Senator Kit Bond: Waterboarding is "like swimming"
DeanJ says: "If Senator Bond invites you over for an afternoon pool party you really should make other plans."
Gwen Ifill (PBS Newshour host): "Do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?"LinkSenator Kit Bond: "There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point."
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Sounds effective. I mean, what better way to get someone to cough up information than take them swimming?
Poor Kit Bond. He should have thought before he used that analogy. What he meant to say is apparently that waterboarding and swimming are both things that you can do in a lot of different ways.
But the way he said it, people's eyeballs turn off after "it's like swimming."
http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/SwimmingYoure128420468197115000.jpg
(image taken without permission from http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/11/15/18461482.php )
oh for pitys sake... sure its like swimming--like swimming back to land after a shipwreck, not paddling around in your country club pool, numb nuts!
At my YMCA, new swimmers practice swimming with a Styrofoam kick board. Could it be that Kit Bond thinks (duh?) that this is what the CIA is doing?
I remember swimming when I was a little kid, and these big kids held my head under water for a long time and then finally let me get a small breath and did it again and again and again. Jesus, that was torture.
I have a simple solution to the torture debate: I will endorse any technique that these morons in the Senate, House, Justice Dept., and Oval Office will allow to be done on the (unsuspecting) family member of their choice.
It has to be unsuspecting, because part of the suffering inflicted by waterboarding is BELIEVING YOUR GOING TO BE DROWNED!
Yes and a car battery wired to your genitalia is like electrolysis.
Don
Clearly the Analogy Police need to be called on Senator Bond, but it's he second half of his statement that intrigues me: "The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point."
Could someone who knows what he's talking about please enlighten me? I'm a little concerned that we are apparently also torturing non-prisoners in some capacity.
Apparently Senator Bond thinks waterboarding is similar to surfboarding or something. Methinks the Senator should receive a personal introduction to the technique to clarify his understanding.
Why does no one ever ask:
"How would you feel if a member of your family was captured, held hostage and waterboarded?
Would that be considered torture?
Would you be fine with that?"
Johnnyweird, apparently being exposed to some "enhanced interrogation" techniques is part of special forces training, to help prepare you to resist torture in the event you are captured.
No, you don't need to believe you are going to be drowned. Your body will react to the waterboarding no matter what. I have been waterboarded during military training. It was a training excercise...there were medical personnel right there... Your body still tenses up and freaks out even though you know it will be over soon and that they aren't going to kill you.
It sounded to me like Bond was saying there are different ways of doing it just like there are different ways of swimming. Crappy analogy, but he wasn't comparing being waterboarded to taking a swim. At least that's not my take.
That said, I don't agree with it's use as an enterogation tactic.
Thank you, Woolie. Is that how these practices have found their way into our own interrogation process? Through these special forces operatives?
JohnnyWeird-- Senator Bond is using a pretty common rhetorical device when he says "waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through."
He's trying to say that, because our CIA agents or special forces soldiers are put through something similar---in controlled conditions and with their own permission--that us bleeding hearters need to shut up and stop whining cause it's not so bad. We're just wimps.
You see the same argument with the use of tasers by police: "We tried it on ourselves and we turned out fine."
And to be really academic, he's then using Apophasis by saying "but that's beside the point"---he's bringing up a issue and then saying that it's not worthwhile to debate. So why mention it in the first place?!
JohnnyWeird---Great questions. We apparently developed out enhanced interrogation techniques by reverse engineering what our servicemen were taught to *resist* in the event of capture during the Cold War:
NY Times: Soviet-Style ‘Torture’ Becomes ‘Interrogation’
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/weekinreview/03shane.html?ref=weekinreview
Do you feel like swimming?
Yes, right now.
I know a way to swim all the way downtown.
/Sandman
Part of what gets people so angry about this stuff is the hypocrisy of it all: the euphemisms for torture, the assertions that it's legal, the comparisons to frat pranks.
Why don't they just come out and say, "Yep, it's torture, but they're baddies, so we feel no remorse"?
Shouldn't he have said "Waterboarding is like [i]not being able[/i] to swim?
I'm not sure why this is so difficult. In our country Assault is defined as "any intentional display of force such as would give the victim reason to fear or expect immediate bodily harm." Assault may occur without touching. If touching occurs, then its Assault and Battery. Are we allowed to Assault and Batter POWs or enemy combatants? (for those more familiar with the Hague/Geneva conventions than myself). Somebody help me out here . . .
Also, kicking ignorant politicians in the crotch, hard and repeatedly, is not unlike petting a kitten. It brings one feelings of peace and, if not exactly true love, a reasonable facsimile thereof.
At least that's what I read on the internets, and when has it ever lied to me?
#13 "No, you don't need to believe you are going to be drowned. Your body will react to the waterboarding no matter what."
Right. Now add to the physical stress the psychic stress that comes from really believing you're going to drown.
Part of the problem, it seems to me, comes from comparing the experience of military trainess (and I'm certainly not underestimating the severity of that experience) to that a detainee undergoes, which has to be worse.
The detainee isn't being trained. He's not being pranked. And he's not participating in a demonstration. He's alone with his interrogators in a cell, far from any aid, and has no reason to believe he will ever emerge alive or even uninjured.
Poor Kit Bond. He should have thought before he used that analogy. What he meant to say is apparently that waterboarding and swimming are both things that you can do in a lot of different ways.
But the way he said it, people's eyeballs turn off after "it's like swimming."
*Light bulb*
Oh now I get it! He's essentially saying that waterboarding is like a box of chocolates...
I can't stand the denial from US senators and congress members, that this doesn't constitute as torture. I want them to experience it first and then still claim it wasn't torture!
FFS, use those grey cells in your minds, and think for once, congress-critters.
So, does that mean that waterboarding is also like riding a bicycle, if it's being employed by those who still remember it from their days in training?
All of these torture apologists who keep going on about how this or that technique is fairly mild, or perhaps just a bit "torture-ish" are oh-so-conveniently overlooking that all forms of torture, even torture-lite, are expressly forbidden. And for good reason.
I think the solution is simple: any politician* advocating torture (or "enhanced interrogation" or whatever they call it) should be forced to experience it themselves and then we'll see whether they stand by their statements.
*) Since I'm from Germany, I'd especially like to see this approach used on our Secretary of the Interior, Wolfgang "Stasi 2.0" Schäuble.
"Also, kicking ignorant politicians in the crotch, hard and repeatedly, is not unlike petting a kitten. It brings one feelings of peace and, if not exactly true love, a reasonable facsimile thereof.
At least that's what I read on the internets, and when has it ever lied to me?"
May the Lord God bless you, Halloween Jack.
Was it *McCain*, a firm republican, who pointed out that Japanese officers used to be *hung* for waterboarding by the Japanese government during WWII? Please follow up if I'm wrong.
The republican platforms during this election are more closely matching the phrase "a wretched hive of scum and villainy" every day. I believe this to be an empirical statement.
Every time one of these brighter lights talks about torture methods, I keep getting reminded about the banality of evil. It isn't the horrific horned demon Satan or Grendel or any other dramatic monster that commits the worst sins against humanity, but the petty little bureaucrat just doing his assigned job.
When everyone accepts that it's just another job to torture confessions out of people, how soon before will we be back into the Medevial ages when people were being tortured to confess sins because it was better that they die on the rack and confess resulting in banishment to purgatory than to let them die unrepentant because then their soul would burn in hell forever.
Aside from the moral repugnance that everyone (except the people in the US who take decisions) feels about this technique, I always assumed that the major reason for not using torture on prisoners was that it is ineffective. If your prisoner has no useful information and will tell you anything in order to have the torture stop, the information thus obtained is likely to be dodgy to say the least.
Maybe people who don't feel that this technique is wrong, who can square their consciences with detaining people without the right of a trial or even to know why they have been detained, who endorse kidnapping rather than the due process in order to extradite people accused of crimes... maybe there is no humanity or better nature to appeal to there... maybe there is a chance that the ineffectiveness of torture as a way of obtaining information, might sway them instead?
I don't think there are many people who could endure this torture without trying to give their interrogators something to stop them... the idea that innocent people may be implicated by other innocent people because the US allows the use of torture is terrible.
In the week when Adel Hamad has been released, an innocent man incarcerated for no good reason for years in Guantanamo Bay, I think the US population needs to start standing up for the Christian ideals it putports to represent to the rest of the world.
DEAR GOD! Why are they being so stupid on this?
Pop Quiz: What is the training that military folks go through that includes Waterboarding?
TORTURE CAMP
my first wife said she wanted a divorce due to mental torture. she would have said anything for that divorce (see torture works). so i escalated to physical torture (tied up in basement with lights and music blasting for 24 hours). For some reason law enforcement thought it was torture and if i had only been smart enough to have rudy g as my lawyer, would have gotten off.