Just waterboard them all!

Following Techsassy's twit on a Playboy video where a reporter let's himself be waterboarded, a thing or two came to mind. First, by reading the comments made by most of the readers of that post, I get the distinct impression that the possibility that at least some of the waterboarded guys are not necessarily terrorists (as in "innocent of the accusations"), never even crosses their minds. The reason why there is a judicial system is because civilized societies have developed this expensive and (in the case of Portugal, at least) time consuming process to determine the guilt of people accused of crimes. In the Middle Ages, which some people for some reason call the "Dark Ages" (imagine ominous music playing while you read those two words), they had a much more expedite process to determine the guilt of people. The suspects' arms and legs would be tied and they would be thrown into a lake. The guilt or innocence would be determined by capacity of the accused to float. Their investigation methods must have been very good at that time because that process usually confirmed the suspicions.

Another thing which came to mind is that what the video demonstrates is, and I can only imagine, a very soft version of the waterboarding technique. For one thing, the reporter had the control of the situation. He could stop whenever he wanted to, which, in that case, was something like after 6 seconds. For some reason I don't think that the nice interrogators in the US Armed Forces would stop after just 6 seconds. Another thing that comes to mind is that only a bit of the process is shown. Terrorism suspects are waterboarded for the acquisition of intel. So I'm going out on a limb here and risk saying that the technique (torture) will be restarted as many times as needed until the subject babbles something that might be of interest to the tort... I mean, "intel acquisition specialists". So, for this demonstration to be closer to reality what should have been done was to try to get him to confess something. And I'm particularly curious to know how many times they would have to waterboard the reporter before getting his confession that he was the guy on the grassy knoll. Not so curious that I'm willing to let myself be waterboarded, mind due. I'm also left wondering how do the interrogators decide that they have the wrong guy. Because both the terrorist and the innocent will surely start by saying they don't know the answers to the questions. Maybe the trick is to see who keeps saying he doesn't know the answers after, let's say, twenty plunges.

Many people argument that waterboarding is not a form of torture because it doesn't inflict physical pain. Without even going into that, I would point out that United Nations Convention Against Torture's definition of torture includes severe mental suffering. I'm only guessing here, but I'd say that if the process is repeated over and over, severe mental suffering is more or less guaranteed. Again I'm guessing, but I'm pretty convinced that the subjects of real waterboarding will almost certainly suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now, I don't want to be unfair to the reporter. His aim was not to replicate the conditions under which terrorism suspects, or any other, are subject to waterboarding. He just wanted to be able to explain as best as possible what does a person who is waterboarded feel. So my own aim with these words is only to debunk the arguments of those who would use this video to argument that waterboarding is not torture.