Back to the old waterboard.

Rove 'proud' of US waterboarding terror suspects

In a BBC interview, Karl Rove, who was known as "Bush's brain", said he "was proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists".

He said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, should not be considered torture.

In 2009, President Barack Obama banned waterboarding as a form of torture.

But the practice was sanctioned in written memos by Bush administration lawyers in August 2002, providing legal cover for its use.


In 2008, CIA head Michael Hayden told Congress it had only been used on three high-profile al-Qaeda detainees, and not for the past five years.

You know--I usually don't give a shit what Karl Rove says. He's a professional toady, a lickspittle by nature, a follower who fell in love with George W. and decided to make something better out of a Texas oil/political scion than nature intended. He's tried to justify what occurred in the Bush White House from time to time with naked tautologies and fibs and criticized the current administration with laughably obvious projection. But in this particular subject, I just get pissed.

Oh, I get pissed enough when Mark Theissen, a chipmunk-cheeked squint with a bad tooth-to-gum ratio, makes like he doesn't know that a dozen swirlies or even the threat of an atomic wedgie after getting a few regular wedgies, will totally make you say whatever a bully wants you to say--not cough up valuable information--just, say whatever the bullies want you to say.

But there are people who respect Rove for some dumb reason. So here we go:

We are a signatory of the UN Convention against torture.

Waterboarding is not just a dunk in the water. The people doing it under the Bush regime were very methodical, brutal, and tried to be slick. This is Waterboarding for Dummies:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

And how effective is it?

Maybe not very.

How about--definitely not very! It only gets an interrogator what they want to hear--not necessarily the truth. And it might not get that information timely, either. It's a waste. And we have other, better ways of getting information.

And also--isn't that information so illegally obtained tainted to where it could interfere with our getting solid convictions of terrorists?

I'm sure Rove just doesn't want to see his old masters be branded as war criminals. At least their pet is loyal like that. But his "pride" that we can now be judged by the same standard as Saddam Hussein, Stalin, or Mao doesn't really impress me bunches. I'm not proud about people "broken". That wasn't what got the good intell. Police-work did. People who knew what they were doing did it--for example, did anyone notice how many Al-Qaeda and Taliban have been captured under the Obama Administration--which has banned torture, compared to under the Bush administration?

Hmm. It's like that.

He shouldn't be proud of the waterboard. None of us should. It never was right--and we always could have done better.