Waterboarding Is Torture, Says Ex-Navy Instructor (SERE)

The Washington Post ^ | Nov 9, 2007 | Josh White

[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-

[Secret Agent Man]

“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.

[MindBender26]

>>>>And drop the whole “ticking time bomb” garbage. It’s an old and tired argument that is based on emotion.

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.

[George W. Bush]

Let's say you had very good intelligence that certain people planted a large bomb somewhere. But only those people knew where it was.

That is an entirely different matter than the routine administrative practice of torture for the purpose of extracting intel on a foreign battlefield.

We had a spectacle in one of the debates where our candidates were seemingly competing on how much they'd waterboard and torture captives in such an event.

First, we should never make it our policy which this administration has done.

Second, if the scenario you suggest ever did occur (and it's quite unlikely), then a president would have to make the call (and he would authorize).

But to make it a routine method for the extraction of military info and as a routine administrative procedure is not the same thing as its use in an extreme circumstance.

A good rule to remember is: "Hard cases make bad laws." It's just as applicable here. Don't try to justify bad policy by dreaming up the most extreme and unlikely crapola anyone has ever heard of just to justify your own lack of other means to pursue conventional military operations and victory.

I know it's a shock to some people here at FR but the brown peoples of the world don't really think a lot of us using torture and bombs to make friends with them and win them to democracy. I know, it's perverse that they refuse to recognize our benevolence. But the truth is that their hatred of Westerners makes them easy prey for native propagandists against us and these methods play right into the hands of the radicals and help their recruiting against us.

We do pay a price for these practices. Then we sit around and wonder why those perverse foreigners don't like us and Europe treats us like lepers.

[L.N. Smithee]

No, you can't. Sorry. 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.

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").

• WHO or WHAT determines what "the principles of a free society" are?

• WHO or WHAT determines what any of us "deserve?"

• If one no longer "deserves" the benefits, how does that make itself manifest in real terms?

• Once the principles are simply "compromised," is living in that society as equally intolerable as living under generally accepted standards of extreme totalitarianism?

• If those living in a free society are firm in the face of its extinction not to compromise their principles, what force do you believe will protect them from extermination? Do you believe there is some physical manifestation of the maintenance of those principles that will shield them from the effects of malicious firepower?

• Do you believe that an ostensibly free society that is forced to compromise its principles in order to remain in existence "deserves" to disappear?

• If the overwhelming majority of citizens insist their previously stated principles ARE worth "compromising" for the sake of survival of ALL citizens, why should the minority's opinion hold sway?

Don't chicken out of addressing these questions, please.

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.

[DCPatriot]

Absolutely right.

[aruanan]

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.

Of course, once they realize that useless information will result in more of the same, they'll go up that steep learning curve really fast.

[KeyesPlease]

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.

[Secret Agent Man]

“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.

[af_vet_rr]

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.

This I will agree with - any information gotten through such means (waterboarding or otherwise) can't be trusted. It's no different than information obtained by pistol-whipping somebody - they will tell you what you want to hear in order to make it stop.

[secretagent]

I agree with Nance in calling for the US to refuse to use torture, including waterboarding.

[arderkrag]

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”.

[angcat]

I still don’t know what the Waterboarding procedure is? Can someone tell me.

[gridlock]

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.

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.

[Azeem]

Survial school details are classified. But you already knew that since you are far more informed than me on this subject.

[George W. Bush]

You assert that if we DON'T uphold the Geneva Convention fully

In strict legal terms, the Bush administration is correct to assert that the Geneva does not protect non-uniformed combatants. This is well established among the militaries of many countries. I mention it only because of the perception that western nations do not employ barbaric means like these and that we delegitimize our own moral and legal authority if we resort to torture to gather military and battlefield intel. The "Achmed's-Ticking-Bomb" scenario is not relevant because we are using torture interrogations when there is no Ticking Bomb. Just Achmed may have info that we want, mostly on insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan or info about the internal al-Qaeda network, their finances, their plans, their location.

[Luke Skyfreeper]

Would you rather live in a country that routinely tortures people or live in a country that does not, but will have a major city vaporized by a terrorist nuclear weapon within the next ten years?

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.

[arderkrag]

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.

[SergeiRachmaninov]

I think anyone who uses fear to push a political agenda is a terrorist, plain and simple.

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.)

[pnh102]

I still don’t know what the Waterboarding procedure is?

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.

[Secret Agent Man]

“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.