The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - Strangeness
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02:03 pm
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Strangeness
You know, I always thought I was odd because I had this off-hand temptation to set up a waterboarding station in the garage, just to see how bad it could be. I'd have someone set me up in it, and see how long I could last - "Not long," would be my assumption - and then if any of my friends were curious, I'd give it a shot on them.
And then I'd have a handy tool for political debate! Every time someone said, "No, waterboarding's not torture," people in the neighborhood would say, "Well, why don't we jaunt over to Ferrett's house?" and the fun would begin. I suspect many a conservative might change his stripes after a little session on Ye Olde Garage Waterboarde. But really, I'm just curious to see how much I could endure - but I haven't done it because, well, the danger risk is pretty high, and I'm fairly lazy when it comes to building torture devices in my back yard.
I thought I was alone. But today, I found a BDSM aficionado who is going to get waterboarded because she's curious to see whether she can beat the CIA operative failure rate of fourteen seconds, and suddenly I feel a little more normal. Which I probably shouldn't. But hey, that's the Sensate in me.
(EDIT: The woman in question is ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) absolute_tash, and she also eats fire. This is just one of many reasons why she is pretty awesome.)
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![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/75496027/2306053) | | From: | thehat |
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| Date: | May 16th, 2008 06:07 pm (UTC) |
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There's a guy after my own heart! I don't actually trust myself to do it correctly, or not puss out. That's why someone else is going to do it to me - this man doesn't love me, or care about me past wanting to make sure I don't actually drown. So, hopefully it's as close to actual as I can get.
Holy crap. That's crazy. Completely nutters. But a very valuable nutter.
I love the comments on this guy's thread. Especially the huge numbers of them that essentially call him a yellow-bellied EEEVIL LEFTIST terrorist sympathizer for saying that undergoing waterboarding is a tortuous experience.
Remember kids, if you don't like torturing information out of people, the terrorists have already won.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/19765416/1240792) | | From: | nkuvu |
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| Date: | May 16th, 2008 07:57 pm (UTC) |
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Interesting read, thanks for the link.
My personal thought on the matter before reading that post was that the whole waterboarding thing wouldn't be too bad. I'm not particularly afraid of death (but I definitely try to avoid it).
From the writeup, though, my curiosity is fully sated. I don't need to try this myself, thanks.
That's an amazing link, thank-you for sharing.
I will definitly keep you aprised as to how it goes! When the actual waterboarding will take place isn't set yet but I'll see the man who is going to do it this weekend for some more conversation. I know he plans on doing an interrogation before hand with some info a third party will provide. I'm supposed to crack and give it to him, and it will be verified by the third party so he'll know if I'm lying. And I promise to report back - even if I puss out and crack right away.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/88771980/11033953) | | From: | vrax |
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| Date: | May 16th, 2008 06:26 pm (UTC) |
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I lost track of how many times I've wanted to try it out. Too many, i'm sure.
I got all I wanted to know about the experience reading Little Brother. I may have felt vaguely curious before, but now, that curiosity is dead and buried.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/88044190/208448) | | From: | aiela |
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| Date: | May 16th, 2008 06:52 pm (UTC) |
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That scene was pretty unpleasant to read, I agree.
14 seconds? I mean, yeah, waterboarding sounds like it would suck, but couldn't you just hold your breath longer than 14 seconds?
Holding your breath may keep water from entering through your mouth. However, since you are bound and your head is inclined downward, it wouldn't keep water from entering through your nasal passages.
"Well, why don't we jaunt over to Ferrett's house?" and the fun would begin.
And since it's not torture, you wouldn't be doing anything wrong (or illegal, for that matter). I suggest you charge admission.
I've wondered that, myself. I'll be very interested to hear about this, once it happens.
There are a bunch of similar experiments up on youtube that I had watched.
Waterboarding?
I'm a little unfamiliar with the term. A little enlightenment?
Apparently going through the experience is pretty convincing. [T]hree years ago, Daniel Levin, then the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, decided to bring reality to bear on his deliberations on the torture question. He went to a military base and asked to undergo waterboarding.
Mr. Levin, 51, a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, had served in several senior posts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department since the administration of the first President Bush. But he had never served in the military, where American pilots, special operations troops and others for decades have undergone waterboarding to prepare them for possible treatment if captured by an enemy...
After his waterboarding, Mr. Levin went on to sign a new legal opinion on the limits of interrogation, released on Dec. 30, 2004, that made news with its ringing opening sentence: "Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms." That memorandum replaced a much-criticized opinion written in August 2002, which had defined torture as treatment producing pain equivalent to organ failure or death and had suggested that a president might be able to authorize torture under his constitutional war powers. NY Times Of course it turned out that Levin's effort to grapple with the moral consequences of what he was authorizing was in vain. A footnote to the 2004 interrogation opinion signed by Mr. Levin, insisted on by the White House and the C.I.A., said that despite the shift in legal reasoning, interrogation techniques authorized under previous Justice Department opinions remained legal. Those techniques included waterboarding.
Waterboaring is tortue. I don't have to go through it myself to know that any more then I have to have someone shove bamboo slivers under my fingernails to know that that is also tortue.
I'm pretty conservative in a lot of ways and I'm ashamed that my country is even trying to condone tortue or use dubious justifications to claim that something that is plainly and obviously a tortue technique is "not really" tortue, pretty much just because "we say so."
May I borrow that wonderful icon? I've been looking for something for the political season ahead.
OK, I've gone through Scylla's writeup, and I can tell you that I (ex-swimmer in good shape) wouldn't give it a go.
That said, I don't have a problem with torture per se, as long as we have a few ground rules around it:
1. We admit openly that we are a torturing country. We don't fuck around with Clintonesque definitional bullshit. If you're going to pull this kind of shit, man up and admit it.
2. As Commander-in-Chief, the President should be required to undergo every technique that we used at least once. Every President worthy of the job should be willing to experience, for himself, *exactly* what he's authorizing. This goes for all of of the chain of command going down (enlisted men would be excluded, as they don't give orders). In particular, this should be mandatory for all CIA operatives, to be administered by the Army.
3. Torture is only used as punishment prelude to execution. There is NO intelligence to be gained from torture, and torture only serves to punish.
That is all.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/65246973/807716) | | | I dunno, that seems to be on the "evil" side of things to me. | (Link) |
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Wow. I've never found anyone who thinks that torture as a punishment is a good idea.
I peek at your journal every so often and look what today brought!! I do the education coordination for a semi (80 miles from me) local BDSM group in my area and a few months ago we had a presentation on Interrogation and Abduction. One of the topics that our presenter covered was Waterboarding. Modified to be as safe as possible. The information is there if you know where to look.
Edited at 2008-05-17 02:34 pm (UTC)
Isn't this basically how "Jackass" got started?
With Knoxville having himself hit with pepper spray, tasers, etc. for an article he was writing?
Several thoughts, having written my college honors paper about the experience of American POWs in Vietnam and read a bit on torture:
1) I'm not so sure if measuring the 14 second hang time is a great idea if the subject is a BDSM fan. Someone who regularly travels far along the BDSM spectrum may be more used to handling situations in which their movement/breathing is restricted. That person may be able to end up with a hang time greater than 14 seconds.
2) Someone who's undergoing this voluntarily as a point of interest is going to have a very different experience than someone who's undergoing waterboarding under duress.
3) Someone who's imprisoned in an environment in which any treatment except that which causes organ failure or death is going to be dealing with more than a single session of waterboarding-- they may experience other treatment that leads them to believe that they are in the hands of people who will kill them-- and that waterboarding is what will actually do it.
On my soapbox: Waterboarding is torture. I'm not a big McCain fan, but the guy's been tourtured (seriously, seriously tortured) and he's familiar with waterboarding. They guy knows what he's talking about when it comes to torture. Do I appreciate people at Gitmo who are out to kill other people (including Americans)? Nope. I think that if they're guilty, they should be locked up. Do I think they should be tortured? Nope.
Off my soapbox: Not so sure that the Chez Ferrett waterboarding experiment is going to be an accurate, even pseudo-scientific, reinactment.
There was actually an interesting thing I ran across where someone was waterboarded for 5 minutes and didn't think it was a big deal.
It turns out they were doing it wrong. |
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