ISIS hostages were waterboarded

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Damn. I came here just to made that quip and you put it right into the article. pouts

Though I’d love to see how Fox pundits explain how this torture.

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Thanks, Obama!

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Hey, but they don’t have a doctor watching. Cruel bastards!

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Hey, it’s just “enhanced interrogation”, just like in the Civilized World™!

I think this is relevant…

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As long as they weren’t tortured.

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“Doctor”

If this specific aspect of the political/war climate doesn’t polarize ones beliefs about the legitimacy of the tactics used post 9/11 by the US for gathering intelligence, or the intelligence of any group willingly emulating those tactics, than it will surely radicalize them. I don’t remember where I heard or read it yesterday, but one pundit was only concerned about what the consequences of the US previous policy on torture would have on US citizens, and not the effect it would have on the rest of of the world. An angry swarm of wasps doesn’t really care who it stings on it’s way to it’s new nest.

Hey, I didn’t go to Evil Medical School for 7 years just to be called “Doctor”.

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Those barbarians. Where did they learn to commit such atrocities?

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where do you learn the art of decapitation?

Waterboarding should be called controlled drowning. They actually fill the lungs with water, so your body is sending the signal “you’re dying” to your brain. It’s not about inducing pain: it’s about inducing psychological trauma.

They’re drowning you but “save” you just before you finally die (heart attack?)
That’s why they put you on a flipping board: to quickly purge your lungs when they’re loosing you (I doubt they do CPR).

Oh, and in the beginnings the Guantanamo bay inmates were choking with their own vomit: small chunks of food couldn’t be flushed away from their lungs. Too many of them were dying, so no more chunky soup!

Du manger mou for you this week! Lucky you!

PS: If someone waterboarded me and after offered me the choice to rather have my throat slit (after reading a text before a camera), I’ll probably choose the latter.

Was it Sean Hannity who said he’d get waterboarded but never did? Christopher Hitchens actually did it. The video is pretty disturbing.

Do you have a reference for this? I’ve never heard of waterboarding actually filling the victim’s lungs with water. It’s extremely difficult to believe that you could evacuate the lungs anything like quickly enough to maintain consciousness.

My understanding is that the incline of the board helps produce the terror of drowning.

This guy tried it: I waterboard! (referenced here on BoingBoing!)

And recently when waterboarding tape destructions was news (‘Vomiting and screaming’ in destroyed waterboarding tapes) this US Navy trainer said ‘Waterboarding is drowning in a slow, controlled manner’

And for the medical ameliorations of the technique, here’s a snippet from [Medics performed ‘interrogation research’, Human-rights advocacy group alleges major ethics breaches. Nature]

On the basis of this data collection, the report continues, CIA medical personnel replaced water in the waterboarding procedure with saline (salt) solution, to reduce the risk of a detainee contracting pneumonia or developing dangerously low levels of sodium in the blood, which can result from swallowing huge quantities of water. They further modified the procedure by putting detainees on a liquid diet before interrogation, to make them less likely to choke on their own vomit, and introducing a specially designed gurney to move the detainee upright quickly in case of choking.

So it appears that lungs do fill (partially?)

I’m not getting from either source that the lungs fill partially or fully (what does “partial” filling even mean?). What I get is that in the extreme, a small amount of water might be aspirated. The point being that when there is no air in the lungs and you feel water start to go into the trachea, you experience an unimaginable terror. This terror being the goal. The point of the saline being a) if a small amount is aspirated, it is less likely to produce pneumonia than plain water, and b) if large amounts are swallowed, as they are likely to be, it won’t disturb your electrolyte balance.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a completely fucking barbaric thing, and easily meets the standard of torture. I’m just being pedantic and pointing out that filling the lungs with fluid would almost surely result in death, and that that is not what the process is about.

Well… you’re correct, I was confusing lung with respiratory tract. Water filled bronchiole, then.

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