After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: “I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure.” He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. “Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning,” he replied, “just gasping between life and death.”
Interesting. As a kid, my friends and I thought Japanese water torture was immobilizing a guy and then endlessly dripping water right between his eyes. I always wondered how that shit could make you crack.
Mythbusters covered that one a while ago. I think there’s a video on the Discovery channel website. Even in a safe environment, monitored by friends and medics, they couldn’t take it for long.
I thought the same thing (except, I knew it was Chinese). I noticed in another recent article that the same relation was made, and I kind of went ‘duh’. I’d had the cliched view of the Chinese coming up with some fiendishly clever torture rather than something that seems to be proven brutally effective. (Well, as far as torture goes).
Though the death by a thousand cuts thing is still pretty fiendish, after reading Flashman’s description.
Also, back on track- I am one of the few pro-Americans that I know of down here. It gets really hard defending torturers, you know.
Chinese Water Torture. They didn’t go all the way with it (IIRC, it’s more effective if the drip’s random, not regular), but they made an immobilising bench and facemask to test it with.
There was a new poster (forgot his name) who had obviously put a lot of thought into how he would torture people and I remember him talking about how you could test the veracity of information by doing a few double-blind tests using intel that you had from other sources. Personally, I’d just tell everything as close to the truth as possible. And more. Probably with a lot of squealing as well. Is it possible to embarrass a torturer into giving up by not being manly enough?
Well there you go Hanszii, the torturers union would push for full time employment and mandate that tourtures would not be required to perform tasks that are outside their area of expertise, thus pressuring management into keeping up meaningless torture just to keep the unions happy. And even worse, it could lead to torture being outsourced to cheap uneducated third world torturers and offshore torture bases, and then where would we be?
I think everyone would agree that is the most logical interpretation of that post, on every level. I’m also impressed with the incisive analysis of espionage ethics that you tossed in there. That really ties in nicely.
