National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell on Capitol Hill, February 5, 2008, (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
by Frank James
At today's hearing at which the nation's top intelligence officials were reporting to the Senate Intelligence Committee on the threats facing the U.S., National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell was asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) about a quote attributed to him in a recent New Yorker magazine article which seemed to suggest he personally viewed waterboarding as torture.
McConnell said that when he was interviewed by writer Lawrence Wright, he did say that he personally would find it painful to have water drip into his nose but said he was basing that on his own anatomical peculiarities. He wasn't making a legal or value judgment about waterboarding.
He also described a 90-minute back and forth he had with the New Yorker writer as he tried to get the journalist to change the quote to, in McConnell's eyes, better reflect what he insisted he meant.
Here's McConnell's exchange with Feinstein:
SEN. FEINSTEIN: And I was reading a New Yorker article about your interview on the subject of waterboarding and coercive interrogation techniques, and I gather that you felt that for yourself, if used, waterboarding would, in fact, constitute torture. Is that correct?
MR. MCCONNELL: No, ma'am, that's not correct. The discussion was about something entirely different. It was a personal discussion about when I grew up and what I was doing as a youngster. And the discussion was framed around being a water safety instructor. Some people, and I'm one of them, have difficulty putting my head under water. If your head goes under water, I ingest water in my nose.
So what I was having the discussion with the journalist is about being a water safety instructor and teaching people to swim. He said, "Well, what about when water goes up your nose?" And I said, "That would be torture." I said it would be very painful for me.
Then it turned into a discussion of waterboarding. Ma'am, I made no statement or judgment regarding the legality of waterboarding. We've discussed it openly here, what it is. Waterboarding, taken to its extreme, could be death. You could drown someone.
SEN. FEINSTEIN: Then the quote that I'm reading directly from the article, "Whether it's torture by anyone else's definition, for me it would be torture," is not correct.
MR. MCCONNELL: I said in -- what I was talking about was water going into my nose given the context of swimming and teaching people to swim. So it's out of context.
Now, when the journalist was checking facts, he called me back and said, "Here's what I'm going to say." And I said, "That's not the subject of our discussion, and I ask you not to put that in the article." We argued for 90 minutes. I said, "That will be taken out of context. It is not what our discussion was all about." And he said, "Well, you said it. I've got -- it's in my article, it's out of my control."
So here we are. I said to him, "I will be sitting in front of a committee having this discussion, arguing about what I said that was totally out of context."
Let's see if I understand this. McConnell told the reporter that water flowing up his nose would be painful, indeed it would even be torture to him. But that's because he may have some abnormality in his nasal structure, the assumption being that terrorist suspects don't have such abnormalities.
Then when the New Yorker writer reports on McConnell saying he said he would personally find water flowing up his nose to be torture and said reporter reached the conclusion that McConnell would personally find waterboarding to be torture since water goes up the nose of a person subjected to the practice, McConnell thinks the reporter overreached because the DNI wasn't talking about waterboarding specifically but about swimming.
It seems like McConnell was focusing on the activity that produces the effect while Wright was homed in on the effect. It was a interesting peek inside McConnell's thinking process, at how expert Washington officials can be at compartmentalizing cause from effect.
One thing is certain. McConnell is an expert on the ways of Washington. His prediction that he would find himself sitting before a congressional committee explaining that water-up-his-nose comment was dead on.
Here's the passage of the New Yorker article that McConnell said misstated his comment about water flowing up his nose:
Waterboarding was not a part of the training when McConnell went through SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape military training,) although it sometimes has been. “You know what waterboarding is?” he asked. “You lay somebody on this table, or put them in an inclined position, and put a washcloth over their face, and you just drip water right here”—he pointed to his nostrils. “Try it! What happens is, water will go up your nose. And so you will get the sensation of potentially drowning. That’s all waterboarding is.”
I asked if he considered that torture.
McConnell refused to answer directly, but he said, “My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain.”
Did waterboarding fit that description?
Referring to his teen-age days as a lifeguard, he said, “I know one thing. I’m a water-safety instructor, but I cannot swim without covering my nose. I don’t know if it’s some deviated septum or mucus membrane, but water just rushes in.” For him, he said, “waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”
I queried McConnell again, later, about his views on waterboarding, since this exchange seemed to suggest that he personally condemned it. He rejected that interpretation. “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways,” he said. “I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning.” That would certainly be torture, he said. The definition didn’t seem very different from John Yoo’s. The reason that he couldn’t be more specific, McConnell said, is that “if it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.”
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Comments
I get it--water up McConnell's nose is torture, but water up some poor guy who may or may not be a terrorist isn't. Because he's not McConnell.
Posted by: Cheryl | February 5, 2008 4:54 PM
May I suggest the next time they can't get information from a murderous terrorist bent on destroying San Francisco they try pointing an index finger at the subject, scraping it with the other, and saying shame shame.
Why after getting a Letter of Protection from the courts do women go into hiding? Isn't talking it out with signed documents the only route to safety?
Posted by: whatnow | February 5, 2008 5:22 PM
Waterboarding is a lot worse than what the intelligence community says it is. Ask a retired CIA operative what it really entails. At its worse, it is not simulated drowning, but actually drowning, with the victim revived before s/he dies. It is barbaric and
Posted by: Anonymous | February 5, 2008 5:37 PM
When do we start waterboarding american teenagers suspected of planning school shootings?
We're only doing it to prevent mass killings, right?
Posted by: Mary | February 5, 2008 5:52 PM
Congratulations fellow Republican followers.
Our plans for world domination are coming to fruition...
http://s100.photobucket.com/albums/m29/alienlovesong/?action=view¤t=repub.gif
Posted by: Dr Stangelove | February 5, 2008 6:00 PM
Waterboarding is WITHOUT A DOUBT TORTURE. Look, I hate terrorist scumbags as much as the next guy but there is a reason why we are the good guys. Torture is not in line with American values. Not to mention that it doesn't produce reliable intel.
Stand for something or fall for anything!!!
Posted by: Logic Prisoner | February 5, 2008 6:58 PM
It depends on what the definition of 'torture' is....
Posted by: C.Morris | February 5, 2008 7:01 PM
May I suggest the next time they can't get information from a murderous terrorist bent on destroying San Francisco they try pointing an index finger at the subject, scraping it with the other, and saying shame shame.
_____________________________
I love the way the pro-torture advocates imply there are only two way to get information from suspected terrorists. If torture or "a stern talking to" are the only interrogation techniques developed by the CIA in 60 years, then we need to shut the agency down and start a new version, hiring only people with, oh I don't know, imagination. This is not a binary option. There are plenty of ways to get information. If you think only torture will save the US, then there is no saving the US.
Posted by: rncbs | February 5, 2008 7:52 PM
Look, I like McCains stance on torture. Yeah, go ahead and criticize me for making any positive reference to McCain. Go ahead, have at it. What I will say is this...
Torture is bad. It is wrong to subject any human being to anything that we wouldn't be comfortable subjecting our own soldiers to. I have been subjected to self-induced "water boarding" during SWET training. You're given a 30 second emergency air respirator and dropped to the bottom of a pool in a metal frame simulating a downed helicopter. The emergency respirator doesn't have a mask, and you are dropped upside down in the frame. You have to allow water to enter your nose and breath directly through your mouth as you use both hands to knock out the window and unhook your safety harness. Using a mouthpiece respirator with no mask or noseplugs SUCKS when you're upside down.
That being said... if the worst thing I was subjected to should I ever become a POW is waterboarding... Well I'd be pretty happy about it.
Posted by: Joey | February 5, 2008 8:20 PM
Further on my previous comment...
There are different forms of waterboarding as well. The more severe ones really are barbaric and are torture.
Being that I believe the United States needs to take the moral high ground in every way, shape, and form... Even if the CIA uses the "nice" method of waterboarding it still should be banned for the perception of the world sake. Many critics in the US (Limbaugh) laugh at the notion as to whether America should care what the rest of the world thinks of us. I disagree. If we don't use a higher set of moral standards than our enemy, then how are we any better than them.
Posted by: Joey | February 5, 2008 8:44 PM
Perhaps exit pollers should waterboard voters to assure correct answers to their questions.
Posted by: C.Morris | February 5, 2008 9:18 PM
If waterboarding is so harmless, you'd think Bush Administration officials would jump at the chance to prove it by participating in a demonstration for Congress. Obviously McConnell's sensitive nasal passages would rule him out, but torture proponents like Bush or Cheney should be able to show just how safe and effective it is. As an added bonus, Congress could ask them questions about the "lost" US Attorney emails or the Abramoff scandal or the pre-war intelligence and be certain they could get whatever answer they wanted by repeating the procedure. How's that for a win-win torture fans?
Posted by: Tom O | February 6, 2008 2:09 PM
You guys are ignoring a huge part of the story. The only time that waterboarding "might" have been used by the US, according to this report, was on three high-value terrorists by CIA operatives. This was NOT the military. CIA is espionage, it's a completely different government agency that operates under the rules of espionage, not the Geneva convention. These weren't POWs. These weren't even battlefield fighters. These were high-value Al Qaeda operatives.
These guys don't play by any rules when it comes to making human bombs, attacking civillians or doing anything else that serves their cause.
CIA does lots of unsavory things that our government does not endorse. The only problem is they never did it. They never existed. That's how they do their job. It's called espionage. If anyone ever found out about what most CIA operatives were doing our government would deny that the people doing them worked for us and would probably deny that they ever existed.
There is a HUGE difference between CIA doing this and anything that happens to a POW covered by the Geneva Convention. If our intelligence agencies can't use the same methods that every other international intelligence agency does (and believe me there's a lot more barbaric stuff than waterboarding out there), how will we ever get Bin Laden. Spying is ugly. You can't have it both ways, guys.
Posted by: Jeff | February 6, 2008 3:50 PM
So Jeff DOES wholehearted support the use of any and all torture, as long as it's done by the CIA. I'm sure McCain would be proud.
Posted by: JT | February 6, 2008 6:18 PM
Jeff:
If the United States of America is bound by the Geneva Conventions, what is your basis for arguing that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America is not also so bound? To call this is a stretch is to be kind.
As for the rest of your spiel, please consult your beloved Sen. Mc for his thoughts on whether torture is an effective way to get info.
Posted by: a blinkin | February 6, 2008 6:26 PM
When do we start waterboarding american citizens suspected of planning to date, go to a movie, or interact in unlawful kissing, hugging, or outwardly displaying affection?
Posted by: Keith Richard Radford Jr | February 12, 2008 11:55 PM