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Books of the Times The C.I.A.’s Missteps, From Past to Present

By MICHAEL BESCHLOSS
Published: July 12, 2007

CIA Statement on “Legacy of Ashes”
August 6, 2007


Legacy of Ashes - the undoing of the CIA
The anatomy of a discredited organization
By George Smith, Dick Destiny → More by this author
Published Wednesday 29th August 2007 07:49 GMT

Book Review At the beginning of the Nineties, this journalist went through the Central Intelligence Agency's hiring process. The process took about a year to complete, its length and rigor attributed to the great importance of its classified mission plus a purported desire to get just the right kind of people - America's best.

In any case, that was the story.

CIA Bans Water-Boarding in Terror Interrogations
September 14, 2007 5:00 PM
By Brian Ross, Richard Esposito & Martha Raddatz

Hmmm, let's see here. How long did it take to figure out that it might not be a good idea to use waterboarding?

This quote is from William Blum's "Killing Hope" (C) 2004 p. 129

At the US Navy's schools in San Diego and Maine during the 1960's and 1970's, the course had a different name. There the students were supposedly learning about methods of "survival, evasion, resistance and escape "which they could use as prisoners of war. There was in the course something of survival in a desert, where students were forced to eat lizards, but the naval officers and cadets were also subjected to beatings, jarring judo flips, "tiger cages" ---hooded and placed in a 16-cubic-foot box for 22 hours with a coffee can for their excrement--and a torture device called the "waterboard": the subject was strapped to an inclined board, head downward, a towel placed over his face, and cold water poured over the towel; he would choke, gag, retch, and gurgle as he experienced the sensation of drowning, just as was done to Vietcong prisoners in Vietnam, along with their tiger cages.
A former student, Navy pilot Lt. Wendell Richard Young, claimed that his back as broken during the course and that students were tortured into spitting, urinating, an defecating on the American flag, masturbating before guards, and, on one occasion, engaging in sex with an instructor. #41

#41 Newsweek 22, March 1976, pp 28, 31.