While the use of waterboarding has figured prominently in the debate over Bush Administration approved interrogation methods, there were a number of other techniques that were approved by those Office of Legal Counsel memos written by Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury.  Those other methods included sleep deprivation, heat/cold exposure and stress positions.

Not to minimize the horror of waterboarding, but the other approved techniques are as vile, and mentally and physically crippling as the waterboard.  Look no further than Senator John McCain for evidence that the use of stress positions will have long term crippling effects on detainees.

Jeff Tietz at True/Slant has a chilling piece on one teenage detainee’s experiences at Guantanamo.  For 15 year old Canadian citizen, Omar Khardr, avoiding waterboarding was no less horrifying.

The government accuses Khadr of killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade during the battle, but in 2008 the Pentagon accidentally revealed that it had no evidence of this; it had evidence only that Khadr was present at the time. Khadr was far too young to have any useful knowledge of al Qaeda activities. Still…he was treated as a dangerous, savvy enemy combatant.

A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. “Get up,” the guard said. “You have a reservation.” Reservation was the commonly used term at Gitmo for torture session.

…the MPs uncuffed Omar’s arms, pulled them behind his back, and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this from of “stress positioning” can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of the chains between his hands and feet, and pushed him over onto his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and onto the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while, and then poured pine oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they had sucessfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.

As I read Mr. Tietz’s article I wondered how it is that waterboarding has taken center stage in terms of the torture debate.  Certainly the treatment of this 15 year old Canadian kid, even without waterboarding, would be considered torture by any reasonable person.

So, why all the discussion about waterboarding only?  Perhaps it’s that the U.S. has prosecuted both foreign and U.S. military forces for waterboarding, or that folks like Christopher Hitchens, Playboy magazine reporters, and radio commentator Erich “Mancow” Muller have, with the intent of proving waterboarding as no big deal, famously found waterboarding to be torture indeed.

But there may be another reason as well.  Vice President Cheney, in his speech on national security the other day, derided those who have coined euphemisms to describe interrogation techniques.  Put aside, if you can, Mr. Cheney’s obvious hypocrisy of, on the one hand, criticizing the use of euphemisms while, on the other hand, coining terms like “enhanced” interrogation, but waterboarding has been euphemism central for torture advocates.

It’s just a little “splash of water in the face”, after all.  Kinda like swimming, right?  All one has to do has hold their breath.  No big deal.  But Christopher Hitchens, the Playboy reporter and Mancow can provide video evidence it’s nothing at all like swimming or just a splash of water in the face.  But the extent to which advocates can minimize waterboarding will, to a great extent, determine how much or how little public outrage there will be against it.

So, I suspect torture advocates are happy to concentrate on the false debate of whether waterboarding is, indeed, torture.  Heck, it’s easy to come up with swimming metaphors to describe waterboarding.

Imagine trying to come up with euphemisms to describe using a 15 year old detainee, with his wrists bound to his ankles behind his back, as a human mop to soak up his own piss.

Or just think how difficult it would be to invent a nice little euphemism for slicing detainees genitals with a scalpel.

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