The media do a terrible job explaining what exactly waterboarding is. My 2005 posts titled "What is waterboarding?" (here and here) still get a lot of hits from Google.
The question then was whether waterboarding involved actual submersion under water or pouring water over the face to simulate submersion. In the US case, at least, the answer appears to be the latter. Today's McClatchy report on the debate over waterboarding includes this helpful (but disturbing) graphic:
If more news reports illustrated what the technique actually entails, I'd guess public support for its use would go down quite a bit.
As far as we know, waterboarding has been used to question no more than 3 enemy prisoners, all of whom were high-level terrorists. However, it's been used as part of the training on a substantial number of our own service personnel.
Brendan Nyhan claims to believe that waterboarding is torture, but I think he's spoofing. If he really thought waterboarding was torture, would he not be railing against widespread torture of American servicemen by our own military?
Posted by: David | November 08, 2007 at 12:46 PM