Again, all of it si water torture.
Yet this meaning is incorrect: As Wallach has pointed out in an op-ed (Washington Post, 11/4/07), “To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death.” He elaborated that the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted.
Malcolm Nance, a former instructor at the U.S. Navy’s Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival program who has taught American service members what to expect under torture, concurred with this assessment of “waterboarding” in an interview with Extra!: “There is nothing simulated about it.”
U.S. Justice Department legal counsel John Yoo’s 2003 memo, which provided a legal justification for the use of “waterboarding,” has deservedly been rebuked by the media for having “redefined torture to justify repugnant, clearly illegal acts,” as one New York Times editorial (4/4/08) put it. Unfortunately, the same can be said of much of the news reporting on “waterboarding.”
From Water Torture to ‘Waterboarding’
A Visual History of Water-Based Tortures | waterboarding.org
PolitiFact | History supports McCain's stance on waterboarding
