"This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like" from The Nation

[grizmaster]

I've been looking for photos of waterboarding all week to show people how brutal it really is. Well look what our CIA and Gitmo guards have in common with the Khmer Rouge.


http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?pid=125306

This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like

The Nation -- As Congress has debated legislation that would set up military tribunals and govern the questioning of suspected terrorists (whom the Bush administration would like to be able to detain indefinitely), at issue has been what interrogation techniques can be employed and whether information obtained during torture can be used against those deemed unlawful enemy combatants. One interrogation practice central to this debate is waterboarding. It's usually described in the media in a matter-of-fact manner. The Washington Post simply referred to waterboarding a few days ago as an interrogation measure that "simulates drowning." But what does waterboarding look like?

You can see here. Jonah Blank, an anthropologist and foreign policy adviser to the Democratic staff of the US Senate, was in Cambodia last month and came across an actual waterboard at a former prison turned into a museum that chronicles the horrors of the

Khmer Rouge regime. Blank took photos of the waterboard and a painting depicting its use. I cannot post photos in this space, but I've published his photos on my own blog at www.davidcorn.com.

<snip>

These photos are important because most of us have never seen an actual, real-life waterboard. The press typically describes it in the most anodyne ways: a device meant to "simulate drowning" or to "make the prisoner believe he might drown." But the Khymer Rouge were no jokesters, and they didn't tailor their abuse to the dictates of the Geneva Convention. They--like so many brutal regimes--made waterboarding one of their primary tools for a simple reason: it is one of the most viciously effective forms of torture ever devised.

[grizmaster]

1. why would the mod move this to the editorial page?

If a discussion of what waterboarding looks like doesn't belong in latest news with the torture bill being debated then I don't know what does.

[CottonBear]

2. See the LBN and general posting rules. Mods are doing their jobs.

Welcome to DU.

[grizmaster]

3. I assume they are

But this is not an editorial, it is only 2 hours old, and while what the Khmer Rouge did is not "latest breaking" the discussion of whether waterboarding is a torture and whether Congress should rubberstamp torture is about as current of a topic as you can get.

I'm not knocking the mods for making a call (I know it can be hellish job when a board gets hopping). I just don't see it in this case. I'll bow to the more experienced hands, but forgive me if I see it a different way.

[OKNancy]

4. Hello - the name of this forum is Editorials and Other Articles

This is an "other article" - not breaking news.
Hope that helps

OKNancy
LBN Moderator

[grizmaster]

8. Just a rookie mistake

Thanks for the tolerance of us beginner swimmers :dunce:

[sharp_stick]

5. What kind of a sick POS

could think up something like this? I've always thought it was kind of interesting that we could live with people that could come up with these devices and methods and not think twice about using them.

[bhikkhu]

6. You say that waterboarding obtains a false confession, or

rather useless "intelligence", and so has no purpose whatsoever. I would disagree, to the extent that this useless intelligence is put to the use of legitimizing the "global war on terror", having been cited as the source of several orange alerts, several successfully dodged terror attacks, and a cause for the continued use of torture.

So we have created something of self-perpetuating machine by our use of torture-induced fantastical confessions.

[grizmaster]

7. It's a sort of despot obssessive-compulsive self-perpetuating cycle

And it's up to us to let the non-demented citizenry know what is really being done in their name

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. You know Corn is showing something important when he gets a DOS attack

at the bottom of his own blog, he says he's had to switch off comments, because one person bombarded the site with 300,000 comments in one night is an attempt to shut it down.