America:Hours before the Senate confirmed Michael Mukasey as attorney general, despite his failure to say that waterboarding was illegal torture, members of a House of Representatives subcommittee were hearing first hand what the controversial interrogation technique actually involves.
Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a former US navy instructor of prisoner of war and terrorist hostage survival programmes, described how he underwent waterboarding as part of his training and that he personally led or was involved in using the procedure other trainees.
"Waterboarding is torture, period," he said. "I believe that we must reject the use of the waterboard for prisoners and captives and cleanse this stain from our national honour."
Last week, Nance reported in Small Wars Journal that the navy studied torture techniques used by the Viet Cong, the Cambodians and some Middle Eastern regimes in training service personnel to resist harsh interrogation methods. Although most journalists, including this one, have described waterboarding as "simulated drowning", Nance says there is nothing simulated about it.
"Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonising feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word," he says.
Waterboarding does not simulate drowning because the lungs are actually filling with water and the victim is drowning. A doctor watches how much water is ingested and looks for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes "from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral".
"Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration - usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death," says Nance.
Mukasey told senators that he found the idea of waterboarding repugnant but because he had not received classified briefings about CIA interrogation techniques, he could not say if it amounted to torture. The former federal judge promised that, if Congress passed a Bill banning waterboarding, he would enforce it as attorney general.
"This is like when somebody murders somebody with a baseball bat and you say: 'We had a law against murder but we never mentioned baseball bats'," said senate judiciary committee chairman Patrick Leahy. "Murder is murder. Torture is torture."
The CIA is believed to have used waterboarding on detainees held in secret prisons outside the US, including alleged "black sites" in Poland and Romania, before they were moved to Guantanamo Bay.
Most Republican presidential candidates favour harsh interrogation techniques for terrorist suspects and want to keep the prison at Guantanamo open. Indeed, Mitt Romney - one of the more moderate candidates - said he would like Guantanamo to be twice as big.
All the Democratic candidates say they oppose torture and both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposed Mukasey's confirmation because of the waterboarding issue. In an interview with The Irish Times earlier this year, Clinton said that Guantanamo and the secret prisons were "not a good fit" with America's values but she would not commit to closing Guantanamo.
"I think that's the kind of tactical decision that has to be considered depending on what the real facts are at the time. Obviously, I feel that the administration has misfired in the way that it has refused to expedite the treatment of the individuals down in Guantanamo.
"And, frankly, it has relied on unreliable, hearsay evidence and we need to clean up the processes," she said.
In Iowa this week, Obama promised to close Guantanamo immediately and to reverse any of George Bush's executive orders that exceed the proper powers of the presidency.
"I will overturn it with the stroke of a pen. We don't have to wait for legislation to do that," he said. "Shipping people off in the dead of night to be tortured somewhere else, that's not who we are. That's not what America is about."
