Waterboarding: Torture?
Waterboarding has been around since the Spanish Inquisition and has recently been all over the US/World news.
Now, Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the US House of Representatives) fends off CIA/Republican criticism she was briefed about the “enhanced interrogation technique” in 2002 and did not, at the time, raise objections in alignment with her current position on the subject. I must admit that, based on media coverage with expert walk-throughs of waterboarding, I did not label waterboarding as “torture” and relegated it to be in the same league as excessive tickling or playing non-stop Barry Manilow. My brother (Joel) sent me a link to the video in this article where Mancow Muller of Chicago’s Big 89 gets waterboarded to see what it’s like and shares it with listeners and viewers. Mancow didn’t think there was a lot to it but he only managed to last 8 seconds (the average is 14 seconds) in a safe environment. Another video can be found here as writer Christopher Hitchens did a piece for Vanity Fair in August, 2008 called “Believe Me, It’s Torture.”