Waterboarding is torture

Malcolm Nance is a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego.

His post on waterboarding at Small Wars Journal should be required reading for every American.

Comments

[fishbane]

That is a great article. There are some real winners in the comments thread, though. Aside from the outright apologists, there was one poster that kept emphasizing the need to find the middle ground in the debate.

[Fitz]

Waterboarding is torture.

Yes it is.

Excellent article. One of the latest elisions about waterboarding is that "navy Seals" do it. Well... they trust the person holding them under to let them up. (I guess my Brother used to "waterboard" me when we went to the pool as kids)

This is not "sensation of drownding"...it is drownding.

[Michael Hussey]

This article is long but people need top read it. Democrats should have Nance testify about waterboarding. More bloggers need to link this article.

[Margalis]

Sadly the reality is that no AG under Bush will declare Waterboarding illegal. You guys ever read the Ironic Times? They put it well:

"Bush Pick for Attorney General Headed for Confirmation
Mukasey last piece in puzzle keeping Bush, Cheney from firing squad."

No AG picked by Bush is going to turn around and call Bush a criminal.

[chowderhead]

Aside from the fact that torture is a war crime the official sanctioning of torture results in the weakening of national will. The failure of national resolve is exactly what conservatives see as the great weakness of the Untied States. Napoleon said "Even in war moral power is to physical as three parts out of four." Go read the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, now, what rhymes with torture?

[cfrost]

I see Nance's article mentions that former GOP congressman and present MSNBC gasbag Joe Scarborough apparently gets a throb in his codpiece when contemplating waterboarding. By Scarborough's logic then waterboarding might help shed some light on how his conressional aid Lori Klausutis' corpse wound up in his office?

[pecunium]

I read it. I linked to it.

I couldn't manage the comments (the article itself isn't that long), because I have been engaged in a couple of heated debates on it (I think I'm getting a letter in the Oregonian refuting their idjit columnist who says those who oppose torture are immoral).

Middle ground? What middle ground? Nance says there's no middle ground, how can one find the stones to tell him he needs to find a middle ground?

[Interrobang]

Am I the only person in the left blogosphere who didn't like that article? I thought it was rambling, needlessly discursive, badly-written, and undermined its own points several times with editorialising. If you're going to argue a case like that, you need to stay well clear of emotional appeals and personal opinions (not personal experiences, which are different), because that just gives your opponents the opportunity to claim you're mistaken in your beliefs, and then you're down to arguing over taste and smell.

I thought the author had some great points, and then proceeded to shoot himself in the foot repeatedly with Theodore Dreiser-esque moralising. Fix the occasional usage mistake and "schoolgirl syntax," cut a lot of the editorialising out of it, run it at about three quarters of the length at which it actually appeared, and it would have been a great article.