I had read, with some skepticism, Malcolm Nance’s assertion that waterboarding is torture:
I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques employed by the Army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What is less frequently reported is that our training was designed to show how an evil totalitarian enemy would use torture at the slightest whim.
Having been subjected to this technique, I can say: It is risky but not entirely dangerous when applied in training for a very short period. However, when performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique – without a doubt. There is no way to sugarcoat it.
In the media, waterboarding is called “simulated drowning,” but that’s a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.
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.
Not sure how it can be torture when applied to a prisoner but not torture when used in training. If I pull out your fingernails in a training session, is that not torture? How about if I tie your hands and feet together behind your back and hang you from the ceiling… training?
It’s either torture or not torture in my view. So if it is torture, and we know torture is illegal, why then is congress not demanding that we prosecute those “trainers”?
But what really got me was the assertion that pint after pint of water fills your lungs. Have you ever aspirated anything? I have… a very small food particle. This resulted in pneumonia that knocked me out of commission for quite some time… for a tiny partical of food. So I’m thinking pints of water filling my lungs would pretty much have killed me.
Turns out my hunch was right. Found this over at Captains Quarters:
There is a word for people who have “pint after pint of water” filling their lungs: dead. “In fact,” according to Mike, “they would be very, very dead. By definition, anyone who has drowned is in fact dead. A large percentage of true drownings do not involve ANY water entering the lungs because the epiglottis closes off the air passages as water enters the throat. People who die immediately from being immersed in water actually die of suffocation, not water entering their lungs. Not only that, many people who survive a near-drowning who do have even small amounts of water that slip by the epiglottis and enter their lungs can die later of fluid shifts and pneumonia. I can assure you that we do not use any technique that involves true suffocation or aspiration of water into the lungs. One cannot get questions to answers from people who suffocate or have water fill their lungs in any interrogation technique, which would render that technique more than a little self-defeating. Dead men tell no tales — and also make rather poor soldiers.”
I am far from an expert on waterboarding, but just the fact that journalists have subjected themselves to this technique indicates to me that waterboarding is a very intense form of coercion, but not torture.
Flopping Aces has some good insight on the topic as well.
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