Torture by another name: CIA used 'water

dousing' on at least 12 detainees

Interrogators used a technique that elicits a drowning sensation and
lowers body temperature on many more detainees than the agency
admits to waterboarding

Those familiar with the cases of the 13 men known to have experienced water dousing say its departure from
waterboarding is a distinction without a difference. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

2015

Spencer Ackerman in New York-Friday 16 October

At least a dozen more people were subjected to waterboard-like tactics

in CIAcustody than the agency has admitted, according to a fresh
accounting of the US governments most discredited form of torture.
The CIA maintains it only subjected three detainees to waterboarding. But
agency interrogators subjected at least 12 others to a similar technique,
known as water dousing, that also created a drowning sensation or chilled
a persons body temperature sometimes through immersion in water,
and often without use of a board.
New lawsuits, recently released documents and the Senates landmark

torture report indicate that at least 13 men in total experienced water

dousing. Those familiar with their cases and an interrogator cited in the
Senate report consider water dousings departure from waterboarding to be
a distinction without a difference.
Water dousing, however, added an element of hypothermia. Some
detainees reported their CIA captors dousing them with cold or
refrigerated water, then wrapping them in similarly frigid sheets of plastic,
keeping their temperatures low.
CIA cable records often describe the detainees as naked after the water
dousing, while other records omit such detail, the Senatereport states.
Lawyers for some of the detainees said they were prevented by
classification rules from discussing the treatment of their clients, a
limitation they said helps the CIA in continuing to define waterboarding
narrowly. Even beyond the dousings, there is some evidence to suggest that
the CIA performed more waterboardings than it has thus far admitted.
Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch, who has investigated torture for the
group, said the CIA was being entirely disingenuous in claiming it only
waterboarded three people.
First, more than three people were waterboarded, she said. But second,
the CIA used water to torture detainees in a variety of ways that cannot
escape classification as torture. Whether on a board or on the floor, they
induced near suffocation using water. And whether you call it
waterboarding or water dousing, thats torture plain and simple.

A form of waterboarding

Object 1

Suleiman Abdullah Salim was water-doused. Flashbacks come anytime, so much they make you crazy, he
said in a video published this week by the Guardian.

The CIA maintains that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abdel Rahim Nashiri and
Abu Zubaydah are the only men it waterboarded. Mohammed was
subjected to both water dousing and additional waterboarding sessions,
according to a March 2003 CIA document cited by the Senate intelligence
committee.
That official account is complicated by internal CIA documentation cited by
the intelligence panel. A CIA interrogator cited by the committee said the
dousing can approach the effect of the waterboard. Some cases, the
committee found, indicate that agency interrogators even performed the
dousing on a waterboard.
According to recently released documents and lawsuits, five detainees
Walid Bin Attash, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Majid Khan, Gul Rahman and
Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, also known as Mohammed Shoroeiya were
not strapped to a board for dousing during their brutal interrogations.
A lawsuit filed this week by Ben Soud and Salim described the dousing that
the two men experienced as a form of waterboarding.
Additionally, accounts from the Senate intelligence committees 2014
report indicate that another seven men Asadullah, Mustafa al-Hasawi, Abu

Hudhaifa, Abu Yasir al-Jazairi, Suleiman Abdullah, Abu Jafar al-Iraqi and
Abu Hazim, also known as Khalid al-Sharif were subjected to the dousing.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed accounts for the 13th known case of water
dousing.
Two interrogators stated to the CIAs inspector general that al-Hasawi cried
out for God as the dousing occurred. (Ben Soud, for unexplained reasons,
is referred to as Abd al-Karim in the Senate report.)

Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud. Photograph: ACLU

McClatchy noted the discrepancy between the dousing described in the
report and the agencys waterboarding claims in December. With more
information about the dousing now released, detainee attorneys cast new
doubt on the depiction of relatively limited waterboarding provided by the
CIA.

I dont know if the CIA is lying about the number of people it

waterboarded, said air force major Michael Schwartz, a military lawyer for
Bin Attash, who faces a military tribunal for the 9/11 attacks. I do know

that if I were allowed to tell you about the specifics of Mr bin Attashs
torture, you would laugh the next time you heard the government try to
minimize its wrongdoing by drawing a distinction between waterboarding
and other forms of water torture.
Is there a distinction for purposes of discussing victim impact? Medically,
yes. Is there a distinction for purposes of discussing the lawfulness of the
CIAs conduct, and the question of accountability? No.
A shower
Bin Attash described the role of water-based interrogation techniques to an
interviewer from the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to
an account leaked in 2009.
[O]n a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic
sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold
water was then poured on to my body with buckets, Bin Attash said. I
would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several
minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation.
Interview notes with CIA detainee turned cooperating war-crimes tribunal
witness Majid Khan, released in June, record Khans claim that CIA
interrogators held his head repeatedly under water, causing him to believe,
as with waterboarding, that he would drown. Khan claims he was
suspended from a wooden beam and submerged into a tub of ice water,
and also that his captors doused his nose and mouth with water and ice
from a bucket.
Whether the CIAs water-based techniques employed a board is a
distinction without a difference, said Wells Dixon, an attorney for Khan.
A high degree of skepticism is appropriate about what the CIA says about
what happened in its torture program.

In this family photo, Majid Khan is seen in 1999 during his senior year in
high school in Baltimore, Maryland. Photograph: Center for Constitutional
Rights/AP
Rahman, an Afghan, is the only detainee known to have died in CIA
custody, of hypothermia. A footnote in the Senate report cites a CIA linguist,
quoted in an agency inspector general study, describing Rahmans dousing,
referred to as a shower.
Rahman was placed back under the cold water by the guards at [redacted
CIA officer]s direction. Rahman was so cold that he could barely utter his
alias. According to [the on-site linguist], the entire process lasted no more
than 20 minutes. It was intended to lower Rahmans resistance and was not
for hygienic reasons.
Furthermore, an attorney for the youngest man formerly detained at the US
military facility at Guantnamo Bay, Omar Khadr, has said Khadr was
waterboarded, although Khadr was not in CIA custody and there are no
confirmed cases of waterboarding at Guantnamo. Both the CIA and the
Pentagon deny the allegation.
More waterboardings?

While there has been comparatively little attention paid to CIA water
dousing, the few accounts that exist describe it as similar to waterboarding,
and are bolstered by other non-dousing indications that waterboarding itself
went further than the CIA has thus far admitted.
In a case that the Senate committee said approximated waterboarding, a
CIA linguist told the agency inspector general that when water dousing
was used on Abu Hazim, a cloth covered Abu Hazims face and [redacted
CIA officer] poured cold water directly on Abu Hazims face to disrupt his
breathing. [The linguist] said that when Abu Hazim turned blue, Physicians
Assistant [redacted] removed the cloth so Abu Hazim could breathe. The
inspector general noted that he could not find evidence corroborating the
claim.
According to the Senate intelligence committees 2014 report, an
interrogator cited by the committee expressed doubts that the water
dousing was functionally different from waterboarding.
I have serious reservations about watering [detainees] in a prone position
because if not done with care, the net effect can approach the effect of the
water board. If one is held down on his back, on the table or on the floor,
with water poured in his face, I think it goes beyond dousing and the effect,
to the recipient, could be indistinguishable from the water board, a CIA
interrogator emailed in November 2003.
At a black site believed to be in Afghanistan, the Senate inquiry found,
detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the
tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or
refrigerated water was poured on them. The CIA inspector general found
that the dousings at the site reflected guidance from attorneys at the
agencys Counterterrorist Center and its Office of Medical Services.
According to a footnote in the study, no waterboarding is confirmed to have
taken place at the Afghanistan site, which the Senate inquiry gave the
pseudonym Detention Site Cobalt. Yet the Senate committee found what
it describes as a CIA photograph of a wooden waterboard there.
The waterboard device in the photograph is surrounded by buckets, with a

bottle of unknown pink solution (filled two thirds of the way to the top) and
a watering can resting on the wooden beams of waterboard. In meetings
between the Committee staff and the CIA in the summer of 2013, the CIA
was unable to explain the details of the photograph, to include the buckets,
solution and watering can, as well as the waterboards presence at
Detention Site Cobalt, the footnote states.
The CIA did not ask the Justice Department for approval to use water
dousing until summer 2004, two years after the torture program began. The
description of the technique provided to department attorneys made no
mention of cold water immersion, which was used on CIA detainees and
taught in CIA interrogator training, according to the Senate report.
The agencys official response to the Senate report noted that headquarters
officials provided guidance on water dousing as early as March 2003
and classified the dousing, considered the most coercive of the standard
interrogation techniques in use until early 2004, after which the agency
classified it as an enhanced technique.
The response continued: While it is reasonable to question the propriety of
the water dousing with cold water at the [redacted] facility where Gul
Rahman died, likely due to hypothermia, it is important to note that the
technique was employed after the first few months at [redacted] in rooms
heated to a minimum of 65 degrees in order to prevent possible harm.
CIA officials did not address questions from the Guardian as to why the
agency considers the difference between waterboarding and water dousing
to be substantive. They did not challenge the Guardians tally of detainees
subjected to water dousing.
CIAs 2013 response to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI)
Study acknowledges that the program had shortcomings and the agency
made mistakes, said CIA spokesman Dean Boyd.
The most serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact
that the agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required
to undertake an unprecedented program of detaining and interrogating
suspected terrorists around the world. In carrying out that program, CIA did

not always live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves and that
the American people expect of us. CIA has owned up to these mistakes,
learned from them and taken numerous corrective actions over the years.
Posted by Thavam