Mark Benjamin at Salon backs Nance up. Benjamin dug through some recently-disclosed CIA documents and found what waterboarding actually involved, as practiced by CIA:

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 all detailed in Abu Zubaydah’s account to the International Committee of the Red Cross of how he was tortured. But it’s one thing for a terrorist to testify to ill treatment. It’s another for CIA documentation to corroborate his account. Clearly Abu Zubaydah was drowned. As Benjamin observes, this is not the “dunking” that Dick Cheney describes. Whatever apologists like Marc Thiessen might say, the people who performed this torture knew full well that they were torturing people like Abu Zubaydah.

I worry though when we capture these leaders that we no longer have the option of using any of the enhanced interrogation techniques because the president took those off the table. When you’ve got people in captivity we’d like our CIA officials in particular to have the capacity to do more than just ask the terrorists to please tell us what they want.

I guess it’s not so surprising that a Cheney loves torture, but I don’t recall Liz Cheney being quite so explicit about her enthusiasm for torturing people. More significant is her presumption that only torture is effective in eliciting intelligence, which every experienced interrogator — Ali Soufan, Malcolm Nance, the people at the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group — will tell her is the direct opposite of the truth. It would be interesting to hear her tell Gen. David Petraeus why the Central Command leader is wrong about the relationship between torture and success in counterinsurgency, to say nothing of Petraeus’ views on the relationship between torture and the moral fabric of America. No one who doesn’t have the last name Cheney or hasn’t ever depended on a Cheney for a position or a paycheck believes that Liz Cheney has more credibility on this subject than these individuals.

You remember Malcolm Nance, right? He’s a longtime counterterrorist who taught Navy Special Forces in the ways of SERE and testified before Congress in 2007 about what waterboarding was and wasn’t. (His short answer: it’s unambiguously torture.) I asked him in an email how the SERE subjected its students to sleep deprivation. “By definition,” Nance said, “SERE is sleep deprivation” because “we are wailing on you nonstop.” When it came to the technique itself, he continued, “We used simple sleep deprivation techniques like lights, music, horrible noise, work and, if we need[ed] to, hold[ing] a student up.” Not stress positions — unless you define the entire program as sleep deprivation.

SERE training wouldn’t involve subjecting a soldier, sailor or airman to these techniques for prolonged periods. “Stress positions were designed to bring a student to a self induced pain and to get them to understand what prolonged standing and physical contortion was like,” Nance said. “None one did it for any length of time. That’s not the purpose of SERE.”

What’s more, sleep deprivation in SERE is a technique for troops to beat their interrogations, not become more compliant for them. “We want the student to feign an inability to stay awake,” Nance said. “We want sleep deprivation to occur so one cannot be subjected to questioning.” Why? Because when someone is forced to stay awake for too long, “he will say anything or gibberish,” which “really hurts the interrogator.” For the SERE program — which, remember, is about training U.S. troops how to defy their captors and torturers — that’s victory.

None of that proves that SERE wasn’t the basis for CIA’s stress-positions-as-sleep-deprivation regimen. But if SERE instructors and officials reverse-engineered their program to keep someone awake for extended periods, either they didn’t understand that sleep deprivation is bad for acquiring information or they were interested in extracting false confessions. This is all back to the point that SERE trainers are not interrogators, and considering SERE training to be about extracting quality intelligence is to commit a category error. And apparently the CIA committed it.

This is the final paragraph of what Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told the International Committee of the Red Cross:

During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told the interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.