I'll go for door #2, Monty...
Posted on 11/14/2010 1:11:55 PM PST by mojito
An enterprising journalism school might want to start offering a one-day seminar in the effective staging of videotaped waterboarding. Getting under a wet towel is a surefire way to put your name out there. It’s sort of like the reality TV of journalism. Get a cheap camera, do something unpleasant, and welcome your new audience.
Before today, I had never heard of the Sun’s Oliver Harvey. But now that he got wet and held his breath for 12 seconds while being videotaped he’s become the subject of this post. Harvey is the latest in a string of writers who’ve taken this shortcut to a larger readership. Of all the volunteer splashees, Christopher Hitchens got the most mileage when he submitted himself to the whims of fake interrogators in 2008. This produced an immediately forgettable Vanity Fair article and an immortal YouTube video.
Apparently it eludes these eager bathers that as more of them get dunked for dough, the case for the unspeakable inhumanity of waterboarding becomes increasingly weak. In fact, there’s something wonderfully pro-American in all this. So evil are the wartime methods of the United States that they’ve inspired a succession of entrepreneurial self-administering copycats to capitalize on them in the free market. Tell me there’s no poetry in that. You don’t see the denizens of Fleet Street offering themselves up to the interrogation methods of the regimes they’re so eager to defend, do you? When you see an Iran apologist suffering the identical treatment of an Evin prison captive then we’ll talk.
I have friends who have been waterboarded as part of their military training. They admit it is uncomfortable, even scary, but not truly terrifying.
I’ve asked them to waterboard me so I could understand. They refused.
Maybe the difference is trust you will not actually be harmed? Or maybe it’s that 7th century mohammedeans are terrified wimps at their core?
Being waterboarded in training that you KNOW is training is bound to be unpleasant, but since you know it is just a training exercise, there is no real genuine terror involved, or shouldn’t be.
In a real interrogation, with mean interrogators, I imagine they take things a lot more seriously and do everything to convince the subject being interrogated that they are willing to kill him if that’s what it takes to get the information. That is bound to be considerably more unpleasant.
Call it “edge play”.
Muslims and Lefties just hate the ideas of bathing and water baptism.
At least they walk away with their freakin’ heads...still attached.
Steve Harrigan-waterboard demo (Fox News)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2jKe5zAS9E
As Ann Coulter said a few years ago, if you can hire someone in NYC to do it to you, it probably isn’t torture.
I'll go for door #2, Monty...
For the record, the type of waterboarding techniques used in training and on certain people in the media are NOTHING to compare to the techniques used on KSM and others.
I am not saying that KSM should not have been waterboarded, but the methods used on him and others are much more severe than what I ever knew.
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“(CIA) documents show that the agency’s methods went far beyond anything ever done to a soldier during training. U.S. soldiers, for example, were generally waterboarded with a cloth over their face one time, never more than twice, for about 20 seconds, the CIA admits in its own documents.
These memos show the CIA went much further than that with terror suspects, using huge and dangerous quantities of liquid over long periods of time. The CIA’s waterboarding was “different” from training for elite soldiers, according to the Justice Department document released last month. “The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed,” the document notes. In soldier training, “The interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth (on a soldier’s face) in a controlled manner,” DOJ wrote. “By contrast, the agency interrogator ... continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.”
One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood. Generally a concern only for marathon runners , who on extremely rare occasions drink that much water, hyponatremia could set in during a prolonged waterboarding session. A waterlogged, sodium-deprived prisoner might become confused and lethargic, slip into convulsions, enter a coma and die.
The agency used so much water there was also another risk: pneumonia resulting from detainees inhaling the fluid forced into their mouths and noses. Saline, the CIA argued, might reduce the risk of pneumonia when this occurred.
“The detainee might aspirate some of the water, and the resulting water in the lungs might lead to pneumonia,” Bradbury noted in the same memo. “To mitigate this risk, a potable saline solution is used in the procedure.”
Detainees would be strapped to the gurney for a two-hour “session.” During that session, the continuous flow of water onto a detainee’s face was not supposed to exceed 40 seconds during each pour. Interrogators could perform six separate 40-second pours during each session, for a total of four minutes of pouring. Detainees could be subjected to two of those two-hour sessions during a 24-hour period, which adds up to eight minutes of pouring. But the CIA’s guidelines say interrogators could pour water over the nose and mouth of a detainee for 12 minutes total during each 24-hour period.
One of the weirdest details in the documents is the revelation that the agency placed detainees on liquid diets prior to the use of waterboarding. That’s because during waterboarding, “a detainee might vomit and then aspirate the emesis,” Bradbury wrote. In other words, breathe in his own vomit. The CIA recommended the use of Ensure Plus for the liquid diet.
Justice Department authorized the CIA to use it in combination with other forms of torture. Specifically, a detainee could be kept awake for more than seven days straight by shackling his hands in a standing position to a bolt in the ceiling so he could never sit down. The agency diapered and hand-fed its detainees during this period before putting them on the waterboard.”
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/09/waterboarding_for_dummies
It's not about simply holding your breath. Waterboarding sends water up your nose and to the back of your throat where your body's automatic systems take over and scream: "TALK TALK TALK!!!"
Waterboarding is effective simply because it triggers the most primitive and primal fears in the lowest parts of our brains. Waterboarding makes every part of you believe you are drowning.
If KSM was holding information on an attack and I had a stable 440vac line handy I would light him up like a Whitehouse Christmas tree.
This “explanation” of the extreme waterboarding techniques sounds like it was written by Michael Moore with additional info by Bill Maher.
Do you really believe what you read in Salon?
There were many news reports about these CIA documents. Try a Google search to find another sourse you prefer.
>>As I’ve said before, offer $100 in any US city to anyone willing to go through water boarding and the line will be around the block.<<
Write an addendum that the testing will be in one of four muslim countries yet unselected and that line will disappear. Iran is one of the four countries.
If the US government tortured me, could I file a claim?
When I was in Basic Training in the Army (and I was drafted, basically an oppositional youth, I didn’t volunteer for anything), They put us in a building, had were ordered to remove our masks. A lot of guys panicked and ran for the exit, which was blocked by a fun-loving drill sergeant. Choking, gagging, virtually blind, he finally relented and we escaped.
By the new defintions, we were definitely subjected to “torture.”
And that’s the problem. The definition of torture has been broadened to include any unwelcome discomfort, the result being that REAL torture is trivialized.
That article from Salon is a summary (an enhanced summary) that tortures the facts get a desired result.
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