IN DEFENSE OF WATERBOARDING

IN DEFENSE OF WATER BOARDING

Stay with me on this one.

I recently had a conversation with a good friend, a former Special Forces medic who told me a story from back in the day at Fort Bragg. He and another medic were called into a tent where SF candidates were undergoing standard SF training for resisting the enemy if captured—harassment, physical abuse, sleep deprivation—you know, the usual, which also included a procedure which had not yet been named. Each candidate was held down on his back, a towel was placed over his face, and water was repeatedly poured over the towel. The response feels exactly like drowning, a simple equation of too much water, not enough air, and panic follows, always, without failure. My friend was asked to judge whether the applicants were medically fit for duty, which they were, without exception. The only serious damage apparently had been wounded egos, because each had broken, panicked, tapped out, gave it up, and they were embarrassed and very angry.

His story flashed me back to a similar one of my own, from even further back in the day, during the 1960s when I was a life guard in Daytona Beach, Florida. For an 18-year-old male, work didn’t get any better than that for obvious social reasons. But it was not a job for the timid—we often had rough seas, quick run outs, tourists who could not swim, and days with multiple rescues, some of which held the margin of life or death, but we were well trained, well disciplined, and that was our job.

You could work as a beach guard (and collect your $320.00 per month) without becoming a member of the inner circle of the corps, a membership which required a 12-hour, testosterone-driven, abusive initiation which included, but was not limited to, chugging beer, running until puking, being beaten, buried in the sand, punched, kicked, and generally brutalized until dawn, when things turned really ugly. Facing the rising sun, everyone swam out to sea for perhaps a mile, where began the dangerous end of the ritual. Once there, each recruit was surrounded by 5 or 6 seasoned guards who began grabbing and pushing the recruit under water, repeating the procedure each time your head broke the water’s surface, usually without an opportunity to get a breath of air, and on it went until you panicked, the very worst thing to do in a drowning situation. In my case, I panicked and then went to the next predictable stage in the death-by-drowning process. Somewhere my oxygen-deprived brain decided that remaining under water was calm, tranquil, more tolerable than continuing the struggle, so I stayed there, drifted toward the bottom until one of the guys dove down, grabbed my arm, pulled me up, dragged me to the boat, and draped my arms over the side; but I was too out of it to hold on, so they put me in the boat and took me to shore, where I was proclaimed the most fun of any initiate for some time.

Later that same summer, during the next initiation, a new guard was deprived of oxygen for 6 to 8 minutes and suffered permanent brain damage according to examining physicians. That was the last summer the “Old Corp”, as it was later called with admiration, had an initiation at sea.

My point: being abusively reckless in the water can kill someone, but water boarding is not dangerous if conducted by professionals in a controlled situation.

But our national water boarding/torture crisis creates a dangerous rub when it comes to matters of policy. One form of torture cannot definitionally be different from any other. If we decide that water boarding is torture, and if our nation uses water boarding, then we condone torture. In the shadows, the exception always becomes the rule, so I ask, if we call water boarding torture, can the hand-cranked generator with the genital clips be far behind?

Dr.Huesos is an unrepentant New Leftist who rebuilds old Harleys