Students protest torture method

A group of about 10 students gathered near the Frist Campus Center's South Lawn on Friday afternoon to protest the United States' use of an interrogation method known as "waterboarding" that many charge amounts to torture.

During the demonstration, Jean Beebe '10 was cuffed by her ankles, lying face-down on a stretcher, with her head made to appear submerged in a bucket of water. She was one of two students to undergo the procedure during the protest, which aimed to call attention to the practice in U.S. detention centers.

Beebe noted, though, that her experience was far tamer than what might occur in a real-life situation. "If I were actually being tortured," she said, "I would be blindfolded and gagged."

Jordan Bubin '09, who organized the protest, added that during actual waterboarding, Beebe "would have been flipped right-side up, possibly with saran wrap over her face, and water would be poured over her head from a bucket."

"When you have a gag in your mouth," he added, "you vomit against the gag because the water going over your face initiates your gag reflex and you think you're drowning."

Though this form of interrogation has been used previously by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and Augusto Pinochet's government in Chile, Bubin said the United States is the first nation to acknowledge openly that it employs the method.

"Dick Cheney called it 'a dunk in the water' in a radio interview," Bubin said. "This makes the U.S. the first country to publicly admit that they used it — other countries denied it."

Bubin argued that many detainees, who may be subjected to the practice for years, are detained simply to make them confess to past crimes. "They do this to extract confessions, not to gain actionable information for troops," he said.

Bubin added that, though confessions extracted through torture may not be used except in certain situations, the government has narrowly defined torture so that practices like waterboarding are excluded. "Over 200 have died from the torture tactics [the government has] used," he said.

Because detainees continue to be held regardless of whether or not they confess, Bubin said, many of their stories are not publicly known. "If they don't confess, [the interrogators] keep doing it indefinitely," Beebe said. "It's completely reprehensible."

The student protesters are part of a global push to protest the Bush administration's actions, with organizations including Amnesty International objecting to the United States' alleged use of torture and violations of human rights. A 2006 report released by the United Nations found that the United States' use of waterboarding violated established human rights laws but the Bush administation dismissed the report as "skewed."

The protesters urged onlookers to write to their congressional representatives in support of two bills currently before Congress, the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act and the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007. The proposed measures would repeal part or all of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which its opponents allege contains wording that enables practices including waterboarding.

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Some onlookers, including Atrish Bagchi '10, said they found Friday's demonstration informative. "I didn't know about waterboarding before, so in that sense it was effective," he said.

But others walked past without stopping to look. "A couple people have been interested, but most people are apathetic," said Kim Ostrum '10, who handed out fliers during the demonstration.

Alex Barnard '09, who participated in the Princeton Animal Welfare Society's protest Tuesday, said it is encouraging that two protests have been staged in the past week but lamented the relative rarity of such demonstrations. "It's been a good week for Princeton," he said. "It's been the only [good] week for Princeton."