How we know waterboarding is torture

December 27, 2007

Via Boing Boing we have yet another volunteer journalism account of waterboarding from the Straight Dope message board:

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.
[ I Waterboard! ]

Now, I take all of these waterboarding demonstrations with a grain of salt because I know that — especially in an “official” demonstration — waterboarding can be done a number of ways. Some ways can make it seem less than a prank, others can throw you into desperate, mortal, existential panic. We already know which method is used to train American service members, though, and the “controlled drowning” method surely sounds terrifying. The other reason not to put too much stock into any description of voluntary waterboarding is that you can’t simulate the difference between volunteering to do something and being forced to undergo the same treatment, especially after long periods of other “enhanced interrogation measures.”

But we don’t even need these demonstrations to understand that waterboarding is torture and not some sort of mildly unpleasant frat ritual. Here’s the thing: if waterboarding is effective — that is, it gets the subject to talk — then it has to be physically unpleasant and scary enough to do so. If waterboarding is not sufficiently unpleasant, then it is not effective.

Those on the “not torture” side say it’s not really torture, it’s just a bit of water. If that’s true, it’s mindless, banal, stupid cruelty that doesn’t even work and we ought not do it because it’s a waste of time and resources. If that’s not true, then it is actually torture and we have moral, legal, and self-interest reasons we shouldn’t do it. We simply shouldn’t be waterboarding people, or making them stand in “stress positions,” or depriving them of sleep, or any of those other things a reasonable person would call “torture.” And that really ought to be the end of the discussion.

Posted in Politics, Speaking Very Slowly, Terrorism