... are often forced to relive it. An old paraphrase but one, I am afraid, which will be true once more. Old Dick Cheney is raising his formerly lowly head in American politics once more, still posturing and postulating about how he and his former puppet G.W. Bush saved the United States from destruction by waterboarding, torturing and otherwise lowering the U.S. to the standards of the al Qaeda freaks he so rightly denounces.

In the 1930'd Adolf Hitler and his cronies took a democratic but deeply depressed Germany into a dictatorship that ruined a once great nation. They did it by creating a science out of a thing called propaganda. Until then propaganda relied upon graphic pictures and slick catch phrases, such as when the British showed the Germans in WWI as huge King-Kong type apes eating poor, hapless Belgian citizens. The idea was simple, Germans are bad, low-life apes.

Hitler brought propaganda from a useful tol into a form of advanced mind control. He is often credited with having said that if you tell a lie often enough most people will believe it to be true. This is exactly what men like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have been doing for several decades now, and Dick Cheney, sly fox that he is, is using the fear of another terror attack on the U.S. to whip up political support for what he allegedly ordered done at the CIA when he was the shadow president.

First of all, the International Red Cross (IRC) calls waterboarding torture. People have been accused of war crimes when using it. The Chinese and North Koreans were soundly and roundly accused of using torture when they used it on U.S. and U.N. POWS. Many nations have used it and were called torturers by former U.S. presidents and other officials of our nation.

So how come all of the sudden Dick Cheney is saying it was legal to use this technique? His daughter has also been on the stump for her dad, a natural reaction I guess for a child to protect her father, but why are they allowed to get off espousing their fiction without anyone contradicting them with the facts?

Whether you like it or not, waterboarding is torture as defined by the IRC. Yet Cheney and others pick and chose which of the IRC definitions they want to use, according to the situation at hand.

"During the Spanish-American War, a U.S. soldier, Major Edwin Glenn, was suspended from command for one month and fined $50 for using "the water cure." In his review, the Army judge advocate said the charges constituted "resort to torture with a view to extort a confession." He recommended disapproval because "the United States cannot afford to sanction the addition of torture." (source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15886834)

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In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

"All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators," writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. (source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15886834)

 In Viet Nam on Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post showed the following photo of a U.S. soldier participating in the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. As the caption explained, the technique caused "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk." This incident was investigated by the U.S. Army and resulted in the court martial of the soldier.

Once more for the hard headed: Waterboarding is Internationally named as a form of torture.  People have been found guilty of using it.  It is illegal.

In 1983 Sheriff James Parker and three of his deputies were found guilty of using waterboarding on prisoners.  They were convicted and sent to jail for 4 years.  Waterboarding is a jailable offense.

 Well, there is little doubt that waterboarding will produce some rsults, but whether or not there is usable intelligence at the end of a session or many sessions of torture are less than clear.  It seems that very little is gained by waterboarding that couldn't be gained by other methods which are neither illegal nor in the realm of torture.

former FBI agent Ali Soufran testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee that waterboarding is neither productive nor reliable as a method of interrogation. Other top ranking people, such as Col. Lawreance Wilkerson, former aide to Colin Powell, says that it is dubious at best and is best used to extract false confessions, such as the Chinese and North Koreans did decades ago to get G.I.s to confess to heinous crimes against humanity.  Such forced confessions are the mark of brutal regimes out to win over public opinion against their foes, not nations under the gun to find important information in a hurry.

So, except for Cheney and a few others seeking allegedly to keep themselves from being prosecuted for war crimes, few people in the know accept that waterboarding is a tool that gains us much in the way of operational and usable intelligence.  In short, it doesn't work.

 Water torture has been used by Inquisitions and dictators and evil people of all kinds.  Now we Americans have been entered into the ranks of such notables as those evil creatures who used waterboarding and other torture techniques in the defence of our way of life.  I hope we are proud of men such as Dick Cheney and others who have lowered our national selves to the point of being just about as honest and upstanding as Pol Pot of Cambodia, the leaders of North Korea, Saddam Hussein and the other illuminaries who decided that waterboarding was a necessary expedient in order to gain access to information that many leading authorities on the technique call a useless and self-defeating way to get good, solid and useable information from detainees.