New Reporting Reveals Much More Expansive CIA Water Torture Program

While the CIA claims it subjected just three prisoners to waterboarding, new lawsuits and documents as well as a further analysis of last year’s Senate Torture Report show that a separate water-torture technique known as “water dousing” was used on at least 13 men, the Guardian reported Friday.

That tactic, according to journalist Spencer Ackerman, “created a drowning sensation or chilled a person’s body temperature—sometimes through ‘immersion’ in water, and often without use of a board.”

What’s more, Ackerman adds, water dousing often “added an element of hypothermia. Some detainees reported their CIA captors dousing them with ‘cold or refrigerated’ water, then wrapping them in similarly frigid sheets of plastic, keeping their temperatures low.”

“Those familiar with their cases and an interrogator cited in the Senate report consider water dousing’s departure from waterboarding to be ‘a distinction without a difference’,” the Guardian states.

The reporting continues:

McClatchy reported on water dousing last year, citing the Senate investigation.

“Interrogators used the water dousing technique in various ways,” the Senate report reads. “At detention site Cobalt (in Afghanistan), detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or refrigerated water was poured on them. Others were hosed down repeatedly while they were shackled naked, in the standing sleep deprivation position.”