I haven't trotted out this "news" category in a while. It was created in a time when I read the newspaper every day and cared about things in it. Now I care about when my next on-call shift is and whether my monitor is color calibrated. But this wasn't going to be an entry about me.

This reminded me of the firsthand account of William Daugherty, another CIA employee and Iranian embassy hostage. Being an ops-focused agent, his story contains lots of fascinating operational details from the thickness of the hardened doors to the unreliable shredder that jammed and left them in the unfortunate situation of holding hundreds of pages of classified documents intact in the vault while the embassy was overrun. Now think about this. Here was an admitted CIA agent captured by Iranian revolutionaries (and they were called terrorists then too) and held for 444 days. What horrors must have been visited on his person, whether in pursuit of information about his CIA activities in Iran or just for fun?

It's a long article, but if you go read it, be prepared to be shocked at how brutal the Iranian captors weren't. He speaks euphemistically once or twice about "a physical price to pay" after deliberately insulting his interrogators, but goes on to say that "the penalty was never unbearable...and the ensuing disruption was always worth it."

However life may have been for the captured CIA agents, it looks to have been a fair bit easier for the civilian hostages. I didn't read the entire diary of Robert Ode, but in the parts I did read, the major difficulties were being given stale bread to eat, and inconsistent mail delivery.

Back to the present. Last week I was talking to a person who, coincidentally or not, worked for the NSA until recently. He explained that the newspaper accounts of waterboarding are, well, watered down. Apparently the way it works is this: Having been tied down and inclined so that your lungs are higher than your head, water is forced into your nose and mouth until they are full. There is nothing you can do in this position to expel the water from your nasal cavity. This is what triggers the uncontrollable panic reflex; your body believes it is drowning, and no matter how tough you think you are, you cannot force yourself to take a breath with a head full of water. So you suffer until you reach the point of suffocation, when the other uncontrollable reflex overrides and forces you to inhale. This is when your lungs would fill with water and you would actually drown, if you were underwater, but since you aren't, air bubbles through the nose and throat and reaches your lungs. You probably inhale some water too, but you get enough air that you stay alive. So the process starts over.

It's a neat trick, leaves no marks, is unlikely to cause accidental death, and requires no incriminating equipment. And it's obviously torture.

Now I haven't read anything by Tom Ahern, so if he was in fact tortured in Iran, then I retract my implied claim that the Islamist revolutionaries were better than us. But the fact that the question is even askable means that we have already lost. There's no point fighting a War On Terror unless "we" are better than "them." As it stands, what we're doing has no more meaning than a bar fight between Patriots and Giants fans. Which side you are on is mostly determined by where you were born.

18 Feb 2008 03:35 PT - persistent link - trackback - 3 comments

Re: Re: I would work for the good guys, but where do I find them? laz wrote on Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:26

hippy Reply