Water Boarding
What’s one good way to tell that waterboarding isn’t nearly as much fun as Dick Cheney claims it is? Not even Steve-O from Jackass has tried it yet. Stick your face into a man-o-war? Check. Scorpions in his underwear? Check. Riding a bike on things that aren’t at all traversible by wheeled vehicles, then dropping hard onto the bike frame with your groin? Check. But so far, they’ve avoided waterboarding. Perhaps because they would be able to handle it so easily—with nary a wince—compared to their other shenanigans that it would be misconstrued as a political statement supporting torture, Dick Cheney and apple pie.
WaterboardingThis article, Waterboarding Video, covers the story of a reporter, Kaj Larsen, who subjected himself to waterboarding and published the video online. The video is available here, Getting Waterboarded (Current.TV), and the uncut 25-minute long version is here, Getting Waterboarded (Uncut). The torture itself is like watching bad porn, in that the production values don’t live up to the expectations engendered by watching 24. The first part of the process is relatively tame—though extremely primitive, with one soldier dipping what appears to be a salad bowl into a large bucket to get more water—and the reporter isn’t even struggling. Mayber it’s because he knows what’s coming (he’d had it done during his basic training years ago) or maybe because they’re taking it easy on him. Watch the video and see if Hollywood hasn’t succeeded in jading you into thinking “whatever, that doesn’t even look so bad” or simply laughing out loud at the sheer cheesiness of it (again, the bad porn thing). He just plain looks too relaxed throughout the ordeal.
Alan Dershowitz weighs in with what he surely feels are pithy arguments for regulating torture—it’s everywhere, everyone does it, no stopping it now, might as well go with the flow. He argues that this accountability, in which the president or some other authority figure must authorize torture, will somehow make it less palatable to those wishing to employ it. Another interviewee wants precise definitions of techniques in the law, though whether that’s to define what’s allowed or what’s not allowed wasn’t all too clear. At the end, after 24 minutes, the reporter comes out laughing and it looks for all the world like they’re trying make it seem like it wasn’t all that bad. When he says that he “felt like he was going to die”, it’s really hard to believe him.
This kind of reporting—with it’s Jackass-style approach—is far more likely to cause torture to gain adherents than lose them. Even if you don’t actually watch the video, the photo above—a full two minutes into the torture—shows the reporter’s hands relaxed and unclenched and one of the soldiers struggling to dump enough water onto the reporter’s mouth, while the other barely has to do anything to hold him down. It’s clearly torture, especially when you think that a lot of the people unfortunate enough to have it done to them haven’t done anything wrong and have no idea what’s coming next. The reporter was never not in control and actually volunteered for it, which changes the psychology of it significantly. It would have been nicer to be able to point a quivering finger a the video and bellow “see?!!??” indignantly, but it just doesn’t deliver the expected visceral punch—even if you already believe that torture is evil and wrong.