Waterboarding: The New American Crawl
“It’s like swimming”
On the Dec 11, 2007 episode of PBS’ Newshour, Republican Senator Kit Bond, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, compared waterboarding torture techniques to swimming strokes.
President Bush & Sen. Kit Bonds
GWEN IFILL: I just would like to — but do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?
SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It’s like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that’s beside the point.
I’m not sure what level of idiocy you have to achieve to before you can compare the finer techniques of torture to the breaststroke. All the evolution and advancement of humankind seems to go right out the window when you have a member of the United States Senate touting the nuances of torture as an excuse for the practice.
[flv]http://garlinggauge.com/videos/waterboardingswimming.flv[/flv]
Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) discussing waterboarding torture on Newshour.
A dip in the pool: Soldiers in Vietnam waterboarding a suspect near Da Nang in 1968.
Waterboarding is inexcusable. Period.
While acquiring information is vital to national security, the avenues in which we allow our government to procure that information must be cordoned by sensible ethics and the high-road of morality. The greatest obstacle in scavenging for and extracting information should not be the suspects and foreign entities themselves, but the banner of principles we bear through that process.
America cannot extol its humanity while acting inhuman.
I guess, however, for Republicans, they can.
If anything, Senator Bond should of just called it what it is: the Dead Man’s Float.
Swimmer’s last resort: Dead Man’s Float survival technique.
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More on Waterboarding, GOP
See also:
President Bush’s Mukasey Approves of Torture
http://tinyurl.com/yqvh3v, http://tinyurl.com/yokuzg
http://www.re-lab.lv/error/images/waterboarding.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2eslft, http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/752/192569.JPG
http://www.wilderness-survival.net/figures/fig16-2.gif
http://www.wnbc.com/news/14522451/detail.html
Stumble it!
I originally only came here to see a picture of different swiming strokes found through a google image search.
But I have continued to read your very interesting article and followed the various links given.
I am completley and utterly disgusted with what i’ve read and seen.
I can’t believe how Bush and his droogs try to manipulate very straight forward questions and the way they twist their answers. This in it’s self should be illegal, let alone what their doing and sanctioning.
This is a very good article bringing awarness to this and other forms of tourture.
Sadly I am in the UK and feel totally frustrated not to be able to shout at these war moungrels in person.
Thank god Barack Obama has taken over, and that hopfully he will put a stop to all this. Only time will tell i’m afraid.
But there is one question still to be answered. Just how do you get a man to tell you what you want. You can’t just ask him nicely, it doesn’t work like that.