At Captains Quarters
Earlier, I wrote about the practice of waterboarding after reading a piece in the New York Daily News by Malcolm Nance. Nance, who served as an instructor at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE), wrote that he considered the practice to be torture, without question, and therefore illegal. Given his description of the practice, I thought he made a good argument. A number of commenters questioned Nance's conclusions, description, and qualifications, and I decided to get a second opinion.
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Captain's Quarters readers will remember Mike the SEAL, who has served this nation in several capacities, including as a decades-long member of the elite commando team as well as a first responder in his community. Mike wrote several extensive posts here at Captain's Quarters while overseas in various capacities in 2004 and 2005. I'm fortunate enough to count Mike as a personal friend for the last several years, and I know him to be a man of courage, honesty, and absolute integrity. For obvious reasons, I will not identify him any further.
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Without getting into specifics on his experiences, Mike strongly disputes Nance's exaggerations of waterboarding. There is a word for people who have "pint after pint of water" filling their lungs: dead. "In fact," according to Mike, "they would be very, very dead.
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Mike emphasized that modern military interrogators receive excellent training and know that coercive techniques do not usually work as well as "positive incentives" and they will generally work through "echelons" of interrogation to obtain critical information. Mike would not go into any detail on "positive incentives" anymore than he would about coercive interrogation techniques generally used as a last resort. He continued to emphasize operational security (OPSEC). However, there are many different scenarios for interrogations, including time-critical emergencies, such as hostage rescue or impending attacks. "Effective interrogators need every range of options in these cases, including methods that use coercion to elicit information, for the different situations that our forces not only might face, but have faced. He used the examples of rescuing captured American soldiers from terrorists when we know they will be brutally tortured and murdered if not found immediately and rescued. "I'm guessing that the vast majority of Americans who vote would not have a problem with us using coercive tactics to get that kind of information from a terrorist."
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