Quote: First Amongst Daves said: "Break a detainee"? "Exposure to heat and cold"? Efforts to convince someone they are drowning? This is all acceptable to a government?
Today's Wall St. Journal points out that our soldiers are subjected to "efforts to convince someone they are drowning" as part of the their training:
It turns out to be "waterboarding," a rare interrogation technique reportedly used against the hardest al Qaeda detainees. The method involves immobilizing a detainee and inducing a feeling of suffocation. The Post says it should be banned both as torture and contrary to the U.S. Constitution. That's certainly worth debating, though the Post may get an argument from U.S. servicemen who've endured the waterboard as part of training to resist interrogation--proof that, if practiced properly, it does no lasting physical harm.
There's also last week's ABC News report that 11 of 12 captured al Qaeda kingpins who have talked only did so after being waterboarded. This would appear to contradict so many glib suggestions, such as those in an open letter yesterday from Congressmen calling themselves the New Democrat Coalition, that such techniques "just plain don't work." The truth is that sometimes they do work.
