The CIA may use waterboarding on Al-Qaeda, but the simple truth is torture does not work

Like falling, drowning is one of mankind's primal fears.


It is the basic principle behind the torture technique called "waterboarding", pioneered in the Dutch East Indies in the 16th century.

More recently, it was used by the wartime Gestapo and the Japanese military police - one of whom was sentenced to 15 years for doing this to a U.S. prisoner of war - as well as by French interrogators during the bloody 1954-1962 Algerian War.

Ironically, many of these French torturers were multi-decorated veterans of the wartime Resistance who had themselves been tortured by the Gestapo.

First, let's deal with the grim practicalities of waterboarding.

The objects of interrogation are strapped to a board and turned upside down as water is streamed over a cloth wrapped around or inserted into their mouths.

The effect is akin to gagging when you try to avoid choking to death on a piece of food, and it rapidly induces the most extreme panic in those subjected to it.

Supporters of the technique say it does no long-term damage to the human body; opponents claim it damages the lungs and brain while wrists and ankles can fracture as the victim struggles to break free.

CIA sources say the practice has saved lives.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou claims waterboarding has been used on three high-value Al Qaeda suspects including Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, respectively a senior trainer of jihadist terrorists and the mastermind behind the mass murders of 9/11.

Although Kiriakou left the agency three years ago, and relies on hearsay from his former colleagues, he claims that both men 'broke' in a few minutes, which is longer than the 14 seconds CIA men averaged when they researched the technique on themselves.

It is clear that the CIA and other intelligence agencies use a spectrum of interrogation techniques, running from severe to relatively mild, and that what constitutes torture is a matter of dispute.

Al Qaeda has no qualms on the matter - it issued a 'how to torture people' manual which earlier this year surfaced in Baghdad.

Horrific illustrations show how to burn victims with blowtorches and electric irons, or where to use hammers and an electric drill to maximum effect.

Several states, including some which are the West's allies in the war on terror, routinely beat detainees, imprison them in dark and dank holes, or subject them to electric shocks or savage dogs.

The movie Rendition shows how this is done, with the active connivance of the CIA, which covertly flies people to destinations such as Morocco or Thailand with such treatment in mind

People who have survived such experiences and who were repatriated to Canada or Europe have reportedly returned with multiple cuts in their genitals made with a razor.

But there are less obviously horrific techniques, too.

People can be given the sort of narcoleptic drugs used for those with acute mental illnesses, whose effects are to induce perpetual movement, lock-jaw and uncontrollable shaking in a healthy person.

Cells can be perpetually lit, made extremely hot or cold and filled with the nerve-jangling sound of 'white noise'.

People can be made to assume such stress positions as propping themselves up by the forefingers against a wall, or forced to squat in the way that a fitness book might recommend for those with flabby thighs.

These positions are agonising even after minutes, let alone hours.

So what should we make of this? Clearly there is a need for interrogation, but where does interrogation stop and torture begin?

And if torture works and does save lives, is it not a valid tool in the fight against terror?

As someone who has studied terrorism in some depth, I am completely opposed to torture - although my definition of torture is admittedly hazy.

I tend to draw the line at most techniques which are physically invasive, whether it is using drugs, oldfashioned torture instruments or water being forced down someone's throat.

And while there are moral objections to torture, most of my objections are pragmatic.

At a time when we are being relentlessly told that the war on terror is ultimately about ideas, ideologies, values or hearts and minds, it does the West's cause no good to be associated with torture in the world's dark basements.

In 1978, the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro was abducted and held for more than 50 days by Left-wing terrorists.

Forced to contemplate torture to discover Moro's whereabouts, the police chief Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa (since murdered by the Mafia) famously said: "Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture."

Torture does not simply degrade the torturer and his victims while giving succour to its apologists; it sullies any regime connected with it, along with those White House lawyers and their sinister attempts to justify it with distinctions about "intense" or "harsh" interrogation.

There is very little evidence that torture works.

French soldiers who tortured Algerian nationalists in the 1950s and 1960s have admitted that the confessions they extracted consisted of what the victims imagined they wanted to hear, or were designed so as to incriminate some rival nationalist group.

In other words, the information was next to useless. They also admit that many of the victims of torture subsequently fell off police station roofs or were buried out in the desert as the torturers eradicated compromising evidence.

Already, the CIA is being accused of destroying incriminating film of waterboarding, a classic example of how one crime leads to another.

According to top U.S. military interrogators who routinely deal with terrorist prisoners in Iraq or Afghanistan, the abandonment of "coercive practices" led to a 50 per cent increase in the high-value information such men yielded.

In addition to establishing human rapport with a suspect, interrogators can exploit non-verbal communication - or body-language - and sophisticated psychology in order to make people yield up the truth.



They quickly learn that the person who maintains eye contact may be a greater liar than the shifty-looking fellow, or that glancing upwards to the right when recollecting a story indicates efforts in the imaginative, rather than memory, areas of the brain.

Apparently our dry mouths give us away more than our blinking eyes, along with the drumming fingers and shuffling feet, all weapons in the interrogator's arsenal.

Most people are also susceptible to psychological manipulation that goes beyond inquiring after the suspect's wife and children.

An Iraqi terrorist who had been educated at a distinguished U.S. university sneered at an army interrogator who had studied at an obscure Jesuit college.

Instead of taking umbrage and punching the Iraqi to the ground, the interrogator simply went away and then announced when he returned that the suspect was small fry who would be shipped elsewhere.

That calculated insult duly elicited declarations of the man's importance within Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Most interrogators try to build trust, with minor rewards and vague threats, so as to mentally detach the suspect from the ties he has to an organisation, membership of which has landed him in this uncomfortable place.

None of these techniques involves physical violence, or even the threat of it, and they are proven to work.

Detectives use them every day when they question criminals.

So why introduce such barbaric practices as waterboarding into the interrogator's art, a method which is almost guaranteed to cede terrorists the moral high ground that we are all desperate to maintain?

• Michael Burleigh's Blood And Rage: A Cultural History Of Terrorism will be published in February by HarperCollins.