By Gary Schindler
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wbfo/local-wbfo-695860.mp3
Buffalo, NY – Anyone who has ever accidentally inhaled a bit of water at the beach or in the backyard swimming pool knows that waterboarding is torture. I find it stunning that anyone could think otherwise.
Waterboarding is strapping someone down, covering their head with a cloth and pouring water over the face. This forces the person to inhale water and simulate the sensation of drowning. The question of if this is torture is one which has not been resolved in our country, and it lurks under the surface, a question mark asking who we are and what we believe as a people.
If you have any doubts about waterboarding's efficacy as a torture technique, I would suggest that you take a field trip to Toul Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I had the opportunity to visit their early this year. Cambodia is a fascinating country, and the people I met loved America, even though tens of thousands of Cambodians are reported to have been killed by U.S. bombings during the Vietnam War. Toul Sleng Prison is infamous for the brutal deaths of between 14,000 and 20,000 men, women, children and infants. Reportedly only 6 or 7 people who entered the prison came out alive. The dead were Vietnamese, Laotians, Thai, Indians, Pakistanis, British, Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians, but the majority were Cambodians. Most were Cambodians who had joined the Khmer Rouge and were arrested, falsely accused, tortured and died as the paranoid regime cannibalized itself in a frenzy of accusation and terror.
The prison itself looks rather innocuous as you approach. It is a converted school. As you begin the tour, you pass by the tombs of the last victims of the regime, emancipation coming just a little too late for them. You then pass through former classrooms, bare except for metal bed frames, shackles make from rebar, photos of victims of the torture on the wall. There are even spatters of blood on the ceiling, still there after 30 years. You move on to large rooms that are crudely divided by wood or brick into tiny cells not even a yard wide. Then rooms with photos of victims, both the prisoners and the jailers. They were all victims, with some prison guards finding themselves prisoners in the jail they ran.
The final wing of the tour is where I stopped taking pictures. I stopped in part because it is so exceedingly gruesome. What really made me stop is a painting on the wall above a wooden box with shackles and a watering can. It is a painting of someone being waterboarded. In a place that specialized in pain and suffering and extracting mostly worthless confessions, the tormentors seemed to think that waterboarding fit the bill for torture. If waterboarding passed the test as a torture technique for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, it passes any test I can conceive of. It should pass the test and be named torture the United States..
By refusing to call waterboarding torture, as our Attorney general Robert Mukasey has done, the debate never really gets to where it needs to go. An argument that centers on whether or not a quote technique unquote is torture stalls the discussion before reaching the critical issue of whether or not our nation should be involved in torture. Ever. For any reason.
History is replete with examples of those who relied on torture to keep an iron fisted order on the populations under their control. I personally don't want to be, and I don't want my country to be counted with that number. Democracy, society, civilization, these are fragile things. Things can disintegrate so quickly. Torture is a catalyst that only hastens the process.
You don't have to believe me when I say waterboarding is torture. You can take field trip to Cambodia yourself and see.
Listener-Commentator Gary Schindler is vicar of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Springville.
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