A few weeks ago, I heard Sean Hannity offer to be waterboarded “for the troops,” as a way to show that waterboarding isn’t torture. Blubbermouth Keith Olberman has hounded him about that, offering to pay out $1000 for every second that Hannity endured waterboarding.

Both of these polar-opposite idiots miss the point.

Waterboarding is not done by itself, and it’s not done on healthy people. For Sean Hannity to get the full impact of what Cheney convinced Bush to permit, this would need to happen:

Hannity is hooded, strapped to a stretcher, flown many hours to some unknown location, stripped naked, dumped on a damp cement floor, and left there. He’s given 1000 calories a day, no solid food. At some point, guards hood him again and take him to a different room. A towel is wrapped around his neck and a guard, grasping the two ends of the towel, flings his head against the wall, several times (a trick, Jane Mayer reported, that we learned from the Israelis). 

In this new room, they stand him up, still naked, and shackle his hands above his head. He’s left like that for a week. His legs swell up. He’s not told where he is or when this will end. And he’s not allowed to sleep. He is regularly doused with buckets of cold water, and loud music plays constantly.

Then, finally, he is deemed ready to be waterboarded.

That, Mr. Hannity, would give you the full effect. Do THAT for the troops.

There is an abundance of information, from numerous reports and internal military and Congressional investigations, which details what we did to prisoners. Perhaps the best is the interviews the Red Cross conducted with 14 high-value detainees; the report came out this spring. These persons were kept in continuous solitary confinement and had no contact with each other. And yet, they tell the same stories of the same methods. 

The remarkable similarities attest to the systematic way in which we inflicted torture. We went about it very scientifically–do this, then do that, then follow up with this. The Red Cross report says, “The ICRC wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the fourteen adds particular weight to the information provided.”

The New York Review of Books published two lengthy articles based on the Red Cross report (PDF). Both are excellent.

• April 9: “US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites”  
• April 30: “The Red Cross Torture Report: What it Means“

The Red Cross report concludes that the US committed acts which meet the definition of war crimes: “The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

And so, I remain angry at an administration that threw aside the values that I have always felt America, my country. stood for.