Board of Congress
Waterboarding sounds like an innocent sport that you might take up in Cancun one vacation week. It is not. It is the practice of strapping a subject to a board, covering their head with a hood and slowly pouring water onto their head, into their mouth, up their nose and soon into their lungs. People who have experienced waterboarding compare it to drowning.
Malcolm Nance, a Navy terrorism specialist told Congress yesterday that it was clearly and unequivocally torture. Mr. Nance had experienced it himself as part of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training.
He also felt that it was an ineffective interrogation technique because the questionee will say anything to make it stop. Several Republican members of Congress took exception to this and claimed that it had elicited good information from terrorist suspects already.
I am ashamed that the United States of America has gotten to the place where this kind of hairsplitting goes on. It makes a mockery of those who attacked Bill Clinton for his "it wasn't really sex" position. As a Democratic country we should be edging well away from the precipice of torture rather than lightly walking along the very brink.
I propose (and I mean this) that any Congressperson wishing to support the continued use of waterboarding volunteer to undergo 60 seconds of it under controlled conditions, such as the aviators' SERE school.
Posted on November 13, 2007
