DISTRACTION ABOUT THE DISTRACTION !!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2009/05 ... ction.html
May 29, 2009
By BJ Bjornson

I see a little brouhaha brewing on memeorandum over the possibility that Erich Muller faked his waterboarding for publicity purposes. I wouldn't put it past some people to do exactly that, but I'm not such a fan of torture porn that I would bother to watch the tape and offer an opinion versus the experience of Chris Hitchens. Whether or not Muller actually got waterboarded properly is irrelevant to the debate over whether or not the procedure is torture, but the torture apologists on the right are more than happy to leap upon the possibility to discredit their critics.

As our colleague Jay McDonough noted, the advocates for torture like to keep things focused on waterboarding as it easier to come up with euphemisms to describe it.

It's just a little "splash of water in the face", after all. Kinda like swimming, right? All one has to do has hold their breath. No big deal. But Christopher Hitchens, the Playboy reporter and Mancow can provide video evidence it's nothing at all like swimming or just a splash of water in the face. But the extent to which advocates can minimize waterboarding will, to a great extent, determine how much or how little public outrage there will be against it.

So, I suspect torture advocates are happy to concentrate on the false debate of whether waterboarding is, indeed, torture. Heck, it's easy to come up with swimming metaphors to describe waterboarding.

Imagine trying to come up with euphemisms to describe using a 15 year old detainee, with his wrists bound to his ankles behind his back, as a human mop to soak up his own piss.

Or just think how difficult it would be to invent a nice little euphemism for slicing detainees genitals with a scalpel.


There is also a consistent misconception about just what waterboarding is that helps the advocates for torture defend its use. Michael Merrit at the Poligazette demonstrates that misconception quite well:

Water going directly to the lungs? I think that under most common definitions of the word, that really is drowning.


After all, waterboarding is only supposed to "simulate" drowning, isn't it? Euphemisms are a big part of selling the lie that America wasn't involved in systematic torture of detainees, and for waterboarding, the biggest part of the lie is the term "simulated drowning". Let's go to the Small Wars Journal for a response:

Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) 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.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.