I listen to a lot of talk radio.

[misterx]

I listen to a lot of talk radio, aka "right wing" talk radio. I used to listen to it mainly on lunchbreak and on the drive home. I now also listen to it on the drive in, since my local radio station filled the gap left by Imus with Bill Bennett.

I know others who also listen to these programs, and parrot the content back faithfully as fact. I find it disturbing, because some of these folks consider themselves independent thinkers. They have uncovered the truth of the matter, by cleverly listening to talk radio. I like to take it with a grain of salt myself.

It is in that spirit that Sean Hannity's flippant cheerfulization of waterboarding got to bothering me. "You put a rag over someone's face, and pour water on it, and it simulates drowning." I'm paraphrasing, but that doesn't sound so bad. Heck, I remember being a kid, lying in the tub, and pulling a wet washcloth over my face. I could see how it could be a little spooky if someone was splashing you, but it wasn't torture. Yet... why the big fuss then? Of course, that is what Bush/Cheney and the talk radio folks are arguing, "What's the big deal with pouring some water on a guy?"

"Simulated drowning", I keep hearing that phrase a lot, sometimes coupled with the word "harmless".

Here's an excerpt from someone with an educated and strongly opposing viewpoint:

"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. ... 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."

--Malcolm Nance, former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE)

I find the following article well thought out, you should give it a read:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/

Another article, with testimony from a victim of waterboarding at the hands of the Japanese, can be found here:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_mallick/20061106.html

Food for thought.

Luckily I post mostly late at night, so it's easily ignored.

Comments

[astaciamorrigen.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had never heard of that. I think it sounds awful and tortorous though and should never be allowed to be used- ever- anywhere.

[gillyg.livejournal.com]

That is just horrific. My father went to a funeral last week of someone who was a prisoner of the Japanese and weighed just 5 stones when he was released. He never spoke about his time as a POW, but one can only imagine the horrors he experienced.

[zeppo-marx.livejournal.com]

Frankly, it astounded me that people tried to pass it off as anything less than torture. I mean, would they be using it as an interrogation method if it didn't work? And what does it take to break a zealot? Put your answers to those two questions together, and the assumption has to be that there is more going on than splashing a little water on the face.

[rupestur.livejournal.com]

Man... that's creepy. And then they give it an innocent-sounding name like waterboarding. I had to do a big research paper on torture a couple of years ago... and since all that research, I've not really wanted to know anything else!

I used to listen to lots of right wing talk radio, for kicks. I have to say, my favorite nutjob was probably Michael Savage.

[misterx.livejournal.com]

I saw that too, but had a couple thoughts. 1) He knows he isn't going to be harmed, and he can say when it stops. 2) Any real interrogation isn't going to be that friendly.

[xmurphyjacobsx.livejournal.com]

Over and over, intelligence agencies and experienced operatives say that torture produces inferior, compromised or completely false information. There's no reason for someone under torture to believe that anything they say will stop the torment, unless they manage to say whatever magical phrase their tormentors want to hear.

The Spanish Inquisition, anyone? It did such great things for Christianity, after all...

[misterx.livejournal.com]

Good point... here's a quote from the first article:
"He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know including the truth. They rarely stopped. In torture, he confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a Buddhist Monk, a Catholic Bishop and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French."