Do unto others

Interesting article about waterboarding in the WaPo today. Did you know that we convicted Japanese war criminals after WW2 for waterboarding? Or that a Texas sheriff and his deputies were prosecuted for waterboarding suspects in 1983?

This is interesting for two reasons. First, it plainly shows the degree to which modern "conservatives" (who nearly all defend the use of waterboarding) stand in stark opposition to the traditional values of the United States.

But it also indicates that waterboarding has long occupied a special place in the universe of interrogation techniques, as the one method of traumatic torture that does not involve massive pain or injury. Practitioners of the technique could always convince themselves that they were merely using fear to extract confessions, and that waterboarding was thus no different from a bright spotlight or a shouting police officer. The thing is, though, it is different, because the human drowning-panic reflex is fundamentally different from any other kind of fear, and is more similar to our reaction to intense agony.

Hopefully, the current ongoing debate over waterboarding will finally close this dirty little loophole.