“I Begged for Them to Stop”: Waterboarding Americans and the Redefinition of Torture
from TomDispatch:
I Begged for Them to Stop
Waterboarding Americans and the Redefinition of Torture
By Nick Turse
Try to remain calm -- even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race. Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation. Try not to think about dying, because theres nothing you can do about it, because youre tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately. Youre helpless. Youre in agony.
In short, youre a victim of water torture. Or the water cure. Or the water rag. Or the water treatment. Or tormenta de toca. Or any of the other nicknames given to the particular form of brutality that today goes by the relatively innocuous term waterboarding.
The practice only became widely known in the United States after it was disclosed that the CIA had been subjecting suspected terrorists to it in the wake of 9/11. More recently, cinematic depictions of waterboarding in the award-winning film
Zero Dark Thirty and questions about it at the Senate confirmation hearing for incoming CIA chief John Brennan have sparked debate. Water torture, however, has a surprisingly long history, dating back to at least the fourteenth century. It has been a U.S. military staple since the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was employed by Americans fighting an independence movement in the Philippines. American troops would continue to use the brutal tactic in the decades to come -- and during the countrys repeated wars in Asia, they would be victims of it, too.
Water Torture in Vietnam
For more than a decade, Ive investigated atrocities committed during the Vietnam War. In that time, Ive come to know people who employed water torture and people who were brutalized by it. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies regularly used it on enemy prisoners and civilian detainees in an effort to gain intelligence or simply punish them. A picture of the practice even landed on the front page of the
Washington Post on January 21, 1968, but mostly it went on in secret. .............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175653/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_hidden_history_of_water_torture/