Waterboarding is torture - I did it myself, says US advisor
As we all know the appointment of Mukasey is being held up by the Democrats because he refuses to say that waterboarding is torture even though he admits that the practice is "repugnant to me".
He has said that he has not been briefed on the secret methods of US interrogators and he did not want to put the CIA officers who used it in "personal legal jeopardy".
In other words, I can't say it's illegal in case we are doing it.
This is typical of how the Bush administration operates and suggests that Mukasey will fit right in if appointed. There are no absolute truths such as "waterboarding is repugnant and constitutes torture" as the President has already said that the US do not engage in torture. Therefore, it is imperative that Mukasey establishes what the CIA have been doing before he states whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture as, if the CIA are doing it, then it can't be torture as the US doesn't torture.
This is the kind of mangled logic that the Bush administration have got the US embroiled in.
However, Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence, has stepped forward to condemn the practice which he has supervised whilst training at the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School in San Diego.
Nance has concluded that "waterboarding is a torture technique – period".
What planet does Mukasey live on that it could even be open to debate as to whether or not such a practice constitutes torture?The practice involves strapping the person being interrogated on to a board as pints of water are forced into his lungs through a cloth covering his face while the victim's mouth is forced open. Its effect, according to Mr Nance, is a process of slow-motion suffocation.
Typically, a victim goes into hysterics on the board as water fills his lungs. "How much the victim is to drown," Mr Nance wrote in an article for the Small Wars Journal, "depends on the desired result and the obstinacy of the subject.
"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. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch."
He obviously lives on planet Bush where such a practice cannot be torture if the US is doing it as the US does not engage in torture. Or perhaps he is living on planet Yoo where a person can only be tortured if the pain they experience is "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
One thing is clear, it used to be taken as a given that the US would not engage in any practice that could be considered torture, since 9-11 that is no longer a given.
Now we have a man being proposed for the role of US Attorney General who can't even say publicly whether or not waterboarding is torture because he has not yet been informed whether or not the CIA are engaging in this barbaric practice.
Who would have thought we would ever end up here?
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