Torture by another name: CIA used 'water dousing' on at least 12 detainees
Interrogators used a technique that elicits a drowning sensation and lowers body temperature on many more detainees than the agency admits to waterboarding
Those familiar with the cases of the 13 men known to have experienced water dousing say its departure from waterboarding is ‘a distinction without a difference’. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud. Photograph: ACLU
Those familiar with the cases of the 13 men known to have experienced water dousing say its departure from waterboarding is ‘a distinction without a difference’. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud. Photograph: ACLU
Spencer Ackerman in New York-Friday 16 October 2015At least a dozen more people were subjected to waterboard-like tactics in CIAcustody than the agency has admitted, according to a fresh accounting of the US government’s most discredited form of torture.
The CIA maintains it only subjected three detainees to waterboarding. But agency interrogators subjected at least 12 others to a similar technique, known as “water dousing”, that also created a drowning sensation or chilled a person’s body temperature – sometimes through “immersion” in water, and often without use of a board.
‘A form of waterboarding’
Suleiman Abdullah Salim was water-doused. ‘Flashbacks come anytime, so much they make you crazy,’ he said in a video published this week by the Guardian.
