Not simulated drowning – it IS drowning!
Nov 9th, 2007 by Paul Moor
The online magazine salon has scored some notable coups in the field of investigative journalism, but I recall none that’s so impressed and inexpressibly horrified me as this one, about the barbarous torture euphemistically called “waterboarding”, which the Bush-Cheney criminal conspiracy not only condones and practises but also inexorably defends as indispensable “under present circumstances”.
What in the name of all my erstwhile fellow Americans have always held dear has become of the country where I spent the first uninterrupted twenty-five of my meanwhile eighty-three years? What more has to happen to get it across to Mr. & Mrs. Lunchbucket (to quote a CBS News editor who used to record my reports from Berlin) that post-9/11 measures in the Bush-Cheney USA more and more resemble the events that led up to Adolf Hitler’s becoming Germany’s Chancellor and perverting an entire highly civilised nation into the most flagitiously criminal fascist regime in modern history?
The salon article I wish every American who genuinely loves his country could read begins with this factual self-introduction by its author:
My name is Malcolm Wrightson Nance. I am a former member of the U.S. military intelligence community, a retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer. I have served honorably for twenty years.
While serving my nation, I had the honor to be accepted for duty as an instructor at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school in North Island Naval Air Station, California. I served in that capacity as an instructor and Master Training Specialist in the Wartime Prisoner-of-War, Peacetime Hostile Government Detainee and Terrorist Hostage survival programs.
At SERE, one of my most serious responsibilities was to employ, supervise, or witness dramatic and highly kinetic coercive interrogation methods, through hands-on, live demonstrations in a simulated captive environment which inoculated our student to the experience of high intensity stress and duress.
Some of these coercive physical techniques have been identified in the media as Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. The most severe of those employed by SERE was waterboarding….
For a photograph of this retired but notably spruce U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer, in the uniform he at least once wore with such manifest pride, plus his unabridged whistle-blowing exposé of torture as officially condoned by the Bush-Cheney United States of America, click here.
