Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Think again. This article is from Malcolm Nance, former chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego. He's done it. He's had it done to him. But only for brief periods in order to train our own SEALs how to survive it as best they can, to give them a taste of what will await them if they are captured. He leaves no doubt 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.
How much of this the victim is to endure 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 that 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 blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia - meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.
Waterboarding is torture. We condemned the Khmer Rouge for using it. We condemned the Japanese for using it on our soldiers in WW2. We brought war crimes tribunals against the Nazis for doing it in WW2. And now we sit idly by while our own government does it.
Comments
The bushies claim that torture is only torture when it involves organ failure would make such devices as thumbscrews, the rack, and a host of other medieval torture devices somehow not torture.
Who's the greater fool? the fool who leads, or the fool that follows? IOW, who's stupider, the liars, or the idiots who fall for the lies?
Posted by: BaldApe | November 4, 2007 10:04 AM
Posted by: Ex-drone | November 4, 2007 10:37 AM
I'm confused. This is the first description I have read that doesn't mention a plastic sheet over the face. I thought the point of the plastic sheet was to keep the water out of the mouth and lungs -- and now I'm wondering where I ever got the idea there was a plastic sheet.
So I just looked in Wikipedia and to links it points to, and it appears that various versions are practiced, sometimes in an escalating sequence, and that the plastic sheet version is the "nice" version. I wonder how many people in the US have been misled into thinking that there was no actual water inhalation. I myself always wondered why it was so awful if there was no water inhalation, and just assumed it was one of those oddities of human physiology that is hard to understand without personal experience.
Our society is very sick.
Posted by: xebecs | November 4, 2007 11:03 AM
Nobody thinks this stuff isn't torture, and I'm sure we all know this. Why argue about it at all? We need to focus on the fact that important people are lying about torture.
I suggest we establish a truth test for torture. Whoever claims something isn't torture gets it done to him on national television. For a week. It he claims twenty things aren't torture, then he gets twenty weeks of testing.
It's important that there be no delay. If Cheney says today it isn't torture, he may be counting on dying of natural causes before he gets it done to him. So the rule should be overnight comeback: you say it today, we do you tomorrow. (It may take that long to set things up and get the cameras ready.)
Posted by: Three-Fitty | November 4, 2007 11:03 AM
Good plan, Three-Fitty. Let's do it to Cheney and see how long it takes to get a confession.
Posted by: Abbie | November 4, 2007 11:49 AM
Here's the direct link to Nance's original, longer post (with lively discussion afterwards).
Ex-drone: that was my reaction too.
re xebecs: Just to be clear, the plastic sheet isn't to keep water off the victim, but the opposite: they put it over your face and poke a hole in it so that they can pour water directly into your mouth. It's not "nice" in any way.
Three-Fitty: Speaking of Cheney, the Wikipedia article (which at the moment is "protected" from further edit until "disputes have been resolved") gives the White House transcript of Cheney's remarks on 10/24/06, where he concurs in the interviewer's belittling of waterboarding as "a dunk in the water." (He denied later that waterboarding was what he was referring to, but he mentions KSM by name - you be the judge.)
I think the important point this article makes can be summed up this way. Waterboarding isn't a "dunk in the water" - or even those "coercive interviews" on TV where Jack Bauer or somebody holds the bad guy's face in the toilet for a few seconds to get him to talk. At the limit, the only difference between waterboarding you and drowning you is that when you drown you actually die. That is, when you drown, after you finally pass out in panic and terror, you never wake up; while if they're waterboarding you, they revive you. You don't die - but you get to go through that same panic and terror again and again. I can't imagine anything more horrible than that. If that's not torture, nothing is. I would much rather be broken on the rack.
Whether we should torture suspects, or proven criminals, or terrorists with vital information, is another question entirely. (The president says that we don't torture, and I too would like that to be the case; but I don't believe it.) But that waterboarding is torture there can be no doubt.
Posted by: Dave M | November 4, 2007 11:52 AM
BaldApe, water torture isn't merely like medieval torture, it is medieval torture. It was used during and Spanish Inquisition and the Witch Trials in northern Europe. The Enlish called it "the water cure," while the French called it "the extraordinary question."
The essential technique hasn't changed in centuries.
And the "intelligence" we get through water torture is about as reliable as the "intelligence" gathered by ecclesiastical courts about Witch's Sabbats and kissing the Devil's asshole.
Posted by: HP | November 4, 2007 12:04 PM
Any Californians or New Yorkers reading this: Please contact your Senators Feinstein or Schumer, respectively, and urge them to reconsider their decision to support Mukasey's nomination in the planned Judic. Cmte vote on Tuesday.
Posted by: PhysioProf | November 4, 2007 12:14 PM
Ah, but Three-Fifty, they've already done that! Just the other day, Fox News sent one of their correspondants in to be water boarded. So, he lay down on the board, they strapped him down, he got a little wet and they let him go.
Not an exact quote: "It was uncomfortable, but I'd hardly call it torture!"
Gosh, what were you liberals complaining about?
I wanted to slap my oft-mentioned father as he watched it and recited the mantra, "uh huh! There you go! That's not torture!"
Now, let's try an alternative. Instead of being a journalist in the hands of friendlies, knowing full well nobody wants anything from you and you'll be released in a minute, let's kidnap a (male) fox journalist, and waterboard him until he admits Jesse Jackson is sexy. We'll see if he considers it torture after that.
Posted by: Michael Suttkus, II | November 4, 2007 12:14 PM
"For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch."
That's the scariest bit in the whole passage. What, the initiates - those that got through pledge week - think it's great fun to watch?
This shit has got to stop....
Posted by: Coragyps | November 4, 2007 12:42 PM
The way I see it, any time you're physically scaring someone into saying something, it's torture. It doesn't matter how much permanent damage is being done, it's still torture.
Posted by: theberle | November 4, 2007 1:26 PM
The way I see it, any time you're physically scaring someone into saying something, it's torture. It doesn't matter how much permanent damage is being done, it's still torture.
The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed in 1988 and ratified in 1994:
For completeness, the geneva conventions don't actually define torture, but each geneva convention refers independently to "cruel treatment and torture"; the third geneva convention specifically refers to "physical or mental torture". Both of these flourishes give some indication of what "torture" meant to the persons drafting and signing those treaties; clearly one would not distinguish between "physical or mental" torture if one considered torture to only be that which promotes physical damage.
This isn't "the way you see it" or "the way I see it". This is not a matter of opinion. Waterboarding is torture, unless we are redefining basic terms for the convenience of certain U.S. politicians.
The fact we are even able to have this conversation-- the fact that this is even something which may be considered for debate in this country-- shows exactly how far down this administration has taken us.
Posted by: Coin | November 4, 2007 4:13 PM
It's rather.. frustrating.. how incredibly far off all of you are. You're completely missing the point. I don't mean that disrespectfully, I really don't.
But what you should understand is that this has gone on long enough that the pretense of not torturing has fallen away, and the only people continuing to claim we don't torture are the President himself and his legal staff - and for purely legal reasons, e.g. the reason Mukasey was nominated for AG in the first place: to protect the administration from prosecution.
I have spoken with, and seen enough posts by, the 24%ers in this country to know that they WANT us to torture - they're GLAD we do. Their argument is - "these aren't real people, and they don't deserve to be treated that way. Let's just torture the information out of them." They don't care whether it works, whether it's immoral, or that it's illegal - they think we MUST do it and it's ok for US to do it because hey, we're the UNITED STATES!
It's sickening.
Posted by: Patrick | November 4, 2007 5:39 PM
I'm sorry if this sounds edgy, and maybe I'm just a bad person, but I honestly don't care if Muslim extremists are tortured. They gave up their right to be called human when they started plotting to blow up school busses. I think it's a good sign for our society that most of America wants equal rights for these monsters. They certainly are more principled than I am.
That being said, if there is the slightest chance that an innocent person is caught up in this, then something needs to change. If I were in charge, I would give every prisoner a fair trial, then drop the convicted back in Gitmo. It's the fact that Bush is torturing good people along with the terrorists that makes my blood boil, not that he's torturing at all.
Posted by: Brandon | November 4, 2007 5:54 PM
Yeah, that's basically it.
Posted by: MartinM | November 4, 2007 6:04 PM
In short, you hate America.
Posted by: Skemono | November 4, 2007 6:18 PM
Ah, the last bastion of the despicable: "They're not really human so it doesn't matter how we treat them." You realize, of course, that all of the worst chapters in human history have been carried out under that flag?
So now you're saying it's ok. Why? Because you trust this country could NEVER be like those we so revile? Do you know WHY that is so? Because we choose not to be. We fight, tooth and nail, to make sure we never are. America doesn't get a free pass because it could "never be like them" - it has taken centuries of hard work to make sure we aren't. You think that comes for free? You think that just because this is the "land of the free" that somehow the moral and ethical standards we've tried to live by for 200 years relieve us of all responsibility to our founders, our history, our laws, our morals, and ourselves? You think ANY of that will automatically give us enlightenment in an otherwise dark world?
Get some perspective and then get a clue.
You're right, they are. You, and those like you, you're cowards, and you take the coward's way out. The world is a terrible place, a hard place, a dangerous place. These who are more principled than you want more than the mere survival of pragmatism, but to give to all future generations a clean conscience and a history to be proud of. To give to them a past that has lived by the rule of law and a people that stood by their principles, even when it was hard, because it gave them a brighter future for the effort.
You think it's easy to sit down in front of someone, treat them like a human being, offer them a decent meal, and then look them in the eyes and ask them nicely for the information you want, knowing all the time that they would never give you the same courtesy? You have no idea what courage is.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the two are separable. Any system which advocates torture of anyone will inevitably end up torturing the innocent.
That is why you deny your government such power in the first place.
Posted by: Patrick | November 4, 2007 7:35 PM
Patrick: Fantastic rant. If there are more like it suppressed within you, let them out -- preferably in a public place with a megaphone.
Oh yeah, this is just such a place. Thank you, Ed, for providing it.
Posted by: xebecs | November 4, 2007 7:47 PM
"And now we sit idly by while our own government does it. "
What's the best way to stop this practice? (aside from voting out the Bush Administration) Letter writing campaign? Marching on the Mall? All of the above?
Posted by: Phobos | November 4, 2007 7:51 PM
I think it does come down to principles vs pragmatism. I'm sure we all agree that saving lives is a virtue. The question is whether we can have our cake and eat it too. My personal opinion is that preventing another attack is more important than being kind to our enemies. Obviously both virtues have some level of importance. For example, we definitely don't want another Japanese internment camp on our hands. I just don't buy into the notion that being civil to terrorists is the single most important virtue, at the expense of everything else.
If there is a way to effectively deal with terrorists while wearing kid's gloves, I would sincerely like to hear about it. Please, enlighten me. Unfortunately, we live in this world, not the world we'd like to live in, and if torturing terrorists is the only way to prevent more innocent deaths, then please, pass me the bucket.
Posted by: Brandon | November 4, 2007 8:02 PM
They gave up their right to be called human when they started plotting to blow up school busses.
If they haven't been given a proper trial, how do we know which ones (non-Muslim as well as Muslim) were "plotting to blow up school busses?"
That's one of the main problems with trying to justify torture: we say "they" deserve it, but we do it to people who have not yet been proven to deserve it.
(The other problem, of course, is that we're using it for interrogation, not punishment; and it's not known to work that well as a means of interrogation. But hey, why quibble about results when we're busy showing the world our righteous anger?)
Posted by: Raging Bee | November 4, 2007 8:06 PM
My personal opinion is that preventing another attack is more important than being kind to our enemies.
Okay, let's be totally pragmatic about this, and ask a very pragmatic question you haven't been willing to ask: how effective IS torture as a means of getting unwilling parties to give up information about planned attacks? Are you SURE the most effective means of interrogation involve torture? From what expertise or experience do you speak? So far, the people who seem to know the most about this sort of thing don't think torture is all that effective, and everyone who thinks it is, is basing their arguments on pure emotion, not on any actual knowledge.
And let's ask some more pragmatic questions: if a suspected terrorist is committed enough to know the details of a planned attack, how can we be sure he won't be able to stall and mislead his interrogators until it's too late? How will we know when we've captured the right person, let alone whether he's telling the truth? And if we have enough good (and timely!!!) intel to be sure of all that, will we really need to torture anyone after we get it?
Posted by: RAging Bee | November 4, 2007 8:18 PM
Don't worry.
I'm sure they'll restrict the use of water boarding to cases where evil super villains have hidden a nuclear bomb in the middle of a city and they have only two hours to obtain the pass code to remotely disable the bomb.
Posted by: Chris Noble | November 4, 2007 8:29 PM
xebecs:
Thank you. There is much.. much more where that came from. I have reached my limit.
Brandon:
This, at least, is a point over which reasonable people can debate. The dismissive "I don't care if people are tortured" really burns me in a way I can't describe.
So let's debate this point, then.
There was a time I couldn't see past the idea that preventing another attack was more important than how we treat our enemies. It seems to be an impassable contradiction, doesn't it? Then I realized what's wrong with it: it values life for the sake of life, without regard to WHAT sort of life that is. It's become easy, in this day and age of sound clips, to proclaim our respect for life and never qualify what sort of life we value. If life for the sake of life were meaningful, our founders would never have gone to war to be free from the crown.
Would you save the life of an individual who would spend every second of every day in excruciating pain? What have you saved them from?
I began to realize that the issue presents itself far more clearly if you think far into the future about the consequences of the choices we make now.
Every compromise to pragmatism we make today, makes it all that much easier to create a world we'd never wish to give to our children. Yes, that means that maybe we're going to be attacked again. That's the price of having a free world, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the notion that all men are created equal. The blood spilled of those who faced the darkness with courage rather than the pragmatism of fear is worth far more to our countless future generations than the lives we'd save without purpose.
Well - it may be due to rethink your premise, given the preceding. Definitely I don't think we should just lay down and wait to be attacked. But there are alot of smart people out there with good ideas about how to make our nation more secure without infringing the law and our rights, and without the "security show" we see at airports, or the false sense of security we'd glean from the Real ID, for example. These people are not being listened to because their ideas aren't sexy.
But to "deal" with terrorists? First step is probably to change our foreign policy. The US has to stop behaving as though the world is its playground and being the bully in the sandbox. That means, stop installing and removing dictators whenever we feel like it.
No, that won't stamp out terrorism. There will probably always be terrorism. That's a reality we have to learn to deal with, and stop thinking we can "stamp it out" with some sort of swift justice. What happened to the America that was willing to buckle down for alot of hard work? It's going to take a long, long time to solve these problems. So let's solve them.
Alas I think this comment is getting too long, so I will stop here.
Posted by: Patrick | November 4, 2007 8:30 PM
What makes you think that what we're doing WITHOUT kid gloves is effective? I'm not seeing a lot of difference....
Posted by: gwangung | November 4, 2007 8:58 PM
I think you just don't understand what torture is meant for, Brandon. It's designed to get people to do what we want, not to tell us what we want to know. It was under torture that John McCain confessed to crimes he didn't commit, for example, and gave false answers to his interrogators. Torture is not a useful intelligence-gathering tactic.
Posted by: Skemono | November 4, 2007 9:33 PM
But is the Rack really torture?
Posted by: G Felis | November 4, 2007 10:38 PM
I have an open question to all those who advocate the use of torture "to prevent terrorist attacks" or the like:
Can you name one time that torture stopped an attack? Any? At all?
Surely Bush et al would have announced it loudly, if somewhat subtly (due to the whole legal thing), if they had something to help cover their actions, right?
So when was it? When have the Gitmo interrogation techniques produced useful intelligence? Surely they wouldn't need to keep it secret - if we got a terrorist, his fellow terrorists would know, and would know that anything he knew would probably be revealed before long, so after a few weeks or a month any information he might have had would be perfectly acceptable to release... right?
Posted by: Michael Ralston | November 5, 2007 1:20 AM
Spot on, Patrick. As others have said so many times before, this issue is not about the kind of people they are, it's about the kind of people we are. As soon as we resort to torture, we become the bad guys.
Posted by: Davis | November 5, 2007 2:42 AM
Brandon: It may well be that from a purely pragmatic standpoint it isn't worth preventing another attack if it takes extreme measures to do it.
Terrorism has caused 3000 deaths in your country in a 6 year period, that's 500 deaths per year. It may seem insensitve, but there is only so much a country should do to prevent death. In a policy context, you can't treat human life as infinitely valuable, that would result in ludicrous efforts to preserve life, no matter how much harm it caused.
Road accidents in the US cause 40,000 deaths per year. That's a 9-11 every month, with an extra one per year as a bonus. Almost all of those could be prevented by imposing a 10 mile per hour speed limit uner all circumstances and make any violation punishable by life in prison to ensure ocmpliance. Anyone here think that would be a good idea?
Its easy for me to say this give I live in New Zealand, far from anything Al Qaieda might want to attack, but terrorism is not much of a threat, even in a post 9-11 world. To treat Al Qaieda as a maissive existential threat is to overract to an unlikely event, and frankly does the terrorists far more honour than they deserve.
Don't destroy your society out of fear of a few nutters hiding in a cave.
Posted by: James | November 5, 2007 2:51 AM
When discussing torture please always remember that the reason for torture is one thing only. That is to break down a human being!
We sometimes do the breaking to get intel, sometimes to punish, but that is our reason for breaking, the reason for torture is always the break down of a human being.
This small, but significant point, underlines why it is a lie to classify waterboarding as "not torture".
Why do you waterboard, to get information? Bullocks, simulated drowning is not interrogation. You waterboard to break down a human being, and then interrogate.
But the mean guys are trained to resist other techniques. So fucking what. If the victims are tougher, and you then use tougher techniques, you are still breaking down a human being.
Torture is demeaning to all involved.
Furthermore the treatise on torture states that any nation that has ratified it MUST prosecute perpetrators of torture. The US government must try those guilty of using torture, even if they were so commanded by their officers in charge. It cannot grant immunity against prosecution to torturers.
The right to not be tortured is an immutable human right, even more basic than freedom of speech, which can be set aside legally.
Posted by: Soren Kongstad | November 5, 2007 4:05 AM
If Bush is so certain about it not being torture then perhaps he'd be a willing participant on national TV?
Posted by: llDayo | November 5, 2007 8:53 AM
The water going into the lungs is new to me too, and makes the whole thing sound several times worse.
In training as a lifeguard, we were told there are three ways you can drown. 'Wet' drowning, where the lungs are too full of water to work and 'dry' drowning, where the shock of hitting the water (or initial inhalation) makes the windpipe automatically close and fail to re-open - the body suffocating itself - are the two that lifeguards are likely to actually see.
Far more frightening was the idea of secondary drowning. When someone inhales some water, it can irritate the lungs over a period of hours. The person can be checked out at hospital, thought to be OK and sent home without any signs of trouble. At which point the irritation causes swelling in the lungs which gradually closes them off (collapsing the alveoli) and causes them to fail. This can happen up to 72 hours after the fact and is easily fatal, especially as it is not normally watched for and there is no way to keep everyone who has inhailed water under 72 hour supervision.
There would be no way to avoid this risk. If water is entering the lungs, regardless of salt or chlorine content, secnondary drowning is a risk.
This isn't just torture, it is potential murder.
Posted by: Paul Schofield | November 5, 2007 10:23 AM
All right, Brandon. You're not convinced by the sheer moral reprehensibility of torture? You're not convinced by the idea that if we torture, we are no better than the people we're fighting? You want a "pragmatic" reason for not torturing terror suspects? Apart from all the excellent ones people have already given -- torture being an unreliable form of information gathering, the inevitability of innocent people being tortured, etc.?
I'll give you one:
The U.S. torture of prisoners is inspiring more terrorists, and more terrorism.
The way the U.S. behaves internationally -- the pointless and bloody Iraq war, the indefinite detention of prisoners without trial, and of course the repugnance of torture -- is gaining converts by the day to the anti-American cause. More and more people every day are being convinced, by our actions, that the U.S. is evil and must be stopped. By any means necessary.
Torture will not stop terrorism. Torture is gasoline on terrorism's fire.
Posted by: Greta Christina | November 5, 2007 1:28 PM
If we have to be just as cruel and disgusting as the worst of 'our enemies' to protect 'our way of life', what are we protecting?
I mean: if we accept 'their' motives and methods, what is our disagreement? Is the only difference the colors on the flag or which days are government holidays?
Posted by: khan | November 5, 2007 1:35 PM
Oh, and P.S.: I am truly sick of the false dichotomy between "treating terror suspects with kid gloves" and torture. As if there were no other option. As if stopping torture required that we put up war prisoners at the Hilton and feed them tea and cakes every afternoon.
And BTW: It's "kid gloves." Not "kid's gloves."
Posted by: Greta Christina | November 5, 2007 1:36 PM
If there is a way to effectively deal with terrorists while wearing kid's gloves, I would sincerely like to hear about it. Please, enlighten me.
See the comment above about false dichotomies. This is what happens when you listen to politicians (and creationists, and theologlians too) without your baloney detector hat.
Posted by: 386sx | November 5, 2007 2:33 PM
Of course...that might even be MORE effective...the whole kill-them-with-kindness thing.
But that's not what the pro-torture folks want, is it? It's more about vengeance than getting information....
Posted by: gwangung | November 5, 2007 2:39 PM
"It's more about vengeance than getting information...."
Bingo! Spot on!
Posted by: RAM | November 5, 2007 3:55 PM
"If we have to be just as cruel and disgusting as the worst of 'our enemies' to protect 'our way of life', what are we protecting?
"I mean: if we accept 'their' motives and methods, what is our disagreement? Is the only difference the colors on the flag or which days are government holidays?"
I just want to echo what Khan said.
Because that is absolutely the crux of this debate. If we behave no better than the people we're fighting, then on what moral basis are we fighting them? Why do we deserve to win? What point is there in fighting for freedom and democracy and fairness and other supposedly American values, if what we end up with when we win is a country that sacrificed those ideals the moment they became inconvenient?
Posted by: Greta Christina | November 5, 2007 5:51 PM
Well, actually, if you're ready to chuck those democratic, American ideals NOW...then they don't mean very much to you...because this is not a life-or-death struggle on a material level...It may be a life-or-death struggle on an ideological level---which makes it even more important NOT to dispose of them.
Bottom line, it's an easy choice to discard your ideals now. If you really belived in American values, you'd hold onto them in hard times and good times, because they meant that much to you...
Posted by: gwangung | November 5, 2007 6:32 PM
Excellent point, gwangung.
It drives me nuts when halfwits, including the halfwit-in-chief, say "They're trying to kill us."
No, if they were trying to kill us they'd be called murderists. They are trying to scare us, which is why they are called terrorists.
:inserts tongue in cheek: Funny thing is, the Republican party seems to have a vested interest in keeping people as scared as possible. Does that make them a terrorist organization? :/inserts tongue in cheek:
Posted by: BaldApe | November 5, 2007 7:24 PM
FYI:
Nance was just a guest on "To The Point" with Warren Olney on NPR:
WWW.kcrw.com
Another guest made a point that just *demonstrating* waterboarding my be illegal since you cannot consent to torture.
Posted by: KeithB | November 6, 2007 3:45 PM