go out to all the people who suffered in the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone."

Before announcing the sentence, U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga said that "it is hard to conceive of any more serious offenses against the dignity and the lives of human beings," and that "the international community condemns torture."

Reuters reports that Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich made a statement afterwards, saying that "the lengthy prison term handed down today justly reflects the horror and torture that Taylor Jr. visited upon his victims."

(No word from his boss on what would "justly reflect" the horror and torture that the U.S. government has visited on its victims over the last few years, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that 97 years in prison won't be it.)

*Photo via the BBC

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I'm Just Saying, Is All I'm Saying...

Hypothetical:

Imagine that, in their day-to-day work, the President and the other members of the executive branch occasionally encountered difficult legal questions about the scope of their power and duties. Now imagine that there was a special office within the Department of Justice devoted solely to answering those questions.

One day, the White House writes to a lawyer in that office, and asks whether it would be legal for the President to secretly outlaw jelly beans, and launch covert operations to seize all existing jelly bean stockpiles. The lawyer knows that it would not. In fact, it would be a serious crime to outlaw and seize all jelly beans.

However, the White House doesn't like his answer. They really, really want to rid the country of jelly beans. They explain that they weren't really looking for the lawyer's advice, they just wanted an opinion that said their anti-jelly bean actions were legal. Without the opinion, the FBI's agents might be reluctant to take part in the jelly bean operation, for fear that they might be prosecuted. But if the lawyer could just write a plausible opinion that the activity was legal, then the agents wouldn't have to worry. The opinion would give them a strong a mistake-of-law defense.

The lawyer thinks that is a great idea. He never liked jelly beans much anyway. He drafts the opinion, knowing that it will encourage the President to break the law, and others to follow his illegal orders. He intends that it will help them to do so.

It works. The jelly-bean obliteration gets underway. The opinion supports the illegal program in exactly the way it was intended to. Countless people are harmed by the brutal force levied against candy stashes. Eventually, things fall apart. The media discovers the secret program. Congress investigates, and publishes a report.

Is there any reason not to prosecute the lawyer who wrote the opinion as an accessory to the crime? He did it with knowledge, and intent to cause others to commit a crime. (In fact, he intended it to help them get away with the crime, which is arguably even more serious.)

Yeah, I can't think of any either.

(If we've said there's more after the jump, or you want to see comments, you should probably click here)

Thoughts About Torture

You may have heard that the Armed Services Committee has released the results of its investigation into the United States' torture policy. And that those results are "we definitely have one, and it's quite extensive." So, in honor of the report's release, I'd like to get something off my chest that's been bothering me for quite a while:

Torture isn't okay. And I am worried that we have lost sight of why.

The problem with torture isn't the pain, or the humiliation, or the physical harm, or even the death. All of those are bad, but slightly beside the point, and to focus on any of them is a mistake because inevitably they invite comparison with other things that are not torture. They lead us down wrong but comforting paths. (Are stress positions really worse than standing for long hours at work? Should we care that detainees are forced to wear dog collars and leashes when teenagers do the same thing for fun? How can we justify a ban on techniques that cause pain "akin" to death, when we do not ban the death penalty itself?)

And the problem with torture is not that it produces untrustworthy information. That is a problem, certainly -we should not expend resources on useless results- but torture would still be unacceptable if it produced the sterling truth every time.

The problem with torture is different.

Torture is the subversion of the body to overthrow the soul. When a person breaks, he is broken: he will give up any information, do whatever is asked of him. He no longer exists as an independent being, a member of society. He is only an instrument of his torturer. His sole aim becomes "make it stop." That is a cancer on any free society.

What's that you're thinking? That I'm overreacting, because the use of torture was limited to certain groups? Certain bad actors? Terrorists and such? It's not as if our government has been torturing everyone. (Just people at Guantanamo. And Abu Ghraib. And Navy brigs. And maybe a few others). That it's not a cancer on society, because most of us aren't even affected by it.

And there it is! The second problem with torture! Namely, that it invites society to divide itself in order to maintain some semblance of security. To say "I don't have to worry about my loved ones, because they're not terrorists/Arabs/foreigners/Muslims." As soon as we start to rely on the cold comfort of such thoughts, we lose again. We lose our ideals, of course, because we've abandoned any claim to the belief that "all men are created equal." (That guy in the hood? Less equal than the dude with the cattle prod standing next to him.) And we lose more than that, every time an activist pauses before he inks his protest sign to think of his non-citizen wife and what might be done to her if the government does not like what it says; every time the academic pauses to wonder whether she really ought to publish that op-ed while her family is still in Afghanistan; every time the journalist wonders if it is actually a good idea to publish that story. We lose. We are less free when thoughts of torture are part of the calculus of whether to exercise the rights we claim.

Worse, we lose power over our own government, because any belief that "torture can't happen to us" requires a less-noticed corollary: "they must be correct about who to torture." If it were a mistake, or random, or deliberate but based in lies, then we could not be confident of our own safety. It is too frightening to believe that what happened in Abu Ghraib could happen to us. So we choose to believe that the government must know what it is doing. That these techniques must be limited to scary terrorists with ticking bombs, not to garden-variety criminals, or garden-variety revenge. But then we end up in even more trouble, because if the government must know what it is doing, but cannot tell us, then we have struck a bargain with our leaders that changes the rules from "we give you certain power, but it stops at the water's edge of our rights," to "your power doesn't have to stop, because we've removed the limits based on information we've never seen and never will."

Torture subverts our soldiers' and police officers' best impulses, as well as their worst ones. It is a good impulse to say "we will not stop trying to solve this problem until we have exhausted all of the options." But when torture is on the list, at least some of the time, how do you say when you have really exhausted all of the options? How do you say that this situation doesn't allow torture, because there is no ticking bomb -just the lives of ten kidnapped civilians. Or two missing members of your platoon. Or one missing child. And how can you say if you have tortured enough? If you stop before reaching the outer boundaries of cruelty and imagination, how can you know whether you really got everything you needed? So where do you stop? Do you set up an arbitrary boundary for how much pain you can cause? (No, because you can never know the answer.) Do you limit yourself to certain methods? (No, because if we need that information, then it is a necessary evil, right?) Do you branch out onto the victim's loved ones, in the hope that he will break faster? (Really? You don't want to do that? Why? Have you forgotten the missing child? How will you feel if she dies?) There are no satisfying answers to those questions.

And once torture is on the "we've tried everything" list, then why bother with anything else? If you can just make him tell you, just beat it out of him, then what would be the point in other investigation? Just cut to the chase, and get it over with. Time is of the essence.

Chop, chop.

(If we've said there's more after the jump, or you want to see comments, you should probably click here)

Atrocity Committing Apple Doesn't Fall Far from War Criminal Tree

In an attempt to measure up to his famous father's accomplishments, spawn-of-Charles-Taylor Charles McArthur Emmanuel (a.k.a. "Chucky Taylor" or "Chuckie Jr.") is also standing trial on war crimes charges.

Unfortunately, Chuckie Jr.'s alleged atrocities weren't quite impressive enough to get him into the Hague, so he's been forced to make do with the far less prestigious U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. (Isn't it tragic when offspring of famous parents end up on second-string MTV reality shows / federal district court / in the White House in a misguided attempt to rival their parents' celebrity?)

Chuckie Jr. is being prosecuted on multiple counts of torture and conspiracy to commit torture for acts committed in Liberia while he was head of the "Demon Forces" (At that point, is there really any reason not to just call yourselves "Captain Atrocity and His Band of Merry War Criminals"?), an elite anti-terrorism unit that was allegedly responsible for suppressing opposition to Charles Taylor's regime.

According to witness testimony, the unit's practices - in addition to the usual extra-judicial executions, beatings, and mutilations - included a quirky signature move of forcing to detainees to sodomize each other for their leader's amusement. (I'm guessing this detail didn't make it into Chuckie's recently released rap single about being a super-awesome hardcore African warlord.)

Our boy Chuckie Jr. has the distinction of being the very first person prosecuted under the 1994 federal extraterritorial torture statute, which makes it a federal crime to commit torture abroad. Now, some of you who attended law school (and at last count, that's pretty much everyone I know) may be thinking to yourselves: "Wait just a second, this law applies to anyone, anywhere? I swear there's some sort of legal term for that...rhymes with... shmuniversal shmurisdiction, perhaps?" And to you I say: "Shh!!!"

Apparently, as long as no one actually says the words out loud, Congress can dispense with jurisdictional territoriality requirements all it wants. (See, e.g., the Genocide Accountability Act of 2007 which gives the U.S. courts jurisdiction over genocidal conduct abroad provided that, at some point later on, the perpetrator comes into the U.S.) So congratulations Chuckie Taylor, and here's hoping yours is the first of many shmuniversal shmurisdiction prosecutions for atrocities committed abroad.

(If we've said there's more after the jump, or you want to see comments, you should probably click here)

Putting the "Abuse" in "Abuse of Discretion"

According to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of New York has established a "blanket policy" of immediately prosecuting asylum seekers who cross the border from Canada with false documentation. That means that any refugee who attempts to enter the country on a forged or borrowed passport is arrested and charged with a criminal offense.

That's what happened to Linda Malenge and Ramutalai Barry. Ms. Malenge, a native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, decided to flee after the government troops who murdered her father attacked her in her home. She traveled on false Canadian and Greek passports, because she was afraid to seek a passport from the government she was fleeing. She decided to come to the United States because her husband was already living in Connecticut as a refugee. Ms. Barry's experiences were even worse: A native of Guinea, she was beaten, raped, and tortured by the police because of her political activity.

There is a long-standing principle of asylum law that the use of false documents to obtain entry into the United States does not bar an asylum claim. 8 C.F.R. § 270.2(j) prohibits DHS from bringing a civil claim against a refugee who uses false documents in order to enter the United States. That rule is based on Article 31(1) of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which prohibits signatories from imposing penalties on refugees on account of their illegal entry or presence. (The United States is a signatory to the Convention via its 1967 Protocol.) Moreover, U.S. courts of appeals have repeatedly found that immigration judges may not deny asylum or draw an adverse inference about an applicant's credibility because he or she entered the country with false documents.

That rule is vital. In many countries, obtaining a passport is not a right, and is not easy. Rather, it is a contact with the party in power that can put an applicant at risk of torture or death. Do we really expect Ms. Barry to ask the same government that raped and beat her to help her flee to safety?

In that context, the policy of bringing criminal prosecutions against refugees for using fraudulent documents to save their lives is an absurd abuse of the prosecutorial power. It will have no deterrent effect: these refugees believe that their lives are on the line, and are desperate find safety. It does not prevent harm: no one was injured by Ms. Barry's or Ms. Malenge's brief use of the false documents. Worst of all, it may prejudice the women's chances of obtaining the very relief that they came here to seek. Because while false documents do not bar the women from obtaining asylum, most criminal convictions -especially one for fraud- will.

And yet, according to the court, the U.S. Attorney has made it a policy to prosecute these refugees. This is simply cruel. I have written before about our criminal system, and how we rely on prosecutorial discretion to place reasonable limits on broad criminal laws. Acting U.S. Attorney Baxter, and his predecessor Glenn Suddaby, ought to be ashamed of themselves.

(hat tip: ImmigrationProf Blog)

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Tran Trong Duyet, Sprightly Retiree and Amateur Ballroom Dancer: "You Should Totally Vote for That McCain Guy, Who I Never Tortured By The Way"

Photo Courtesy of the BBC

Did you know that John McCain spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam? Apparently at some sort of Hilton? Where they tortured him? No?

Yeah, I can see how you might have missed it. It's too bad that McCain's campaign never ever mentions it ever, not even a little bit.

But we are here to assist! That's right, via our friends at the BBC, we bring you this interview with Tran Trong Duyet, McCain's jailer during his time a Hoa Lo prison.

Duyet, described as a "sprightly retiree and amateur ballroom dancer," has fond memories of the nights when he would summon McCain to his office and while away the time by arguing about the war. Duyet says he was intrigued by McCain's "interesting accent," and liked it when the imprisoned soldier corrected his speech.

Oh, and those pesky rumors about torture? About how McCain was subjected to such brutal treatment that he attempted suicide and was physically damaged forever? Not true, according to Duyet, who has absolutely no personal interest in covering up embarassing truths about torture! The Hanoi Hilton was awesome, according to our ballroom-dancing friend: "He did not tell the truth...But I can somehow sympathise with him. He lies to American voters in order to get their support for his presidential election."

And wait, there's more! Duyet, it turns out, is now a McCainiac. Apparently he was so impressed at McCain's bravery and fortitude during his non-sessions of non-torture, and is so grateful that McCain helped to normalize relations between the U.S. and Vietnam, that he now considers him a friend and hopes that he will be successful in this election.

"McCain is my friend," said 75-year-old Mr Duyet as he feeds the caged birds he now keeps in his garden in this coastal city. "If I was American, I would vote for him."

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Better Know a Congolese War Criminal III: Thomas Lubanga

So, after Amanda's post on the possible release of Thomas Lubanga following prosecutorial abuses at the ICC, some of you may be wondering "who's this Lubanga guy anyway?" Others (you know who you are) may be thinking "Lubanga? Ha! He's no Bemba."

In any event, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo was the brains behind the Union des Patriotes Congelais (UPC). He formed the UPC in 2000, right around the time the official Keeper of the Scrolls of Congolese Rebel Group Names stopped allowing people to name their militias RCD-xx. (Seriously, it got really confusing with all the RCD-Goma, RCD-Congo, RCD-O, and RCD-K/Wambas running around.)

Lubanga had done a sufficiently good (read: bloodthirsty) job as a commander in the Uganda-backed RCD-ML that he was able to secure Kampala's support when he decided he wanted to have more of a management role in the mass-atrocity-committing business. He assembled a militia drawn primarily from the Hema ethnic group and launched them headlong into the middle of Ituri conflict.

He made a name for himself in 2002 when his forces effected the particularly rape-y/torture-y capture of the town of Bunia and he announced that the local Hema had best tithe him either "money, a cow, or a child" if they expected to live to be raped/tortured another day. (Try not to let your head explode over the fact that Lubanga and the UPC were on the Hema's side.)

Anyway, Lubanga was arrested by the Congolese authorities in March 2005 after the murder of nine UN peacekeepers by UPC and FNI forces. The he hung out in a sort of legal limbo (which probably looked a lot like a prison cell) for almost a year until the ICC issued an arrest warrant on charges of forced conscription of child soldiers. No mention was made of the cows.

On March 17, 2006, Lubanga gained the distinction of being the first person actually arrested on an ICC warrant. His trial, the ICC's first, was scheduled to begin today, but as we've already discussed, that's all gone to hell. Stay tuned for coverage of tomorrow's hearing to consider his release...

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Back, From Outer Space (also Miami)

Readerati! I'm so sorry. I know I've been neglecting you. It has been far too long since I have posted, and you are feeling bereft. Rejected, even. And that's understandable. I know that I'm a very important person in your life. But I'm back! I was just on vacation, getting to know the world's largest big cat and working on my freckles. I did not retire or anything.

So please stop picketing my office. It's making my secretary nervous.

And while I treasure every one of the "Strt Bloging Again NOWNOWNOW" collages that one of you has been sliding under my door, I think that your time might be better spent making collages that say, "STp Torturng NOWNOWNOWNOW," and sneaking them into President Bush's office. Because I was always going to start blogging again anyway, and Our Nation's President is known to be a sucker for anything made with a gluestick.

(If we've said there's more after the jump, or you want to see comments, you should probably click here)

Actually, Those Rights Are in My OTHER Other Pants

A few months ago, I had an asylum client with one of the best (on a scale of "1" to "well-documented textbook case of persecution") claims I'd ever seen, heard, or read about.

The client, a national of a reasonably stable developing nation, was the wife of a well-known government official who was suspected of dissident sympathies. About a year before the client made her way to the U.S., her husband was accused of plotting a coup and arrested. He hasn't been heard from since, and no evidence of the alleged coup was ever released. As part of an ostensible investigation into the alleged coup, our client was detained, tortured, and raped. Twice.

Any reasonable asylum officer would have immediately granted her application for asylum. Instead, we got the one who said this:

"Applicant claims that she was discriminated against because her husband was arrested for taking part in a coup d'etat, a treasonable offense. However, persecution must be distinguished from prosecution, and a government has a right to prosecute people and conduct investigations for legitimate common law offenses. In this situation, the applicant's spouse was accused of taking part in an attempted coup d'etat which, inevitably included an attempt on the life of the President of Ghana. As such, when her husband escaped custody on April 4, 2006, the [enforcement agencies] would been derelict in their duties had they not questioned the applicant and any people associated with him. Attempted murder, of a President, or any human being, is a crime for which a law enforcement authority is required to investigate."

A couple of things:
1. Our client isn't from Ghana.
2. Her husband didn't escape custody. Everyone's pretty sure he was murdered.
3. There was never any evidence of an attempted coup plot.
4. Torture and gang rape are generally understood not to be acceptable investigation techniques.

Our client was devastated, and we were super pissed off. We weren't really interested in waiting the three months to take the case before an immigration judge, so we called the asylum office and asked to speak with the officer's supervisor. We very politely suggested that perhaps some extremely embarrassing factual and legal errors had been made in the asylum decision, and maybe someone might want to take a second look at it. Awesomely, we got a call back from the supervisor the next day saying that he would overturn the decision. Of course, it then took three months to get the final grant notice, but everybody's happy now.

Amanda posted a while back on human rights violations stemming from "sheer bureaucratic incompetence, rather than any actual evil intent." My only question is: What would have happened to this woman if, like the majority of asylum seekers, she'd appeared unrepresented by counsel?

(If we've said there's more after the jump, or you want to see comments, you should probably click here)

I Heart William Safire (Today)

This is a few days late, but those of you who missed it should definitely check out William Safire's last "On Language" column in the New York Times.

This week's column is about waterboarding, torture, and the verbal gymnastics we execute to convince ourselves that the one is not the other.

It contains a handy history of waterboarding's linguistic apologists throughout the ages (The "water cure" during our occupation of the Philippines in 1898, the "water treatment" during the Korean War in the 1950s, and of course the proud use of "water boarding" as part of the Global War on Terror today).

He reminds us that "If the word torture, rooted in the Latin for 'twist,' means anything (and it means 'the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce'), then waterboarding is a means of torture. "

And, in return for ending his article with the following thought, I will probably like him tomorrow, the next day, and maybe even through next Tuesday, no matter how resoundingly he returns to his usually-supercilious self in this weekend's column:

"Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding” — a word found as early as 1929 — 'they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them.'"

(But the worrying part is that sometimes they become funny to the rest of us too.)

(If we've said there's more after the jump, or you want to see comments, you should probably click here)

Lieberman takes bold stance against "putting burning coals on people's bodies" during interrogations

Senator Joe Lieberman, (I-Connecticut), went on record with the Hartford Courant yesterday, saying that he doesn't believe waterboarding is torture, because "It is not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological."

A few observations:

1) Thank you for this important message on the fakeness of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is the clinical diagnosis for what happens to people's brains when they are exposed to trauma, psychological or otherwise. Symptoms include physical pain, exhaustion, frequent nightmares, depression, and flashbacks to the original trauma. It is quite something -I once had a client who would actually become narcoleptic when forced to discuss the trauma in his past. Once he fell asleep mid-sentence. Thanks J. Liebs: if it weren't for you, I would have no idea that he was just a big faker. And don't forget all those veterans with "shell shock"! They must be fakers too.

2) Wow, impressive medical knowledge! The person is in no real danger? I am SO glad you told me that, because I was under the ridiculous impression that drowning was, you know, dangerous. I know that waterboarding gets a lot of play in the media as "simulated drowning," but that's not really right. Sure, your interrogator probably stops before you die. But, as helpful reader Rebecca points out, that's like saying cigarette burns are "simulated burning." During waterboarding, the victim is tied to a tilted board, with his head closest to the floor. Water is poured into his nose and mouth (if the mouth isn't gagged shut), until eventually the victim is forced to inhale it into his windpipe and lungs. Last time I checked, noses, lungs, and windpipes were not designed to be slowly filled with water from the bottom up. (Nor, for that matter, were the sinuses, throat, and mucus membranes of the head and neck.) But thanks to Senator Joe, we now know that they are! It is a miracle of science.

3) It takes a great deal of political courage to take an absolute stand against searing the living flesh of restrained prisoners. Lieberman should be commended for his bravery.

4) I'm glad someone has finally acknowledged the importance of being environmentally sensitive when interrogating the Enemies of Freedom. Psychological torture releases way fewer greenhouse cases than hot coals do!

After the jump, more detailed discussion of waterboarding from new website waterboarding.org (link courtesy of boingboing).

Waterboarding.org posts this helpful explanation of the mechanics of what waterboarding is, and isn't:




"What Waterboarding Is
Waterboarding induces panic and suffering by forcing a person to inhale water into the sinuses, pharynx, larynx, trachea, and lungs.
The head is tilted back and water is poured into the upturned mouth or nose. Eventually the subject cannot exhale more air or cough out more water, the lungs are collapsed, and the sinuses and trachea are filled with water. The subject is drowned from the inside, filling with water from the head down. The chest and lungs are kept higher than the head so that coughing draws water up and into the lungs while avoiding total suffocation.
"His sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown."
Waterboarding is not:
upright or face-down dunking: People dunked face-first in water can keep water out for as long as they can hold their breath. When one is inclined with the head back, holding one's breath will not prevent the upper respiratory tract from filling with water.
asphyxiation: Survivors of near-drowning experiences report that the sensation of water flooding down the larynx and trachea as they struggle to breathe is the most terrifying aspect of the experience. In waterboarding, this begins quickly, long before the onset of oxygen starvation.
submersion: Waterboarding does not require immersion in standing water. Someone can be waterboarded with as little as a canteen or two of water.
slowly dripping water on the forehead: Several types of water-based tortures have been used in Asia, but the famous "Chinese Water Torture" demonstrated in Mythbusters Episode 25 is very different than waterboarding.
a simulation: Waterboarding is actually forcing large quantities of water into the pharynx, trachea, and lungs, inducing choking and gagging in the subject."

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A Very Special Wrongingrights: Devon Saves the World! Hooray Devon!

Today it is my pleasure to present...... dum da da dum da DA TUM...the first ever Wrongingrights Claire Bennet Award!!!!!

This is all VERY exciting.

For those of you who have not already guessed, the Claire is awarded to petite blondes who Save The World.

The first Claire goes to Ms. Devon Chaffee, for being just like Claire Bennet except with lots more law degree and a little less superhuman self-healing ability. Devon works for Human Rights First, and has worked tirelessly to lobby the Senate to pass Section 327 of H.R. 2082, which states:

(a) LIMITATION.—No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.

(b) INSTRUMENTALITY DEFINED.—In this section, the term ‘‘instrumentality’’, with respect to an element of the intelligence community, means a contractor or subcontractor at any tier of the element of the intelligence community.

Translation for those of you who chose not to drop $100k on a law degree: no more torturing people in U.S. custody. Or at least, no using techniques that are not listed in the Army Field Manual, which for now means no more torturing. (But yes, that probably means that the manual will be given a super-top secret attached addendum that lists everything from "incessant John Tesh music" to "electrodes on scrotum," but please do not spoil this happy moment.)

This is a very big deal. Ramming legislation like this through the U.S. Congress, whose members can always be counted on to wimp out on civil liberties to avoid looking like they're wimpy on "terror," is no easy task. It requires dedication, intelligence, a thick skin, and a willingness to talk to people whose actual job is to make you miserable.

Luckily for all of us who wish to keep our fingernails in their original attached-to-fingers packaging, Devon and her fabulous colleagues were up to the task.

Devon Saves the World! Hooray Devon!

P.S. Among the senators who wimped out on this bill was Senator John McCain, who voted "no." Memo to Senator McCain: this doesn't make you look tough. At best it just makes you look calculating, at worst a little bit senile. Everyone knows that you used to have a different position on torture, so which is it? Willingness to compromise on your most cherished ideals in order to con wingnuts into voting for you, or inability to remember what your cherished ideals actually are? Sorry, John, I know that's harsh. But do you know what else is harsh? Being TORTURED. Oh, wait. You do know that! So what gives?

P.P.S. Full Disclosure: I went to law school with Devon, where we worked on this together.

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