05-25-2009, 12:25 AM
Quote: The thought of being locked in a room with hundreds of rats, or biting insects might be "torturous" to someone who is extremely fearful, however once conditioned to "not be afraid" you might even be stung or bit numerous times without "freaking out". The same is true of water boarding. Taking a radio host, or a DOD official, who has not been so pre-conditioned is hardly proof or disproof of what I said. Many soldiers who might find themselves in enemy hands are pre-conditioned to resist torture, including water boarding. They might be a better test case to validate my claims, wouldn't you think?
Well, I probably should have included a ";)" in my previous reference to you, since it was meant semi-humorously.:)
That said, I simply do not believe that you or anyone else, however well-trained, can resist the panic or fear that comes from being waterboarded. I'm sure it's a physiological response that is simply beyond any kind of voluntary (conscious or unconscious) control. The whole purpose behind many of these techniques is to use the response of the victim against him (or her) self. (But I certainly do not want you to try and prove me, or anyone else wrong about that, so we just have to leave it as a point of disagreement.)
Unconsciousness is also not going to be too much help, at least according to the transcript here from a Fillpino lawyer who was waterboarded into unconsciouness by the Japanese during WWII (though it sounds like they were not too proficient at using the procedure to inflict severe pain).
And, since I might as well get these off my chest, two more comments on the Bush administration's use of torture (which is the issue that concerns me).
First, despite all the attention that waterboarding has received (mainly, I'd say, because it's so unequivocally a method of torture) I'm not at all convinced it was the worst part of how US prisoners were treated. The use of prolonged stress positions (which, I believe were developed on the theory that having the victim's body inflict pain on itself was helpful in creating submission and a sense of helplessness), isolation, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, etc. etc. may well have longer and worse harmful effects than waterboarding, as bad as that is. Simply because they're more psychologically sophisticated techniques of inflicting suffering than the pulling out of finger nails, does not mean they're not torture. I suspect that if the Bush administration had it to do all over again they might've left out waterboarding as a permitted technique in order to preserve a more plausible deniability of torture.
It's also worth pointing out that several of the detainees in the secret prisions told the Red Cross that suppositories were placed in their anus when they were stripped and inspected, so it seems quite possible that the CIA did try to use some kind of drugs, though I doubt we'll ever be able to confirm that one way or the other. It may be that since, unlike waterboarding (or pulling out fingernails), the use of psychotropic drugs is explicitly listed in the US torture legislation, they were careful about what they did there.
Second, these types of interrogation methods were not restricted to just a few "high-value" detainees. Leaving aside Abu Ghraib (which, despite Cheney's assertions, was surely not a few bad apples run amuck, supposing that apples could run) innocent people in Guantanamo were --- I'll resort to euphemisms here -- treated harshly. Like Murat Kurnaz, whose only "crime" appears to have been to travel to Pakistan to study Islam.
I find the overall lack of outrage in the US at the innocent people who have been hurt in the slash-and-burn, "lose-hearts-and-alienate-minds" policies of the Bush administration almost more astonishing than the arguments about whether waterboarding et. al. really is torture. It's as if whatever happens to "them" does not matter to "us".