11.09.07
Another who underwent waterboarding calls it torture
It really seems pretty clear that waterboarding is torture—clear, that is, to all but a few: Cheney, Fox News, Bush, Judge Mukasey, … From Dan Froomkin today:
Josh White writes in The Washington Post: “A former Navy survival instructor subjected to waterboarding as part of his military training told Congress yesterday that the controversial tactic should plainly be considered torture and that such a method was never intended for use by U.S. interrogators because it is a relic of abusive totalitarian governments.
“Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a counterterrorism specialist who taught at the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school in California, likened waterboarding to drowning and said those who experience it will say or do anything to make it stop, rendering the information they give nearly useless. . . .
“Unlike attorney general nominee Michael B. Mukasey, who called the technique repugnant but declined to say whether it is torture, Nance said unequivocally that waterboarding is a long-standing form of torture used by history’s most brutal governments, including those of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia.”
Jack said,
10 November 2007 at 3:54 am
I have to say that I’m glad to be living in a country with more human and humane values than those of the United States.