America has tried waterborders as criminals for over a century

Waterboarding - war crime or Intelligence tool?

First, eaactly what is waterboarding? JAG officer Evan Wallach explains:

The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as "simulated drowning." That's incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is, the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding's effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

Whether or not waterboarding (making a prisoner believe they are being drowned) is torture or not has been answered by experts. It is torture. Ask Malcolm Nance, a navy expert who has trained Navy seals in how to deal with torture and who has himslef been subject to waterboarding.

Or look at the history of American prosecution of people for applying waterboarding to people. Again from JAG officer Evan Wallach :

After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding. [Snip]

...a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.

More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that "the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee's mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation."

In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners' civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Here is more detail on the Japanese who we Americans convicted of war crimes for using waterboarding:

But after World War II, the United States government was quite clear about the fact that waterboarding was torture, at least when it was done to U.S. citizens:

But after World War II, the United States government was quite clear about the fact that waterboarding was torture, at least when it was done to U.S. citizens:

[In] 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II,” he sai[d]

So America has defined waterboarding as torture and as a war crime since the Spanish-american war. Now, under George Bush we have a Republican government who is arguing that for some strange reason, waterboarding is no longer torture, and in fact that it is necessary to use it to protect American security!

So waterboarding has been a U.S. crime for over a century. To top the issue off, it does not work. As Navy SERE instructor Malcolm Nance recounted discussing what he was told by a torture victim of the Khmer Rouge:

On a Mekong River trip, I met a 60-year-old man, happy to be alive and a cheerful travel companion, who survived the genocide and torture … he spoke openly about it and gave me a valuable lesson: “If you want to survive, you must learn that ‘walking through a low door means you have to be able to bow.’” He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know including the truth. They rarely stopped. In torture, he confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a Buddhist Monk, a Catholic Bishop and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.

So what makes to Bush administration and the Republican Party so ready to abandon American values? Is it fear or is it just an effort to gain votes from the Republican Party voters? Either way, waterboarding is totally UnAmerican. In addition it violates the international agreements on human rights. Then, to top off the reasons not to use it - Torture simply doesn't work to get useful Intelligence.

Trying individuals who use waterboarding as war criminals and severely punishing them is the only appropriate American approach to such torture.

There remains no doubt that waterboarding is torture and a war . In addition, history had demonstrate without question that it doesn't work, so it cannot be a tool of Intelligence. The very fact that so-called Americans have even been forced to debate the morality of such obviously immoral and criminal behavior is a total indictment of the failure of the Bush administration.