ShareThisCold was a weapon in the wider war on terrorism. And Canadian expertise was consulted.
Documents reveal that CIA officials cast their eyes north after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as spies struggled to develop "water-dousing" interrogation techniques.
The CIA wanted to use cold water to soften up al Qaeda suspects, so it read tracts by Canadian experts.
The research -- with titles like "Immersion into Cold Water" and "Survival in Cold Waters" -- was written with the intent of improving the odds for sailors and fishermen lost at sea. The CIA accessed it to determine how far its agents could go with "high-value detainees" in secret prisons.
"Oh dear. I've helped the CIA, have I?" Chris Brooks of Ontario said when told that an 85-page document he wrote years ago for the federal agency Transport Canada was footnoted in the CIA's so-called "torture memos."
"I'm absolutely flabbergasted," he said.
The University of Manitoba's Gordon Giesbrecht was also taken aback that the CIA cited his research. The expert on cold-water survival researches the precise points at which frigid waters become lethal.
"I've made hundreds of people hypothermic over the last 20 years or so," he said, adding that he has subjected himself to his own water-immersion experiments.
Stressing that his research was always ethically conducted, he added that "we've often jokingly referred to this as 'torture' -- it was just brutal."
Although given unprecedented latitude by the Bush administration, the CIA still needed to reassure queasy bureaucrats and lawyers that it knew what it was doing as it pioneered interrogation practices on alleged terrorists.
Newly disclosed materials on water dousing and other techniques can be found within a sheaf of previously top-secret CIA memos released by court order to the American Civil Liberties Union.
These disclosures led the Obama administration this week to appoint a special investigator to probe past counterterrorism practices.
"Water dousing" is not to be confused with the more notorious "waterboarding," an interrogation technique that amounts to simulated drowning. But the Red Cross has documented several CIA detainees complaining that they were drenched daily with buckets or hoses while held in the cold rooms in secret prisons.
Some even complained they were put in an "immersion bath." Guards made them lie on plastic sheeting with the edges raised and poured in bucket after bucket of cold water for up to a half hour at a time.
"Water dousing is intended to weaken the detainee's overall resistance posture and persuade him to cooperate with interrogators," reads one of the CIA memos justifying the practice. It adds that detainees were to be restrained, possibly naked, and could withstand dousing for up to an hour in the right conditions.
This technique is held as the 15th-most-"intense" on the CIA's internal list, starting with "shaving" (No. 1) and ending with "waterboarding" (No. 20). Dousing was seen as a step harsher than sleep deprivation, but a notch less punishing than being forced into "stress positions."
A 2005 fax sent from the CIA to the U.S. Department of Justice includes an appendix called Medical Rationales for Limitations on Physical Pressures.
"Death can result from prolonged (i.e. 6 hour) exposure to 15 C water, 2 hrs at 10 C, 1 hour at 5 C," the table reads. "Hypothermia can be induced in 30 minutes with 5 C ... Immersion at temperatures below 25 C/ 77 F will eventually be fatal over time."
The CIA urged agents to have doctors handy and cease dousing "upon evidence of hypothermia." The table refers readers to Transport Canada's "Survival in Cold Waters" -- written by Brooks -- or a chapter in a book called "Wilderness Medicine" titled "Immersion into Cold Water."
"That was my chapter," Giesbrecht said.
Although he denounced dousing interrogations as unethical, he said the CIA's guidance actually errs on the side of caution.
"These estimates are really overestimating how quickly one would die," he said.
Every person has a breaking point, Giesbrecht said, adding that the longest he's been submerged in cold water is for about five hours. He recalled extreme pain, numbness and uncontrollable shivering of most major muscle groups.
During World War II, the Third Reich was losing thousands of soldiers to frigid North Sea waters. That led German scientists to study hypothermia by reaching into the Dachau concentration camp for detainees.
Once plunged into tanks of icy water, the prisoners' vital signs were monitored, whether they died or survived. Some were even reimmersed into boiling water.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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