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 ...
“A relic of abusive totalitarian governments..”
You mean the kind of governments that we happen to be fighting against, the kind who want to replace the American government with an Islamic government, where non believers pay the jizya (jizyah, jiziyah, whatever) protection taxes, where they behead Christians, where you can’t build new churches or repair existing churches, where the women are 2nd class and can’t be seen without being layered in clothing from head to toe, where they hack your hand off for stealing.
They will not hesitate to lop your head off buddy. A little water down the throat to simulate (SIMULATE!!!! - ie FEEL LIKE but ACTUALLY NOT) drowning to get good information from certain identified valuable terrorists is totally acceptable.
You think they are doing this with everyone? Hell no.
This is the kind of logic that is behind certain people in America’s early intel period that said “we don’t spy on people because that’s not what civilized people do.”
Who said doing the right thing is always supposed to make us comfortable? If that were the case parenting would always be wonderful! All our tough decisions shouldn’t ever make us anxious or worried. Personally I don’t think this is a very hard decision to make.
If you feel like it’s a moral problem for you, think about the larger moral picture of you being the person allowing terrorist acts to occur because you didn’t get the information out of the guy you had in custody but you couldn’t make talk, but you could have if you would have used this technique on him.
No, I won’t drop it and no, it’s not based on emotion, it’s based on reality. Liberals love ideas that work well on paper. Welfare for example sounds great on paper. Everybody gets free money.
Conservatism is reality, and if someone thinks conservatism means sacrificing 100,000 people so we can be nice to the perp, screw him.
Set aside waterboarding for just one moment, and I would like to ask a few questions about your first statement, "If you compromise the principles of a free society just for survival's sake, you don't deserve the benefits of the country those principles are founded upon" (which sounds similar to the endless variations on the Benjamin Franklin quote, "Those who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety").
And drop the whole "ticking time bomb" garbage. It's an old and tired argument that is based on emotion.
I contend that it is the devotees of that Benjamin Franklin quote that are the ones wrapped up in "emotion," and that the "ticking time bomb" scenario has infinitely more relevance in the twenty-first century than an old and tired single line written in the eighteenth.
Absolutely right.
So by your logic society should not quarantine people against their will for our survival. It would be against the principles of a free society to disallow highly contagious TB infected individuals to roam free.
We can enjoy the benefits of a free society and die of TB - according to your logic.
“When you set a policy, that policy is going to be abused.”
Then let’s not ever set any policies. Let’s not make any laws - that’s just an invitation for people to break the laws. This is absurd: people will abuse set policies, therefore, let’s not have any.
You’d be bashing them if they didn’t have any set policies because then you’d be upset there were no clearly defined boundaries people knew they could or couldn’t use.
I agree with Nance in calling for the US to refuse to use torture, including waterboarding.
I don’t think it’s reality based at all, it’s an emotion based argument, right up there with “would you want a pilot on drugs dur dur dur”.
We are better than them. Let's keep it that way, shall we?
BTW, I have stated, time and again, that IMHO waterboarding is not torture.
Survial school details are classified. But you already knew that since you are far more informed than me on this subject.
Absolutely false dichotomy.
I would rather live in a country that has strong general respect for human rights, but which is prepared, when justified, to do whatever it takes to stop an enemy who is absolutely brutal, inhuman, demonic, barbarian and immoral, who would not hesitate for one single second to gang-rape your wife and slit your childrens' throats right before your eyes if they thought it would bring them an inch of gain; so that we that we have the best chance possible of avoiding seeing the city your mother lives in torn to little tiny bits of concrete and flaming wood by a nuclear bomb, with radiation spilling across the country and sickening millions of American children, so that they live the rest of their lives in pain and suffering.
That's the kind of country I would prefer to live in.
Really? I am a devotee of the Ben Frankiln quote on Liberty and Security. He was light years ahead of any of us, regardless of what the international community was like in his day.
That is a breathtakingly idiotic statement...a repetition of a mindless meme from the far left according to which the only role of politicians is to push their utopian schemes but never to refer to the need to carefully steer the ship of state through perilous waters.
Utterly idiotic.
(I characterice the post and not the poster although, privately, I draw some inferences.)
The person is tied to a board. Then, they angle the board so that the head is below the feet. Then they dump water on the person's face until he talks. There are other variants, an example of which involves blindfolding the person or dunking the person in a tank. But that's the basic procedure.
“To adopt the Mario Cuomo response: If a scumbag terrorist threatened to touch one hair on my child’s head I would rip him limb from limb personally, and take great pleasure in doing so. However, my personal desire should not be the basis for government policy.”
Great we have the solution right here from Maaaarrrriooooo.
We will train every soldiers’ parents in waterboarding and ripping limbs from terrorists who have killed or captured or injured their kids serving in the Armed Forces, and therefore are able to interrogate the terrorists from a personal perspective, rather than a governmental policy perspective. /sarc
You do know one of the few legitimate responsibilities of the federal government is to protect its citizens? You do know that the government exists because it can do certain things that individuals, on their own and in their own individual capacities, cannot and/or are not allowed to do?
According to you quoting Mario, you are for individuals acting in a severely vigilante fashion towards a person they want information from, yet not for the government to do techniques far less graphic than what Mario would do personally, when it comes to protecting our own forces or civilians. Hmmmmmm. Right.
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