Quite Telling - Cheney EVADES full reality of what HE sanctioned in order for it to sound defensible

[kpete]

How could waterboarding be torture?
We do it to our own troops!

......................

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_083011/content/01125106.guest.html
CHENEY: In fact, the techniques we used were techniques that we used with our own people in training. There wasn't anything there --

RUSH: I'm just gonna mention that.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: -- our own forces.

RUSH: Everything you used is part of training for our own troops, including waterboarding, correct?

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Correct.

................



The first attempts to quantify the misery inflicted on trainees:

How stressful is SERE exactly? It might seem a question for which there is no answer, but in 2000, on the cusp of the war on terror, a team of researchers attempted to address this very issue, to quantify in clinical terms the amount of psychological force the school exerted upon trainees. The results, published in Special Warfare, the professional journal of the Green Berets, were shocking. The researchers measured the amount of cortisol, a hormone excreted during times of mental and physical stress, present in the saliva of SERE trainees. "It was the highest amount of cortisol we'd ever heard of," one researcher was quoted as saying. A person undergoing major surgery, such as a heart transplant, can be expected to produce cortisol levels of around 700 nanomoles per liter. By contrast, the researchers examining the saliva of SERE trainees discovered an average of 900 nanomoles per liter, the highest levels ever recorded.

......................

When I got home a week later, a friend asked me how it went. I told him that I would commit suicide before I allowed myself to be captured in combat. http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2009/winter/morris-sere/

American service members are also waterboarded "just" once or twice. But War on Terrorism detainees? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month! And Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, also in a single month. Even if you don't think a single instance of waterboarding is torture, you've got to be daft to think inflicting it on someone scores of times doesn't qualify. And dishonest to say it's equivalent to what we do to our own troops.



http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/dick-cheneys-latest-lie-about-torture/244348/

[Solly Mack]

1. Waterboarding is torture. Period.

Anyone pretending otherwise is a liar or a fool.

The CIA's torture teachers/Reverse Engineering/SERE
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/21/cia_sere/print.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/weekinreview/03shane.html

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/12/23/will-the-bush-administration-be-held-accountable-for-war-crimes/


Course, the most outrageous part of this current Cheney "news" is that the fucker isn't in prison.