From A Guy Who Knows

This interview is worth a read, especially if you're a torture-lover. Written by a man who taught torture techniques for the SERE program -- the existence of which has been used by the Cheneys and their apologists of this world to pretend waterboarding isn't torture, and a variant of which I went through on my way to my year in Vietnam -- it makes a pretty strong case. It's particularly hard on the former Bush speechwriter and now Washington Post columnist, Marc Theissen, who loves everything about Dick Cheney and loves torture even more:

Marc Thiessen is a fool of the highest magnitude if he thinks he knows anything about waterboarding. His claims are based not on first-hand experience but on a classified briefing from people with an agenda of justifying what was done. That makes Thiessen into a court stenographer for war criminals rather than a person with any real claim of expertise. As for his claim about the relationship between Pol Pot–era waterboarding and what we have done derived from the SERE program, he’s wrong. Before I arrived at SERE, I went to S21 prison in Cambodia. Right next to the Wall of Skulls sits the exact waterboard platform that the SERE program copied for our own use in the training program. Remember, our goal was to prepare pilots for the techniques they might face if they fell into the hands of our enemies. I was waterboarded on arrival at SERE, and then as a senior staffer, I performed the technique or supervised it through hundreds of evolutions.

[...] He claims that these techniques are unpleasant but have no long-term physical or mental impact. Really? I challenge him to put up or shut up. I offer to put him through just one hour of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized in the Bush Administration’s OLC memos–including the CIA-approved variant of waterboarding. If at the end he still believes this is not torture, I’ll respect his viewpoint. But not until then. By the way, I can assure you that, within that hour, I’ll secure Thiessen’s written admission that waterboarding is torture and that his book is a pack of falsehoods. He’ll give me any statement I want in order to end the torture.

There's lots more in the interview on which to chew, and it rings true to me. Not least because I've been making the same points here; but also because the guy is an expert. As opposed to most of the talking heads, smugly virtuous and military virgins all, who opinionate about it until hair grows on their palms.