Anyone here ever been almost drowned? Sorry, I know everyone is writing diaries about this whole AG Mukasey confirmation, but it still pisses me off.
I almost drowned once. It wasn't pleasant.
(keep reading below)
I was walking down a pier once in my hometown in South Tx. I was with my friend who wanted to fish. Despite living on the Gulf Coast (the bay was only a few miles from where i lived) I had never been fishing. Indeed, I rarely go to the beach even. I can't swim, you see, and I am fond of saying that I never enter a body of water that doesn't have a drain and a soapdish, regardless of my natural bouyancy (i'm overweight).
Well, as we reached the end of the pier, my friend playfully pushed me toward the edge. No big deal. I mean, even if I fell, I could certainly grab the edge of the pier to keep from drowning, right? Well, I did fall, as his push came in mid-step and I temporarliy lost balance. But even as I fell, knowing that I can't swim, I wasn't worried. Unless I encountered the Kracken underwater my chances of survival seem assured.
But as I hit the water, its' cold temperature caused me to gasp in surprise, resulting in a quick inhalation of seawater. What I felt next is hard to explain. I was scared, but it was more than the fright that most people would refer to.
Have you ever been scared? Terrified? Really? And not just an "i'm scared of this movie" scared. Not even an "i'm walking down a dark street in the middle of the night, all alone, when all of a sudden the sound of a twig snapping behind is heard, and afraid of turning around and validating your fears, you quicken your step all the while almost seeing in your periphery vision, the pale white skeletal hand of your worst fear about to descend on your shoulder...." moments.
We've all had those moments. Those something in the shadows moments. This wasn't one of those.
This was an abject terror absolute panic enducing I'm gonna fucking die! moments. There's no reason to these moments. There's no rational thought to these moments. And there's no comparison to these moments.
I was probabaly in the water for all of seven or eight seconds before my friend grabbed my hand and pulled me back onto the pier, getting a face full of coughed up seawater for his troubles. As I lay there on the pier, heart pounding, all I could think of was how quickly it could all end, and how thankful I was to my friend for pulling me out, even though he was mostly laughing his ass off at the time.
Thinking back to that day, I can't even imagine what waterboarding must feel like. To be almost drowned, then not, then almost drowned again, god knows how many times in one sitting. To feel Deaths vise like grip on you over and over again must be the very defenition of torture. I think I would say almost anything to stop that feeling. I'd probably admit to setting fire to Rome, London, AND Chicago, before taking a flight to Dallas to position myself on the grassy knoll.
Now I'm not trying to get sympathy for terrorists. We have got to get information somehow. But is this the way to do it? To use a practice that has been around at least since the Spanish Inquisition? I thought we were better than that. I think we used to be.
On January 21, 1968, during the Vietnam War, The Washington Post published a controversial photograph of three American soldiers waterboarding a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang. The article described the practice as "fairly common." The photograph led to the soldier being courtmartialed by a U.S. military court two months later. Another waterboarding photograph of the same scene is also exhibited in the War Remnants Museum at Ho Chi Minh City.
That is why the confirmation of Judge Mukasey is so troubling. He claims that he doesn't know enough about the technique to be able to render a judgement.I understand that he is a pretty old guy, so I'm not that suprised to find out that he doesn't know how to use "the google". But he must know what a library is, right? We've still got those, don't we?
I'll end this with a quote:
Laws are silent in time of war.
~ Cicero
rasalom79