Grisly New Details on Waterboarding

A sometimes-heard defense of waterboarding is that American soldiers regularly undergo it as part of their training to resist enemy interrogations. But new details uncovered in government memos show that the “[CIA’s] methods went far beyond anything ever done to a soldier during training.” Whereas U.S. soldiers were generally waterboarded with a cloth over their face once or twice for 20 seconds, the CIA would use six separate 40-second applications over a two-hour period. The CIA also used a special saline solution instead of water, so it could pump detainees full of more liquid without drowning them; it built specialized gurneys to tilt detainees at an angle that would maximize water entering their nasal passages; and it gave interrogators permission to use their hands to “dam the runoff”—that is, prevent water from spilling out detainee’s mouths. Perhaps most gruesome of all: The CIA fed prisoners liquid diets so that they would not choke on their own vomit when waterboarded.