Oh no, the evil ISIS terrorists are waterboarding! How dare those dastards . . . oops!

Kids, don't try this at home! But I've got some suggestions of blowhards who deserve to undergo a lovely round of waterboarding -- at the hands of professional CIA torturers technicians. (Artwork by Simon Scarr/Reuters Graphic.)

"Critics of waterboarding have said for years that the practice endangered Americans, putting them at risk of being subjected to the same brutal treatment at the hands of the enemy."

-- from "Captives held by Islamic State were
waterboarded" on washingtonpost.com

by Ken

Let's try not to make too big a deal of it, but since the Lying LIars of the Right have taken control of public discourse by screeching lies and delusions at people who are both vastly smarter and more decent than they are, while virtually never being held accountable for their 24/7 barrage of the most grotesque and vile falsehoods, I think we need to pause to consider this news:

Captives held by Islamic State were waterboarded

By Adam Goldman and Julie Tate August 28 at 8:43 PM

At least four hostages held in Syria by the Islamic State, including an American journalist who was recently executed by the group, were waterboarded in the early part of their captivity, according to people familiar with the treatment of the kidnapped Westerners.

James Foley was among the four who were waterboarded several times by Islamic State militants who appeared to model the technique on the CIA’s use of waterboarding to interrogate suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Waterboarding often involves strapping a person down on a gurney or bench and pouring cold water over a cloth covering the face. It causes the sensation of drowning. “The wet cloth creates a barrier through which it is difficult — or in some cases not possible — to breathe,” according to a Justice Department memo in May 2005 about the CIA’s use of the technique.

President Obama has condemned waterboarding as torture.

“They knew exactly how it was done,” a person with direct knowledge of what happened to the hostages said of the Islamic State militants. The person, who discussed the hostages’ experience on the condition of anonymity, said the captives were held in Raqqah, a city in north-central Syria. . . .


A second person familiar with Foley’s time in captivity confirmed that he was tortured, including by waterboarding.

“Yes, that is part of the information that bubbled up, and Jim was subject to it,” the person said. “I believe he suffered a lot of physical abuse.”

Foley’s mother, Diane, said Thursday that she had not been informed previously that her son had been waterboarded.

The FBI, which is investigating Foley’s death and the abduction of Americans in Syria, declined to comment. The CIA had no official comment.

“ISIL is a group that routinely crucifies and beheads people,” said a U.S. official, using one of the acronyms for the Islamic State. “To suggest that there is any correlation between ISIL’s brutality and past U.S. actions is ridiculous and feeds into their twisted propaganda.”

Waterboarding was one of the interrogation techniques adopted by the CIA and sanctioned by the Justice Department when the agency opened a series of secret overseas prisons to question terrorism suspects.

Three CIA detainees — Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — were waterboarded while held in secret CIA prisons. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times, according to a memo issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. . . .


Critics of waterboarding have said for years that the practice endangered Americans, putting them at risk of being subjected to the same brutal treatment at the hands of the enemy.

“Waterboarding dates to the Spanish Inquisition and has been a favorite of dictators through the ages, including Pol Pot and the regime in Burma,” Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) said in an op-ed in 2008. “Condoning torture opens the door for our enemies to do the same to captured American troops in the future.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a report asserting that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques used by CIA operatives were not effective, said Feinstein, who chairs the panel. Former agency employees dispute that conclusion. . . .

FIRST TO ANSWER FOR THEIR WATERBOARDING LIES?
THE MAKE-BELIEVE RIGHT-WING-POL WATERBOARDEES

The right-wing scumbags I especially want to hear from are the ones who pooh-poohed waterboarding, insisting it was no big deal, and certainly not torture -- which we Americans don't do anyway, though of course it would be an intelligence gold mine if we could, or id. And in particular the ones who had a few drops of water splashed at them and pretended that they had actually undergone waterboarding their very own selves.

Forget for a moment the total illogic of this argument -- that if waterboarding is no big deal, then what the hell was the point of doing it? At the moment I'm more interested in the fundamental fraud of the make-believe waterboardees. So I propose that all those heroes immediately subject themselves to something closer to the real thing than their panty-ass Celebrity Phony Waterboarding adventure.

EVen the following seems to me a fairly mild description of real waterboarding, but since we just read it, it's worth underscoring:

Waterboarding often involves strapping a person down on a gurney or bench and pouring cold water over a cloth covering the face. It causes the sensation of drowning. “The wet cloth creates a barrier through which it is difficult — or in some cases not possible — to breathe,” according to a Justice Department memo in May 2005 about the CIA’s use of the technique.

You can be sure that the phony waterboardees underwent no such thing. More importantly, perhaps most importantly, the phony waterboardees had complete control of the process, which was bogus from start to finish -- not least including their certain knowledge that there would be a safe finish.

For their new round of waterboarding, I propose for starters that our heroes have no idea of what's going to happen. They will have to a liability waiver relieving everyone involved from any culpability for anything that may happen, up to and including death. It may take them one or two preliminary dunks to grasp that when they feel those first signs of suffocation, they may very well be allowed to die. By the second or third dunking, they should have grasped that their future is up for grabs, that they may in fact have no future.

To add some reality to the game, beyond the fact that anything could happen in it, perhaps we should build in a buy-out option, calculated in terms of each victim's net worth, Perhaps a spinning wheel could be used to determine -- unbeknownst to the "subject" -- the maximum percentage of the subject's net worth that the "technician" can try to extract, with a floor of, say, 25 percent, going on up to 100 percent. Perhaps another spin of the wheel could determine -- again unbeknownst to the subject -- how long each session can be allowed to continue, and how many sessions the subject can be subjected to, assuming he/she doesn't go for the buy-out.


MEANWHILE, IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING . . .

. . . that any right-wing scumbag who offers waterboarding as proof of ISIS's evil will be immediately removed from the conversation. I'd suggest removal via secret flight to an undisclosed black sight. Never to be heard from again.

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