I work with a guy who went to the Air Force Academy, and who was was waterboarded as part of his CERE training. He says it's torture. Good enough?
No.
First off, he's Air Force. A night without cable TV is damn near torture for some of them.
Second, it is SERE.
Third, let me re-emphasize, the differing levels of "stress" considered appropriate by the different branches and different units in those branches. According to many Air Force men (both enlisted and officer) I had the privilege to serve with, many admitted they were ill-served by some of their training and/or acculturation. Some of the few who were really given a quality taste of suck (before SERE) were the AF PJs and Combat Controllers. Those were some good folks to work with, uh-huh.
OTOH, my unit dished out the suck & stress with a liberality that had to be experienced to be believed as a matter of course, even discounting the wall-to-wall counseling(1) that was sometimes required.
What I want is for people who don't think waterboarding is torture to be waterboarded - and not for a measly 6 seconds, but (what was it?) 162 times. If after that they still say it's "just a little dunk" (Cheney's words), I'll accept that.
Then, of course, I'll expect those same people to apologize to the families of the Japanese officers we put in prison, or sent to the gallows, for waterboarding in WWII.
Uh, you are aware that the Japs used a form of waterboarding as different from what our interrogators used as Singaporean caning(2) is from private school paddling? No apology necessary, only an understanding of the facts.
(1) Everything and more (save WB) that was described in the (melodramatically named) "torture memos" was fair game and used before anything got elevated to the wall-to-wall counseling stage. If you became a "leadership challenge" such that WtW was prescribed, Lord help you.
(2) Do do justice to caning, it is not in the least bit likely to be fatal, as opposed to what the Japs did.
Regardless of what people think it should be called, waterboarding is obviously torture so far as the federal laws are concerned.
Uh, no, that is false on its face.
Not only did E-branch lawyer-critters take a good, long, gander at the practice (among others), but the
L-branch folks who wrote the laws were duly briefed on the practice. As we have seen in the press, those who wrote the laws supported its use and did not squawk until it was deemed a useful political weapon against GWB.
