183

How does anyone survive being waterboarded 183 times - - in one month. That's over 6 times a day, and most assuredly it wasn't with that level of consistency, I'm assuming.

I was also struck by the clinical nature of the commentary from the Bradbury report:

...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction....Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

Thinking about those times in my life, either as a result of some foolishness underwater, or something going down the wrong pipe, experiencing just a few seconds of the panicked sensation of not being able to breathe, and then multiplying it out to the extent of what is described here is unfathomable.

Cognitive Dissonance

One thing that I don't understand as we roll into this election cycle is the disconnect on the right as it pertains to torture. I see a recurring theme around the fact that torture tactics that we employed against detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other now-infamous US facilities are somehow tolerable, and that the provisions of the Geneva Convention are quaint, because frankly the means justify the ends, given what we suspect the detainee might have done. And in the same breath, the mere utterance of McCain's military record (not to mention his time as a POW)by anyone on the left triggers a hue and cry that no doubt signifies an impugning of his complete service record, and is nothing short of an indictment of the patriotism of the commenter.

We should either honor McCain's service, the incredible hardships he endured in five years as a POW, AND at the same time reject the premise that our own tactics (many similar, if not the same as those that McCain endured) were nothing less than torture, or alternatively, we relegate the tactics employed by American forces (hired guns and otherwise) to that just a step above "frat hazing" and then must therefore question the punishment that McCain endured as simply his initiation into the North Vietnamese chapter of Delta Tau Chi.