Water, er, Treatment?

There's a story that made a minor blip on the radar a few weeks back that I think deserves a wider audience, and I've been meaning to put up an entry about it, but with Hillary Clinton making a fool of herself and raising my blood pressure in the process and Scott McClellan's book, I just keep putting it off.

The story, from ThinkProgress.org, involves yet another loophole in the narrative from the White House, yet another case where we believe we've finally gotten to the bottom of the story only to find they'd built yet another false bottom...

In this case, it involves water torture. You'll recall that after much back and forth, the Administration finally claimed that "water boarding" had been used on only a handful of prisoners since 9/11 (I believe the claim was three). Which is worse than "we don't water board" but better than "we've been strapping down every Tom, Dick and Ahmed we can find since day one".

But apparently that's only true if limit the question to strictly water-boarding, which is (warning, for the faint of heart or stomach, don't read the rest of this one) when you strap or hold the interogatee down, put a cloth over their mouth and nose or stuff a wadded up cloth into their mouth and then pour water over the cloth, making it very difficult to breathe and making the subject feel as though he or she is drowning.

Apparently this is just one tactic in a wider bucket-o-fun we've been using called "water treatment". The detainee who had his head stuck in a bucket of water and was then punched in the stomach so that he would breath in the water? That's not counted.

Same with the detainee in 2004 whose throat interrogators forced water down make him feel that he was drowning. They did it without the cloth, so it's not counted in the water boarding statistics.

These are the "non-torture" "enhanced interogation techniques" which our government is reportedly using. Tell me again how we're any more civilized than the people we're fighting against?

Liam.