There are a variety of “alternative interrogation practices” which we know have been employed by CIA and Military interrogators in their work with the War on Terror detainees at Bagram, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Most of them involve physical and mental abuses of which I have no personal knowledge.

For example, I’ve never been subjected to “stress positions.” Never had hypothermia induced by standing in a chilled cell with water splashed over me periodically. Never been kept awake for hours on end. And I’ve never been water boarded:

The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt. […]

“The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

No, this has never been done to me, so I can’t testify as to what it feels like to a person who has endured this particular “practice.” All I can do to imagine the sensation that water boarding creates in its victims, is to compare it to a real life experience of mine: an episode in which I nearly choked to death when I was 23 years old.

(cont.)

Thousands of people choke to death every year in America. Nearly everyone has experienced a severe choking episode at least once in their life. It’s a horrible, frightening feeling. This was mine.

I was twenty-three years old, and recovering from a bout of pneumonia that winter. My doctor had prescribed for me a common narcotic cough suppressant medication, which came in the form of a syrup. I had just started to swallow another spoonful, when something distracted me. A sound outside, the voice of my girl friend? I can’t remember exactly, but in that moment of inattention I must have taken in a sharp, short breath, because the next thing I knew I couldn’t breathe. The cough syrup which I had been in the process of swallowing had gone down my trachea and into my lungs.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a terrible fear of suffocation. I suffered from asthma when I was little, and perhaps the experience of not being able to take in a breath because my bronchial tubes had swollen shut was the basis for my phobia. Or perhaps everyone who has ever nearly suffocated has the same feeling of terror with regard to choking that I do. I can’t say. All I know is that when I inadvertently inhaled my cough syrup, I panicked.

I couldn’t breathe, and yet I frantically attempted to take in breath after breath, to no effect. In between these futile attempts at getting some air, any air at all, into my lungs, I tried to cough the syrup out with whatever air I had in my lungs. Nothing worked, and my convulsions, voluntary and involuntary became more desperate. I jumped off the couch I had been sitting on, threw off my robe (Why? Who knows. Perhaps I thought shedding clothes would help me shed this horrible liquid from my body. More likely, I was just acting irrationally.) and ran to the sink where I tried over and over to cough out the syrup, to no avail.

If you’ve ever choked on something long enough, you know that within seconds you begin to feel a painful burning sensation deep in your chest, and often sharp pains in your ribs from the forceful attempts by your body to expel the foreign invader clogging up your bronchal passages. Or at least that is what I began to feel. Even worse, however, was the state of my mind which literally raced with thoughts that I was about to die. I began to experience a feeling of dizziness, and the sense that the room I was in had begun to close down upon me. Everything I saw with my eyes seemed larger and more focused, sharper in detail, hyperreal. I felt trapped and terribly afraid.

At some point my girlfriend ran into the room, and I know she was screaming at me, wanting to know what was wrong, but I couldn’t respond to her. She was just one more element introduced into what was already a nightmarish scene. I may have tried to gesture at her, or perhaps not. I do recall wildly flailing about with my arms as I struggled to get any oxygen in, any at all. Suddenly, I ran out the door to our apartment and hung myself over the second floor balcony. The air must have been freezing because it had just snowed the night before, and I was dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts, but I didn’t notice the temperature, and I wasn’t really cognizant of my surroundings. I was literally crazed.

Now some of neighbors heard me and came outside to see what all the fuss was about. My girl friend had come outside and was now screaming at them. I know now (because she told me later that morning) that she was yelling for someone to call 911, that I was choking to death. Someone, ran up to me and grabbed hold of my chest, but I wrestled away from him. I was still coughing and gagging away, and making strange, strangled, swooping sounds as I tried to force air into my lungs. The air around me appeared granulated, sort of like snow on a television screen when you can still make out the picture, but it fades in and out. I think I felt tingling sensations running down my arms.

Finally, painfully, I began to get some air into my lungs. People held me as I continued to cough and gasp, cough and gasp, out and in. I gradually came to the realization I wasn’t going to die, at least not that day. After a while, I could speak enough to say I had choked. Someone responded “We know.” They ushered me back inside. The entire time from first beginning to choke to being able to breathe again took about 3 minutes. It’s a cliché, I know, but that was the longest three minutes of my life.

Yet, during that entire time, I was not held down on a board by shackles and other physical restraints. I was not tipped over so that my head was lower than my chest. My panic could play itself out in space, unencumbered. I could move my body and to try to find the best position to bring me relief, to aid in eliminating the substance that was clogging my air intake. And when it was over, I knew it was over for good.

Someone being water boarded is not afforded that luxury. He never knows when the experience will end. He cannot move himself, he cannot leave, and he does not control what happens to him from one moment to the next. Even his rising panic and fears of death are encapsulated, held down and exposed to the presence of people whom he knows mean him harm. And when it is over, when he can breathe once more, when the gagging and panic have passed, he cannot be certain it won’t begin all over again, after another minute, or ten minutes, or an hour, a day, a week. He can never know when someone will decide his breath must be stolen from him, and possibly his life.

CIA interrogators who employ this technique, must also undergo it themselves as part of their training. On average, those who subjected themselves to the water boarding experience lasted 14 seconds “before caving in.”
Of course, they had no reason to continue to endure this treatment. They were merely undergoing a training exercise, one to which they knew they could end whenever they wished. So the full horror of the water board “treatment” was probably not available to them in the same way it is available to those to whom they subject this torture. Just like it is not available to me, despite my own experiences with involuntary suffocation. Even so, they endured enough to have a sneaking admiration for one top Al Qaeda figure who reportedly lasted 2 entire minutes of feeling he was about to drown at their hands. Yes, he was one tough cookie. And one thoroughly terrorized individual

Empathy. It’s a difficult quality to nourish in any human heart, made more difficult when the person we are asked to empathize with may be guilty of murder, terrorism, and crimes against humanity. So I don’t really expect to that the many people in our country who are in favor torture if it is an alleged terrorist who is being tortured, to change their minds based on purely moral grounds. But some may.

Perhaps, after reading this, some may begin to wonder if we really want the terrorists to turn us into a country that would subject people to such barbaric
and degrading treatments. They may begin to understand that reacting to terror with terror of our own is not a strategy for victory, but an endless spiral into an abyss, one whose bottom we cannot yet fathom, but which we know ends in the neighborhood of Hell itself.

So I have a few questions for all those people who support President Bush in his advocacy of torture against our enemies, “enemies” only he, in the exercise of his sole discretion, is allowed to define. If you have ever experienced the pain and terror of drowning, or choking, or any other form of suffocation (and I know you have), if you can remember how terrifying and horrendous that experience was, why in the world would you ever want others to suffer in that way?

And why do you wish to be identified as someone willing to torture other human beings by making them believe they are about to die from drowning? Why do you wish to dishonor America in the eyes of the world, by turning us into the Nation that tortures?

Is vengeance that important to you that you would sell your soul for the privilege? Are your principles and your moral values so easy to discard? Are you so numb with fear that you cannot recognize the humanity in any human being, even a member of Al Qaeda?

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were both convicted of the most heinous terrorist attack on America before 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people died, and hundreds more were maimed or injured. Many people suspect to this day that McVeigh and Nichols were part of a larger conspiracy. Yet, did anyone ever believe that our government (under then President Clinton) should have water boarded Nichols and/or McVeigh to force them to name other members of this alleged conspiracy? No. We are a nation of laws, and a nation which respects the dignity of every individual human being. This principle is enshrined in our Constitution in the 8th Amendment which forbids cruel and unusual punishments. McVeigh and Nicholls were terrorists. They were murderers. They were (and still are in the case of Nichols) horrific, indisputably evil human beings. But no one would have thought to grant President Clinton the authority to water board them in the hopes of uncovering other participants to this ghastly crime. Any effort to do so would have been rightly condemned as immoral and illegal and unconstitutional

So why are we now so willing to grant President Bush that power? Why do we want to practice torture? Do we, as a nation, really wish to sink so low? Do we really want to become as barbaric as those who attacked us?

I would have answered a vehement No! to that question even a few short months ago. Now, it seems I cannot.