Waterboarding

revel wrote:

cjhsa wrote:

Personally I find waterboarding to be an effective parenting technique.

Please tell me you are joking however untastefully? Surely you do not use waterboarding on any children you may have? If you are not joking; I hope someone is able to track down your identity and report you to the authorities.

Get over yourself.

I do think most terrorists are the result of very bad parenting, however, and that for them, this is a highly effective refresher course.

Personally I find waterboarding to be an effective parenting technique.

For the record, I don't waterboard my kids, not even my wife!

Now, as far as Walter goes, I understand that Germans have had it pounded into their heads since WWII an the horror of the holocaust that racism in any form cannot be tolerated. So, why are they and so much of Europe bending over backwards to accomodate the worst racists of all, Islamofascists? I hate to tell you this Walt, but they hate you. They want you dead, and your culture destroyed. And, believe it or not, they hate Jews even more than Nazi Germany....

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

For the record, I don't waterboard my kids, not even my wife!

For the record, I don't waterboard my kids, not even my wife!

Now, as far as Walter goes, I understand that Germans have had it pounded into their heads since WWII an the horror of the holocaust that racism in any form cannot be tolerated. So, why are they and so much of Europe bending over backwards to accomodate the worst racists of all, Islamofascists? I hate to tell you this Walt, but they hate you. They want you dead, and your culture destroyed. And, believe it or not, they hate Jews even more than Nazi Germany....

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Uh, "males with issues". ROTFLMFAO!!!!

Ex-Navy Instructor Promises to Hit Back If Attacked on Torture
By Spencer Ackerman - November 7, 2007, 2:11PM

Malcolm Nance, good-spirited though he is, is a pugnacious guy. Nearly 20 years' service in the Navy, including time instructing would-be Navy SEALs how to resist and survive torture if captured. Intelligence and counterterrorism expert. Several years in Iraq as a security contractor. So don't expect him to suffer in silence if his credibility is attacked during testimony to a House panel tomorrow about his personal experiences with waterboarding.

"God forbid if there's even the slightest hint about my credentials," Nance says over tea in a Washington coffee shop. "You will see a spectacle on C-Span. I'll impugn [my attacker's] credibility in public. Let's see him give 20 years in the military, give up his family life, and then he can come talk. If not, shut the hell up."

Nance has become newly controversial for writing on the counterinsurgency/counterterrorism blog Small Wars Journal about his experiences teaching waterboarding for the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program. He's been subjected to the procedure personally, and unequivocally called it torture in a much-discussed post. Subsequently, a House Judiciary subcommittee contacted him during a business trip in the Middle East and asked him to testify at a hearing on so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques that kicks off tomorrow morning.

Since he wrote the post, however, a number of comments have appeared on conservative blogs questioning Nance's military service record. (Small Wars Journal had to delete a number of particularly ad hominem comments.) Nance doesn't want to dignify the attacks -- "it's vet-versus-vet warfare," he laments. But he says he heard from a staffer for the Democratic majority on the committee that a Republican aide has been "questioning my credentials" to members in preparation for the hearing. In response, Nance sent the committee "17 years' worth of evaluations" from the Navy and told staffers how to find more material if needed. Emphatic about not getting swiftboated, he warns would-be assailants, "I'll chew your ass out."

Assuming that Nance gets through the hearing without having his integrity dragged through the mud, subcommittee members will get an earful about the unacceptability of reverse-engineering SERE torture-resistance techniques in order to design torture regimens to use on detainees in the war on terrorism.

"Our body of experience shows a friendly approach is most successful" in interrogation, Nance says. SERE's historical memory goes back to the French and Indian Wars in understanding torture methods that captured U.S. troops might face and devising strategies to resist them. He relates the story of Hans Joachim Scharff, a master Luftwaffe interrogator who spurned abusive techniques used by the Gestapo (also, interestingly, termed"enhanced interrogation") in favor of rapport-building. Scharff's legendary success is still studied by U.S. interrogators. Unfortunately, he says, "after Guantanamo, I thought, how can anyone at SERE ever teach the Geneva Conventions again?"

A trove of accumulated institutional familiarity with torture led to a slide that Nance shares, from an old (and unclassified) SERE PowerPoint presentation to trainees. It asks outright, "Why Is Torture The Worst Interrogation Method?" The first answer: "Produces Unreliable Information."

Nance remarks, "Two centuries of knowledge were thrown out the window" when the administration decided after 9/11 that, to use Cofer Black's famous phrase, "the gloves come off." What administration officials mistakenly thought, Nance says, is that "these were actually gloves, not empirical data. Dude, it's not a glove. It's a fact. But they thought it was one more tool in the tool box."

The result, Nance says, is that al-Qaeda now has, essentially, its own SERE school in U.S. detention facilities, as released detainees have given numerous accounts of their interrogations. What's more, he warns that the world is about to see an uptick in the use of torture as "cops in Bogota, everyone" now believes that the U.S. has lent torture its imprimatur -- or, at least, isn't in a credible position to criticize foreign countries' human rights abuses. He says he's testifying in part to help his old comrades in SERE, which he sees as a vital tool for training U.S. troops. "SERE needs to be increased," Nance insists, "but what needs to be stopped is the transfer of SERE techniques to official interrogations."

When rational argument fails bring up 9/11. Typically conserative rational.

I call jumping out the 100th floor of a burning building torture. What do you call it?