Here’s former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) Malcolm Nance, with a Small Wars Journal entry entitled ”Waterboarding is Torture…Period":

”With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.

[…]

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again.

Read the whole thing.

Back to torture-supporter Cliff May:

"It has been widely reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding and, as a result, he surrendered intelligence that led to the foiling of terrorist plots and the saving of innocent lives. Do you regret that? Would you tell those sworn to protect and defend Americans never to do it again – accepting the consequences of that policy?

We won’t be able to answer such difficult questions unless the moral posturing and partisan maneuvering stop, and a serious debate begins."

What was "widely reported" were the Bush administration's claims that the torture of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad saved lives. Given that the "ticking time-bomb" scenario is purely an argumentative construct for the purpose of justifying torture (and for salving the consciences of people who support torture), and given the Bush gang's consistently strained relationship with the truth, as well as the utter lack of compunction they have shown over stoking Americans' worst fears for the slightest political advantage, I remain extremely skeptical.

In any case, I'd offer that the serious debate over torture has already begun. Malcolm Nance is a part of it. Cliff May is not. Until May and others quit playing rhetorical games around the waterboarding technique, until they recognize that waterboarding is, in fact, torture, and proceed from there, they won't be.

--Matthew Duss