Posted on 11/09/2007 6:14:39 AM PST by RDTF
A former Navy survival instructor subjected to waterboarding as part of his military training told Congress yesterday that the controversial tactic should plainly be considered torture and that such a method was never intended for use by U.S. interrogators because it is a relic of abusive totalitarian governments.
Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a counterterrorism specialist who taught at the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school in California, likened waterboarding to drowning and said those who experience it will say or do anything to make it stop, rendering the information they give nearly useless.
"In my case, the technique was so fast and professional that I didn't know what was happening until the water entered my nose and throat," Nance testified yesterday at a House oversight hearing on torture and enhanced interrogation techniques. "It then pushes down into the trachea and starts the process of respiratory degradation. It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts. As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening: I was being tortured."
-snip-
If Mohammed faced waterboarding for 90 seconds, Nance said, about 1.2 gallons of water was poured down his nose and throat while he was strapped to a board. Nance said the SERE school used a board modeled after one from Southeast Asia, though it had leather straps instead of metal clamps.
SERE attendees expect to be released and assume that their trainers will not permanently harm them. Nance said it is "stress inoculation" meant to let U.S. troops know what to expect if they are captured. "The SERE community was designed over 50 years ago to show that, as a torture instrument, waterboarding is a terrifying, painful and humiliating tool that leaves no physical scars -snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
However,...
...IMO, torture has always been deeds that leave physical scars...severe beatings, broken bones,burns, cuts, fingernails, etc..
Waterboarding is torture, IMO, but it's psychological.
What I wouldn't necessarily like to see is waterboarding being the STANDARD method of interrogation of suspected insurgents.
Used in proper context, it's a valuable tool to use in order to save lives, but let's face it...the jerks who were involved in the Abu Graib fiasco, shouldn't have our blessing to waterboard prisoners for their amusement.
the only thing I am going to chime in here to you is this. People like you are what the terrorists base all their planning on. They bank their efforts on the simple truth that we value human life so much that it will tear us apart internally (with debates like this), and know that it weakens the squeamish western world to their barbaric ability to justify what they do to human beings.
They do not value human life and make that very clear. Osama Bin Laden himself has been quoted saying that this is the difference between us and them. If we want to defeat these so called humans, we have to learn to think like them without compromising what our country stands for, it’s that simple. We should use waterboarding, or whatever it takes to stop them. They need to fear us and consider us irrational, the same way we do them.
Bully bully!
George Orwell, please call your office.
No problem at all. You simply reward good intel and punish the bad.... and confirm everything.
Very simple.
I agree and I believe I heard that the number of times we have used “waterboarding” could be counted on one hand.
Seriously, you're avoiding my point. You assert that if we DON'T uphold the Geneva Convention fully, our people will be subject to mistreatment outlawed by the convention. I don't see how you can get around the assertion of the converse, that our upholding of the convention will protect our people from mistreatment. And this latter simply is NOT true.
I would delight in going after this guy with a screwdriver and a firepoker, but I am not King. My delight does not define the law.
So, how did that whole Vietnam adventure work out, anyway...
This is a very probable scenario and has most likely happened before.
I would not be opposed to a safe psychological interrogation technique like waterboarding. It does no damage if done properly.
Even if the detainee is innocent it comes down to this - A potentially innocent person thinking he's drowning for a few minutes or multiple 100% innocent people being killed if we don't get the information.
If proper waterboarding has saved at least 1 innocent life, it's worth it. Any innocent people waterboarded might have been scared, but they are still alive and uninjured.
Absolute terror. A willingness to say/do anything to make it go away. If one was to be waterboarded...as a demonstration, and then told they would be waterboarded twice a day, everyday until they told everything they know...it wouldn't be long until they told everything they know.
“..When did preventing each and every terrorist act become a requirement for national survival?”
How egalitarian,hope it never happens to anyone we know,..then us who love to parse my feel different when that one little terrorist act hits us personally, oh...how we will rage then.
Tell you what ,the Muzzies who are coming for your family , town and state can go to the Green room for warm showers, gift packages, gentle conversation and care bear packages to send home,..mine can go to Iron Room Pork Waterboard Hellhouse. I’ll just make sure to keep on my side of the country.
And how long did the physical “lasting effects” last once it stopped?
2 minutes? 2 hours? 2 days?
Or should that not be a factor, as the troll on this thread asserts we should not inflict any pain at all and simply put the guy in a comfy chair, serve him tea, and ask him polite questions?
I would prefer the former. You fail to mention that democracy utterly collapses when all semblance of security is taken away - which would of course would happen in the case of losing a major US city.
You also fail to mention that the people we "routinely torture" willingly and gleefully ignore any and all treaties covering the conduct of warfare, and view civilians as the best targets. Why do you insist there are no consequences to that? Why are these filthy animals given Geneva-abiding human rights?
I will make a final comparison:
They saw the heads off of living, breathing, US CIVILIANS, on camera.
WE severely scare them, with water.
I can't grasp where we are doing something immoral.
They are most likely being waterboarded improperly. Water is not supposed to enter the lungs.
I'm sure simulated drowning is close to physical pain but there is no actual damage done.
(The French were using various interrogation/torture techniques including electrical shocks. They concluded that these methods were necessary, because the rebel force structured itself in a pyramid of three-man cells such that almost no one knew more than two other members. When they captured a rebel, they made it instantly clear to him that he would have to give up the other two members of his cell and any real-time operations.)
(Although the French won The Battle of Algiers, they lost the war...for reasons that are not altogether clear to me. I gather that they suffered a collapse of will...certainly that is the way many who fought on the French side felt, including the OAS members who repeatedly attempted to assasinate the appeaser, Charles De Gaulle (as fictionalized in The Day of the Jackal).)
Unlike us, the French had the option of giving up and going home. I don't believe that we have that option. I believe that all those people in the twin towers ~were~ at home when this war started.
It’s like a case I had in law school. Man was cited for 115 in a 55 zone. Good car, empty open road. We established he was taking wife, who was in labor, to the delivery room at hospital.
State said “There are no exceptions.”
I argued “any port in a storm” but made the most points by asking the jury members, with their wife screaming in labor in the seat next to them, what would they have done?
Got a NG in 7 minutes.
See, that is the problem. When you set a policy, that policy is going to be abused. That is why setting policy is such a tricky business.
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