I have long argued in my column as well as numerous blog postings that our country is legally bound to prosecute people responsible for ordering torture during the Bush Administration. There is no question that water boarding is torture as recognized by President Obama, Attorney General Holder, the United Nations and virtually every expert in this field. However, while you may want to try to rewrite legal precedent (as did John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous Torture Memos), you should not try to rewrite history. That is what former Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be doing this month. He told Chuck Todd on Sunday that we never prosecuted anyone for water boarding — an assertion that I and others have repeatedly raised over the years. The statement is simply false and adds historical revisionism to legal revisionism in our sordid foray into torture.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” this last Sunday, Todd asked: “When you say waterboarding is not torture then why did we prosecute Japanese soldiers?”
Cheney responded:
“Not for waterboarding. They did an awful lot of other stuff. To draw some kind of moral equivalent between waterboarding judged by our Justice Department not to be torture and what the Japanese did with the Bataan Death March, with slaughter of thousands of Americans, with the rape of Nanking and all of the other crimes they committed, that’s an outrage. It’s a really cheap shot, Chuck, to even try to draw a parallel between the Japanese who were prosecuted for war crimes after World War II and what we did with waterboarding three individuals — all of whom are guilty and participated in the 9/11 attacks.”
In fact, we did prosecute. Indeed, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East convicted and ultimately executed Japanese war criminals Akira Muto and Iwane Matsui for atrocities at Nanking. This included water boarding prisoner, though it was called “the water treatment” where “the victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness.”
Moreover, in 1947, we prosecuted Yukio Asano for the following these specific acts:
Specification 1: That in or about July or August, 1943, the accused Yukio Asano, did willfully and unlawfully, brutally mistreat and torture Morris O. Killough, an American Prisoner of War, by beating and kicking him, by fastening him on a stretcher and pouring water up his nostrils.
Specification 2: That on or about 15 May, 1944, at Fukoka Prisoner of War Branch Camp Number 3, Kyushu, Japan, the accused Yukio Asano, did, willfully and unlawfully, brutally mistreat and torture Thomas B. Armitage, William O. Cash and Munroe Dave Woodall, American Prisoners of War, by beating and kicking them, by forcing water into their mouths and noses, and by pressing lighted cigarettes against their bodies.
Specification 5. That between 1 April, 1943 and 31 December, 1943, the accused Yukio Asano, did, willfully and unlawfully, brutally mistreat and torture John Henry Burton, an American Prisoner of War, by beating him, and by fastening him head downward on a stretcher and forcing water into his nose.
Asanao was sentenced to 15 years confinement at hard labor.
As noted by the Washington Post, First Lt. Seitara Hata, Sgt. Major Takeo Kita and Sgt. Hideji Nakamura faced similar charges. As noted by the Post, the testimony included that of Cpt. William Arno Bluehe who said “After beating me for a while they would lash me to a stretcher, then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness. When I revived they would repeat the beatings and ‘water cure’ . . . . The tortures and beatings continued for about six hours.”
Then there was Thomas B. Armitage:
“[We] were strapped to stretchers and warm water poured down our nostrils until we were about ready to pass out. [The Japanese] strapped him to a stretcher and elevated his feet and then poured on his face so that it was almost impossible for him to get his breath. [The victim] was then taken into the corridor, strapped to a stretcher, which was tilted so that his head was toward the floor and feet resting on a nearby sink.Water was then poured down his nose and mouth for about twenty minutes. Then I was taken into the hallway of the barracks. Both of the Japanese still insisting I was guilty and urging me to confess.”
Likewise, during the Vietnam War, an American soldier was court-martialed for water boarding a prisoner.
Ironically, while the Senate Report works hard to exonerate the Senators themselves from their past knowledge as well as Bush and Cheney, Cheney to his credit has admitted that both he and Bush were fully informed of the use of program.
The cost of our torture program — and the failure to prosecute a single official for it (or the destruction of evidence and false statements revealed in its aftermath) will continue to cost this country dearly. Countries like Iran, North Korea, and China have already cited our use of water boarding to defend against their own abuses. When our soldiers or citizens are water boarded in the future, countries will play back Cheney’s words and others to say that such abuse is not torture. When we demand that officials in other countries be prosecuted for torture, they will mock our hypocrisy and own history. As much as history may be an inconvenient contradiction for people like Cheney, it will remain unrevised and unvarnished. We have prosecuted both Americans and foreigners for water boarding and we were right to do so. That is not the history that we should work to forget.
I don’t think anyone here considers sleep deprivation torture, do they?
If sleep deprivation is a form of torture, anyone who has had sick toddlers has been tortured.
Or anyone who went to grad school.
Michael Haz – is pulling an all nighter to finish a project torture?
Nick – Inga clearly feels that sleep deprivation is torture.
Knick and Knack.
Ingaboarding is a form of torture on this blog. It should be criminalized. 🙂
Karen Carpenter
Inga, thank you. Well put.
I’ve only just begun.
Inga – when you daughter at Fort (Camp Bastion) goes through sleep deprivation, is that torture? When nurses work back to back shifts and are sleep deprived is that torture?
Norma Rae.
Feinstein and all Dems were briefed and signed off on these techniques. Release of their notes from the briefings @ the time would prove that. Hypocrisy, they name is Democrats. Although, all politicians are hypocrites, to varying degrees. This is just on the 1-10 hypocrisy scale, a 9.7.
Let’s not even mention hours upon hours of sleep deprivation, hypothermia, ‘walling’, just let’s keep on saying its not torture, maybe we can make it sound like it was just a extra rough day at the gym. Why do we lower ourselves to the standards of our enemies? What happened to Reagan’s “Shining City on the Hill”? Oh yes and let us just ignore all the other interrogators who said torture didn’t work, that they got more information with other techniques.
Thank you for writing this blog post Professor Turley. For several days now we have been reading here on RIL, the rationalizations and excuses from the torture apologists. One even claiming that if only Professor Turley would watch the interview of Dr. Mitchell on The Kelly Files and if he thought about it he might see it in a different light. Well here is the Vice interview, maybe JT will watch it and change his mind on torture, think?
Maybe if we downplay the psychological and physiological effects of and rectal feeding/hydration then close our eyes really tight and click our heels three times we will believe its not torture. These have been a shameful acts by our country and it’s going to be man many years before we live it down, if ever. It will go down in the history books just like slavery. As for prosecutions, start with this DOCTOR of Psychology and make sure he never practices again and spends the rest of his miserable life behind bars.
JT, I’m glad to know that your stance on the immorality and the illegality
of torture is as strong as it was years ago and you haven’t changed your mind.
Inga – it is good to see you start the day with a rant. Your blood pressure is up and we all know you are alive. However, you have started the day at such a high level, there is nowhere to go but down.
Remember that the report Feinstein referenced was highly partisan. The authors did not include or interview any Republicans. They did not interview anyone at the CIA. They cherry-picked information that provided the specific outcome that they wanted. It is a hit piece.
Michael Haz – the report is not highly partisan it is partisan. It was designed to do two things. Bring back Democratic voters and deflect from Gruber’s testimony.
As I have said before, nowhere does it say we convicted any Japanese for water torture alone (regardless of what you want to call it). I would have to see the full list of charges on the court-martial to say more on that.
And here is the third part.
Here is the second part.
We waterboarded thousands of servicemen at SERE school. When I went through, we called it “training.” Now that it’s “torture,” apparently we removed it from the syllabus. Probably progress.
However, having watched it at close range, I can tell you there was no incident in which a man had water “forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach” . . . so if that’s the definition, it isn’t the same. If it’s pouring water over a soaked rag to cause sputtering (and general panic in many/most subjects), then okay. In the same vein, bringing up torture techniques of our enemies isn’t a tu quoque (i.e., they do it too) argument . . . it’s to illustrate the difference. Burning someone with a blowtorch or drilling knees is torture . . . an attention slap is not.
I didn’t call any of these things “torture” before SERE school, and I still don’t. If you do, then I’d suggest it’s a lot more pertinent we did it to thousands of our own than three very bad terrorists.
Mitchell was interviewed by Megyn Kelly. Here is the first part.
JT – “When our soldiers or citizens are water boarded in the future, countries will play back Cheney’s words and others to say that such abuse is not torture.”
Can we get that in writing from such G.C. following groups like Isis? I would much rather be water boarded than decapitated.
Also, JT, nice slight of hand with comparing our water boarding with the Japanese “water treatment”. It is not apples to apples and for a logical person to not see that you are being dishonest.
I don’t think the moral case is nearly as clear cut as you want to portray it. As “Ross” points out above, the decision makers had a report in August of the pending attack and didn’t take adequate precautions. Mike Morell told Charlie Rose in an interview this week that the CIA had “credible” intelligence at the time: 1) a second attack was imminent; 2) Al Qeda was in contact with Pakistanis to get a nuclear weapon; 3) there were additional Al-Qeda already in America to carry out a second attack. The term “credible intelligence” appears to have a specific, legalistic meaning because he also said they had other intelligence, not classified as “credible” but intelligence nonetheless, that Al-Qeda already had a nuclear weapon of some kind in NYC.
I stipulate that the CIA has let us down many times over the years and that Morrell is certainly not a disinterested party here. However, if you are President Bush or Cheney, and you just experienced the atrocities of 9/11 and you have CIA director George Tenet telling you another attack is imminent and these techniques are the only way to get information from detainees to save thousands of lives, it’s a pretty hard call for a decision maker. It’s easy to second guess a decade later with the benefit of hindsight.
I don’t know the circumstances under which the Japanese waterboarded people. But I doubt they were doing it under comparable circumstances.
Mr. Cheney was right, is right, and if he were still in office we wouldn’t be seeing the world wide humiliation of the U.S. that we are seeing today.