Water(boarding) under the bridge?

In the Jan. 25 issue of the National Journal Magazine, former Director of National Intelligence in the Bush administration John Negroponte, admitted that the United States has used an "interrogative technique", classified as torture in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and banned by the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the US has signed.

The "technique" is called waterboarding, or artificial drowning. The subjects to this technique are immobilized on their backs, with their heads tilted backwards and their faces covered by a cloth. Then a huge amount of water is poured into the breathing passages. Sometimes a piece of cloth is placed in the mouth, and the water is poured directly on the cloth. The effect is that, through suffocation and inhalation of water, the subject experiences drowning and believes that he/she is going to die. The technique can be questioned on the grounds that most people would admit to anything when they think they are about to die, and therefore the method is useless.

In most cases however, the gag reflex is evoked, and the subjects survive, without any visible physical damage to the body, (one of the reasons the method is so popular). But apart from extreme pain and psychological trauma, serious damage to the lungs and the brain (due to oxygen deprivation) can occur. Agents who volunteered to subject themselves to this method endured a maximum of 14 seconds before they gave up. CIA has admitted to destroying tapes of 9/11 suspects being subjected to waterboarding.

It comes as no surprise to me that Bush’s deputy Dick Cheney has referred to waterboarding as "an important tool" to interrogate Sept. 11 suspects. Nor that the Gung-ho NY mayor and current republican presidential candidate Rudi Giuliani has rambled about not supporting the version of waterboarding depicted in "liberal media". That it depends on how it's done and who does it, etc. What does however surprise me is the Kreml-like comment made by Negroponte, arguing with very questionable logic that "waterboarding wasn't used when I was director of national intelligence, nor even a few years before that. I get concerned that we're too retrospective and tend to look in the rearview mirror too often at things that happened four or even six years ago."

Come on guys! Maybe people were tortured, maybe international human rights conventions were breached, BUT IT WAS SEVERAL YEARS AGO! It’s all water under the bridge…