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.

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

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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

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