A belated post about waterboarding
Jun. 14th, 2009 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaIt's torture.
Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture
(My emphasis.
I got this via Media Matters for America--they watch the right-wing idiots so that we don't have to. They have two videos of Mancow--of the waterboarding and his short interview after.)
Why is this important enough to bring up a month after it was originally covered? Why do I think you might want to hear about this, or watch the videos (which I do recommend)?
I bring this up because the apologists for the recently ended torture regime have, as part of their discourse, deliberately tried to take advantage of our mental image of torture as a medieval legacy. The prototype image of torture in most American's minds is, I suspect, overt physical brutality--whippings or hot pokers or Iron Maidens, practices which break bones and rend flesh and draw blood and leave jagged visible scars. But every schoolboy (and I suspect most schoolgirls) knows of a legendary torture that does none of those things--"the Chinese Water Torture", which was never Chinese--it was first described by a Renaissance Italian, was given that name by Houdini or one of his contemporaries, and is known as "the Spanish Water Torture" in parts of Europe. Waterboarding was used by the Spanish Inquisition. Modern torture states prefer to focus on tortures which leave no visible damage, or at least no broken bones. Beatings with rubber hoses--very painful but leaving shallow bruises which fade quickly are commonplace. Stalin's favorite technique was "The Conveyor", in which a victim was harassed constantly by rotating teams of interrogators, for days or even weeks at a time, with no sleep and too little food and water--this doesn't even leave bruises, just deep emotional trauma. *
The techniques described in the torture memos were developed by torture regimes of the twentieth century to extract false confessions from prisoners but leave them presentable to the International Red Cross.
And that's why it's important to watch things like Mancow's experiment. If you watch it, it looks like not much. He would come out more wet from a log flume ride. But here's a person who wanted, very much to refute a claim he thought was ludicrous and harmful to his nation (and to look strong in the process) and seven seconds later he's throwing his cow and saying, "this is absolutely torture". People need to be shown, to see, that torture didn't stop with the rack and the bastinado; torturers move into the future, too.
*A footnote, as a commonplace--I keep coming back to this. This is quoted from the BBC's article "The real victims of sleep deprivation":
Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, was tortured by the KGB as a young man. In his book, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, he wrote of losing the will to resist when deprived of sleep.
Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture
[Conservative talk radio host] Erich "Mancow" Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboarding live on his show.
Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on -- actually it was head down, while restrained and reclining.
"I want to find out if it's torture," Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.
[...]
Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.
"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."
(My emphasis.
I got this via Media Matters for America--they watch the right-wing idiots so that we don't have to. They have two videos of Mancow--of the waterboarding and his short interview after.)
Why is this important enough to bring up a month after it was originally covered? Why do I think you might want to hear about this, or watch the videos (which I do recommend)?
I bring this up because the apologists for the recently ended torture regime have, as part of their discourse, deliberately tried to take advantage of our mental image of torture as a medieval legacy. The prototype image of torture in most American's minds is, I suspect, overt physical brutality--whippings or hot pokers or Iron Maidens, practices which break bones and rend flesh and draw blood and leave jagged visible scars. But every schoolboy (and I suspect most schoolgirls) knows of a legendary torture that does none of those things--"the Chinese Water Torture", which was never Chinese--it was first described by a Renaissance Italian, was given that name by Houdini or one of his contemporaries, and is known as "the Spanish Water Torture" in parts of Europe. Waterboarding was used by the Spanish Inquisition. Modern torture states prefer to focus on tortures which leave no visible damage, or at least no broken bones. Beatings with rubber hoses--very painful but leaving shallow bruises which fade quickly are commonplace. Stalin's favorite technique was "The Conveyor", in which a victim was harassed constantly by rotating teams of interrogators, for days or even weeks at a time, with no sleep and too little food and water--this doesn't even leave bruises, just deep emotional trauma. *
The techniques described in the torture memos were developed by torture regimes of the twentieth century to extract false confessions from prisoners but leave them presentable to the International Red Cross.
And that's why it's important to watch things like Mancow's experiment. If you watch it, it looks like not much. He would come out more wet from a log flume ride. But here's a person who wanted, very much to refute a claim he thought was ludicrous and harmful to his nation (and to look strong in the process) and seven seconds later he's throwing his cow and saying, "this is absolutely torture". People need to be shown, to see, that torture didn't stop with the rack and the bastinado; torturers move into the future, too.
*A footnote, as a commonplace--I keep coming back to this. This is quoted from the BBC's article "The real victims of sleep deprivation":
Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, was tortured by the KGB as a young man. In his book, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, he wrote of losing the will to resist when deprived of sleep.
In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.
I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them.
He did not promise them their liberty; he did not promise them food to sate themselves. He promised them - if they signed - uninterrupted sleep! And, having signed, there was nothing in the world that could move them to risk again such nights and such days.
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Date: 2009-06-15 03:00 am (UTC)(BTW, would you mind putting this post behind an lj-cut? Thanks.
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