Posted by Damozel | If Rudy Giuliani and Michael Mukasey---who allegedly finds waterboarding sort of "repugnant" but still isn't sure it's torture---just need
to know what waterboarding is really about in order to decide, Malcolm Nance and Kaj Larsen are prepared to fill them in on the details. In fact, Kaj Larsen has arranged for those who aren't sure what is involved to see it live.
Malcolm Nance was a "former
master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival,
Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego. He has
"personally led, witnessed, and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of
people." (New York Daily News)
According to Nance, the interrogation manuals used at SERE were the basis for the techniques now being used against terror suspects. (New York Daily News)
Nance knows the waterboard "personally and intimately." (New York Daily News) He has undergone it himself "at its fullest." And he would like for Mukasey and others to know: it is most definitely torture. (New York Daily News) To administer it, "[o]ne has to overcome basic human decency to endure causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you questioning the meaning of what it is to be an American."(New York Daily News) Still not convinced? Here's his description. Read it and try putting yourself there:
Having been subjected to this technique, I can say: It is risky but not entirely dangerous when applied in training for a very short period. However, when performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique - without a doubt. There is no way to sugarcoat it.
In the media, waterboarding is called "simulated drowning," but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.
Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.
How much of this the victim is to endure depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim's face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs that show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.
Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia - meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.
The lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again. Call it "Chinese water torture," "the barrel," or "the waterfall." It is all the same. (New York Daily News; emphasis added)
Nance nevertheless concedes that there is a place for the waterboard. "Our training was designed to show how an evil totalitarian enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. (New York Daily News). And now, he says, we have NO CHOICE but to use it to train our operatives, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to resist the waterboard.
Brutal interrogation, flash murder and extreme humiliation of Americans may now be guaranteed because we have mindlessly, but happily, broken the seal on the Pandora's box of indignity, cruelty and hatred in the name ofprotecting America.
Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured.(New York Daily News).
Kaj Larsen---"journalist for Current TV, a former military officer, and a student of public policy"---went through the SERE training required for Special Forces operatives who are deployed overseas. (HuffPost)
"Ironically," says Larsen ironically, "one of the many techniques we learned during this training was to assert our rights as told under Article III of the Geneva Convention."(HuffPost)
He decided to have himself waterboarded on television as a public service after seeing a picture at the Tuol Sleng prison (now a museum honoring victims of the Cambodian genocide) of the Khmer Rouge Water-boarding a Cambodian villager(HuffPost) You can see a painting from Tuol Sleng at the beginning of this post.
Please God let this demo leave those who are still quibbling over whether waterboarding is---or is not---torture without a fence to sit on. I trust that Giuliani, Mukasey, W, and all the misguided dittoheads and other seriously confused Republicans who think that supporting torture is a sign of patriotism and---most ludicrously and tragically---"support for the troops" will give Larsen their attention so they'll finally, finally have enough information to decide that it's torture.
Waterboarding has been around since at least the 1500's, when it proved useful to the Spanish Inquisition (the leading experts of the day in "harsh interrogation techniques" and torture technology). You can read a history of it here. Forty years ago, generals in Vietnam designated it illegal. (ABC New).
A photograph that appeared in The Washington Post of a U.S. soldier involved in water boarding a North Vietnamese prisoner in 1968 led to that soldier's severe punishment.
"The soldier who participated in water torture in January 1968 was court-martialed within one month after the photos appeared in The Washington Post, and he was drummed out of the Army," recounted Darius Rejali, a political science professor at Reed College.
Earlier in 1901, the United States had taken a similar stand against water boarding during the Spanish-American War when an Army major was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for water boarding an insurgent in the Philippines.
"Even when you're fighting against belligerents who don't respect the laws of war, we are obliged to hold the laws of war," said Rejali. "And water torture is torture."
And I never thought I'd live to see the day when I would actually hear Americans earnestly defending its use in the same breath in which they denounce the opposition for being insufficiently "Christian" or when certain bullies and blowhards for the values-challenged mess called "neoconservatism" would have the gall to challenge the patriotism, courage, or morals of Americans who oppose it.
It's torture, fools. It always has been and it always will be. Learn it and live it.
For a good illustration of Republican sophistry, check out Andy McCarthy at The Corner who thinks the problem ISN'T waterboarding ("the tactic should be considered illegal and shocking to the conscience (a violation of the McCain amendment) in almost all circumstances") but Democrats who want to ban it altogether.
They want the law to be that we must never, ever resort to waterboarding, no matter how imminent and grave the threat of mass-slaughter. That is a worthy debate to have. And if they win it, we will all honor the result whether we like it or not. But they have to win it first — by convincing the country and passing legislation. (More on the Legal Status of Waterboarding)
Yes, it's all the fault of the Democrats for putting a moral principle that the country has traditionally followed even in other periods in American history when we were all shit-scared before the willingness of individuals to sacrifice morality to save their own skins.
As I said, I never, ever thought---even back in the days of bomb drills when we schoolchildren were drilled to hide under our desks because the government was sure the commies were coming to get us ---that I would ever hear an American columnist argue for a public policy that allows room for torture, no matter how cowardly its lily-livered, spinally-challenged advocates (meaning those who fail to oppose it) may have become.
Bloggers on Memeorandum here and here
RELATED BN-POLITICS POSTINGS
Giuliani: Is Waterboarding Torture? "It Depends on Who Does It."
Romney's Pick for National Security Adviser Would Torture 'in a Heartbeat.'
I say 'Torture'; You Say 'Harsh Interrogation Techniques'.... (Updated)
More Secret & Illegal Maneuvering re: the Administration's Use of Torture
Tales of Repression in Burma; First Lady Laura Bush Takes a Stand
General Says Rumsfeld Misled Congress re: Abu Ghraib
Colin Powell Calls for Closing of Guantanamo
Senate Takes Swipe at Secret CIA Prisons, Seeks to Learn What Bush Knew Before Invading Iraq
LINKED
(Malcolm Nance) I know waterboarding is torture - because I did it myself (New York Daily News)
(Kaj Larsen) A Lesson For Mukasey: Why I Had Myself Water-Boarded (Huffington Post)
I find it so unbelievable that people who haven't experienced torture, or been through SERE, have opinions about what is or isn't torture. My God.
I supposed waterboarding is just a micron better than tying someone to a chair and dunking them backward in a pool of water. That's what they used to do.
We so humane now.
Posted by: On a Limb with Claudia | October 31, 2007 at 11:13 PM
We are the United States. We are (supposed to be/once were) better than this. I thought all of this was settled back when the lid was blown off Abu Gharib and it hurts that it wasn't. Torture doesn't work. Torture is ugly. Torture is illegal. TORTURE ISN'T US. I'm not a big fan of John McCain when it comes to many policies, but when it comes to this, no one can speak with greater authority.
Posted by: The Gal Herself | November 01, 2007 at 12:51 AM