Maybe the TERRORISTS should think twice about KILLING us then, or else spill his guts!
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 ...
Your tag line describes yourself as a Libertarian Nutcase. I agree.
If you believe the above, then you know little about the delayed effects of drugs like heroin, the effects of altitude on drug abuse, piloting an aircraft, or the real world of thinking about wanting an aircraft that I am flying in, or my wife is, being as safe as possible, not just safe enough to probably make it to point B today.
No pilot flying an aircraft I am flying in has a Constitution right to use heroin!
Each year a few doctors here in Florida are busted for illicit drug use. Make sure you request one the next time you need emergency medical treatment!
You are correct. That was the definition provided by arderkrag's post.
2. Drowning - even simulated - is not exactly a pleasant experience. One might even call it painful.
My understanding is that it induces extreme panic and a gag like reflex. That's different than pain. IMO
We are not talking about "whatever it took..", we are talking about waterboarding, and not a random citizen, but a foreign enemy intent on killing YOU, ME and all of our friends and family. In the process of protecting us and our interests, our government kills such people all the time and, I for one, am very pleased about this.
Killing them doesn't make ours a police state, but not killing them could certainly make us dead. Is waterboarding worse than killing them? Is not waterboarding them and them killing us better? My ethics say that waterboarding doesn't do any physical harm, nor long term emotional nor psychological damage, though I like Cuomo's idea of ripping them limb from limb.
Ah. Well, I put it to you that the terror-mongering of American politicians has stampeded Americans into abandoning their constitutional liberties. That threat to national survival I can certainly see. What would you suggest we do about it?
Torture is torture. It’s always wrong.
Just the ramblings of a loyal Freeper, working out of a satellite office for the day.
Nobody ever said ol’ Mario was stupid...
I refer you to post #305. "Whatever It Takes" is not exactly a rare sentiment on this thread.
But it is not an argument you made, so you are right about that.
Not clear what you're saying here.
But waterboarding has not been legally defined as torture to my knowledge. And yes we are assuming it's done properly. i.e. No pain or lasting damage.
It’s my understanding that we are treating the Jihadis as POW’s for the most part, but they are “unlawful combatants” under the US interpretation of Geneva Accords. I believe that Geneva goes considerably further than the US in protecting all combatants rather than just ‘lawful’ combatants. Probably in recognition that most of the wars since ‘45 have been insurgencies & civil wars where at least 1 party isn’t regularly in uniform. I think that WMD Terrorism is a whole new ballgame and 1 that Geneva hasn’t yet addressed.
As torture, to me waterboarding is borderline, but finding the higher moral ground is not. To me, the lives of the many innocents is worth more than the physical comfort of someone hellbent on killing them.
Someone offered the nuke in a city of 100,000 scenario and waterboarding the perp to find the nuke. Could you tell any of those 100,000 people that you've taken the higher moral ground and are going to let them die so you don't waterboard another human? I'm sure they'd all thank you and feel good about your conscience.
Sorry, but the "Geneva conventions" don't apply to terrorists (or even guerilla fighters who don't practice terrorism.
Doesn't apply to Terrorists.
The terrorists are not legally covered by Geneva. But we do accord them Geneva like protection were it is practical.
It's a collosal Catch-22. If you take the moral high ground & lose 100,000 citizens then you are the worst commander-in-chief in history & will be derided, impeached & perhaps convicted of deriliction. If OTOH you rough-up/torture to save 100,000 citizens then some of those same citizens will want to bring the CiC up on War Crimes some years after the fact. If I were president I'd take my chances on the War Crimes whenever I was in a "grey-area".
Three responses:
1. Since waterboarding is a method short of torture, I would not forbid it in such extreme circumstances, subject to controls, as I have described above.
2. If you are asking about what I would do personally, I would do a heck of a lot more than that, if I could assemble the proper tools. But I am a bit of a hot-head. I don't write policy for the US military, and they haven't asked my opinion.
3. Even if a hard-and-fast policy against waterboarding existed, as long as the Presidential power of Pardon exists, nothing is absolutely illegal. If it saved 100,000 lives, you could be pretty sure the President would see your side of things.
>>Waterboarding Is Torture, Says Ex-Navy Instructor (SERE)<<
Water boarding is torture - that’s why we teach people to resist it.
he says he heard from a staffer for the Democratic majority on the committee that a Republican aide has been “questioning my credentials” to members in preparation for the hearing. In response, Nance sent the committee “17 years’ worth of evaluations” from the Navy and told staffers how to find more material if needed. Emphatic about not getting swiftboated, he warns would-be assailants, “I’ll chew your ass out.”
“God forbid if there’s even the slightest hint about my credentials,” Nance says over tea in a Washington coffee shop. “You will see a spectacle on C-Span. I’ll impugn [my attacker’s] credibility in public. Let’s see him give 20 years in the military, give up his family life, and then he can come talk. If not, shut the hell up.”
Nance has become newly controversial for writing on the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism blog Small Wars Journal about his experiences teaching waterboarding for the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program.
“Our body of experience shows a friendly approach is most successful” in interrogation, Nance says. SERE’s historical memory goes back to the French and Indian Wars in understanding torture methods that captured U.S. troops might face and devising strategies to resist them. He relates the story of Hans Joachim Scharff, a master Luftwaffe interrogator who spurned abusive techniques used by the Gestapo (also, interestingly, termed “enhanced interrogation”) in favor of rapport-building. Scharff’s legendary success is still studied by U.S. interrogators. Unfortunately, he says, “after Guantanamo, I thought, how can anyone at SERE ever teach the Geneva Conventions again?”
A trove of accumulated institutional familiarity with torture led to a slide that Nance shares, from an old (and unclassified) SERE PowerPoint presentation to trainees. It asks outright, “Why Is Torture The Worst Interrogation Method?” The first answer: “Produces Unreliable Information.”
Nance remarks, “Two centuries of knowledge were thrown out the window” when the administration decided after 9/11 that, to use Cofer Black’s famous phrase, “the gloves come off.” What administration officials mistakenly thought, Nance says, is that “these were actually gloves, not empirical data. Dude, it’s not a glove. It’s a fact. But they thought it was one more tool in the tool box.”
Malcolm Wrightson Nance:
Waterboarding is not a simulation. 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.
Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown 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 which 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 black out and expiration - usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.
Nance is outraged at America’s loss of honour in condoning the use of such torture, and warns that President Bush’s policies have validated and legitimized this torture technique for foreign governments and terrorist groups:
There may never again be a chance that Americans will benefit from the shield of outrage and public opinion when our future enemy uses torture. Brutal interrogation, flash murder and extreme humiliation of American citizens, agents and members of the armed forces 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 of protecting America. To defeat Bin Laden many in this administration have openly embraced the methods of Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein.
Maybe the TERRORISTS should think twice about KILLING us then, or else spill his guts!
We have not abandoned our 'Constitional Liberties'. And I'm not aware of the "terror mongering politicians" of which you speak.
The threat to or national survival comes from the fecklessness and treachery of liberals. Not from our patriots and our brave men and women in uniform.
The leftwing of the Democrat party is our biggist threat. Once they are defeated we will defeat the terrorists in short order.
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