I’ve heard all of the descriptions of it, and I’ve seen demonstration videos of it. I know the concept is that the victim lies on their back, has a cloth wrapped round their face, and then water is poured onto the cloth. Supposedly it simulates drowning and causes intense panic. In this video Christopher Hitchins only lasts 15 seconds before dropping a metal bar to indicate that he’s begging for it to stop.
But what exactly makes it so terrible? Surely Hitchins could have just held his breath for more than 15 seconds? Is the idea that you continue the torture until the victim can’t hold his breath any longer, at which he can’t help trying to breathe, gets a mouthful of wet cloth instead and panics?
Even if it is, I don’t see why you couldn’t get that same effect just by holding the victim’s head in a bucket of water. What’s different about waterboarding?
So the idea is that you actually get water into the victim’s throat and lungs to trigger the panic reflex?
How does that work through a wet rag tied round the face, if it’s not forced in the mouth? And how could it have started happening to Christopher Hitchins within only 15 seconds?
The point is that the victim’s head is lower than his lungs, so no water actually enters his lungs, just his throat. It’s not simple suffocation, or forcing the victim to hold their breath.
It gets wet and becomes impossible to breathe through. I suppose you could just submerge someone upside-down in a pool or bucket of water but this is easier. I imagine it’s also easier to sell to the public that it’s not torture when done this way.
But this is what I don’t understand. If the purpose of a cloth wrapped round the face and having water poured on it is simply to make it hard to breathe and induce near-suffocation, then there’s no difference between waterboarding and dunking someone’s head in a bucket, or just wrapping something round their face so they can’t breathe. That’s what the description here from cited sources on Wikipedia sounds like:
If we’re just talking about forcing someone to hold their breath, how on earth could it force trained CIA officers to crack after only 14 seconds? Christopher Hitchens dropped the “dead man’s bars” after 15 seconds and said it had been one of the worst experiences of his life. We can’t honestly be talking about simply forcing these guys to hold their breath for 15 seconds, can we? There has to be something more to it. Scylla in that thread posted says that when he tried waterboarding with the wet cloth it “wasn’t that bad”. It wasn’t until he cut holes in the cellophane and actually started drawing water into his lungs that he said the horrible reflex-panic kicked in. But if the victim’s head is tilted lower than the lungs as per that description above, surely water shouldn’t ever really enter the lungs like that?
What am I missing that makes it such a devastating technique?
You’ve watched too many James Bond movies. “Trained CIA officers” are just dudes. There’s no super secret training that can make you impervious to torture. This simulates drowning and as you’ll learn if you read the thread linked above there is a primal and irresistible response that the body has to that. I don’t think waterboarding would be any more effective than, say, cutting off a person’s fingers. What makes this so insidious is that to many people it seems innocuous, it doesn’t seem like “real torture.”
So you ask “How is it different than just repeatedly nearly-drowning someone to death?” and we say “Exactly.”
The water entering your respiratory system, along with the inability to breathe triggers the “Holy shit I’m drowning” routine in the brain. That’s, obviously, a very primal, powerful, and panicked feeling. Forceful enough to make people do anything to stop it.
The difference between this and actually getting water in your lungs is that when you have water in your lungs, you actually drown.
So you’re saying I could get CIA officers to crack by wrapping a cloth round their head for 14 seconds? And some of them will describe it as “horrific” and “one of the worst experiences of my life”? I don’t believe that, I think there has to be something more to it, probably along the lines of what the poster after you said:
So they deliberately set it up so that a certain amount of water does enter your respiratory system (through the nose when the head is tilted back?) and that’s enough to cause instinctive panic, but not enough to actually damage the lungs? That makes sense to me if the cloth were placed inside the mouth to hold the mouth open, or if water was poured on the nose through cellophane with holes in it. I don’t see why that would start happening with a thick cloth round the face though - Hitchens in that video actually has two thick pieces of cloth round his head. Why would the water enter the nose? Or do they breathe it in while trying to gasp for air?
I’ve just never seen any explanation of the exact process of how this supposedly works.
The above-linked “I waterboard!” thread has a good description of the step-by-step ramping up of the various waterboarding techniques. Scylla got up to the saran wrap step, and managed to freak himself out badly enough that he was panicking, and shaking in a corner for 10 minutes afterwards. He said it hit a primal “oh my god I am going to die NOW!” response that he had zero control over.
The wet cloth prevents easy air passage - you try to breathe in, you get water with it. The connection between your nose and mouth will back-flow the nose with water when it comes in the mouth. (Think spraying milk out your nose when you laugh at the wrong time.)
The reason why you don’t let water get into the lungs is this way, you don’t physically damage the person. You fuck with their mind badly enough that they believe they were a hairs-breadth from dying, but their lungs are fine, so you get to do it over and over and over again if you like.
I tried it on myself once. Not for very long because without someone to tie you or hold you down, you can’t do it long.
Just having a wet towel wrapped tightly around your face while lying down triggers what I imagine claustrophobia feels like.
Waterboarding creates a sensation of panic even if you try to hold your breath. Saying you should just hold your breath is like saying you should just hold your hand over a flame; very few have enough willpower to keep going when the stimulus is so noxious and the most primitive parts of their brain are panicking.
If you hold someone’s head in a bucket, that person will be able to hold their breath. Which means two things: 1) You don’t get as much torture time because everytime you put the head in the bucket, you have to account for the victim holding its breath. 2) Since you account for the victim holding its breath, you might go too long or he might breath water into his lungs and die.
OK, but Scylla talks about the “cloth wrapped round the face” technique first in that post and said:
This is, ostensibly, the technique that causes Hitchens to tap out after 15 seconds and talk about how horrific it was. It’s also the technique described in the CIA guidance above. So what gives? Why is it considered such a drastic technique, how is it apparently so effective? What am I missing? Scylla then tries the “cloth inside the mouth” technique and even then he found:
It was only when he wrapped his face with saran wrap with holes cut it in that water started entering his lungs and he wound up ‘shaking in the corner’ with fear afterwards. So is that the technique that’s used by torturers? It doesn’t look like that’s what happens in the Hitchens video though, and it’s not the technique listed on the CIA guidance.
The point of Scylla’s post was that as long as he could maintain control over his breathing, he was alright. As soon as he couldn’t, it was terrible.
Different people will have varying levels of control. It doesn’t matter if torturers use the saran wrap or the cloth inside mouth technique. Some people will not be able to control themselves with the cloth in mouth technique. Even those who are might not be able to control themselves over several hours.
There’s different techniques. The cloth over the mouth and nose forces water into your throat and up your nose. Coupled with the inability to breathe, I think that would be enough to induce a drowning sensation in most people.
Remember, Scylla did it to himself with no prior training. There’s no reason to think that a trained interrogator couldn’t induce the sensation with the rag technique on him.
I’ve always wondered how someone who has successfully conquered panic attacks would do in this. I don’t know if any would actually voluntarily try this. I know I wouldn’t.
The whole point of the white torture methods developed by the KGB and CIA was to leave no visible marks and to make the whole ordeal sound harmless when told afterwards.
“So you had to stand on your feet for a few hours - what’s the problem? You were blindfolded, naked, with loud music blaring, arms stretched out? No, don’t see the big deal”
“You had water poured over your face - so what?”
“You were denied sleep for 14 days on end - eh, I’ve gone to discos for several days, what’s the deal?”
But those methods were developed by the KGB after adapting the older methods of the zarist police to get confessions from anybody during the show trials, and in the 50s further developed by the CIA using detailed medical and psychological knowledge. It’s not a big deal to voluntarily forgo sleep because you’re dancing or have to finish a term paper; it’s quite different when you want to sleep and are being kept awake and interrogated continuously (the KGB officers worked in shifts; after 14 days they got confessions from everybody. Victims start hallucinating).
Or look up sensory deprivation: prisoners are kept in a white, evenly lit cell, with no sound, no touch, no smell (or with a hood over their head and headphones to block out sound and sight). They start hallucinating and their memory is affected, so after a few days, you haul them out and tell them a story, and they will believe and confess no matter how wrong that story is (the BBC did an experiment with volunteers for 24 hrs in darkness. All were terribly shaken and all deteriorated on tests).
All of these methods are torture, it doesn’t have to be torn-out fingernails and crushed bones. Psychological torture uses the last knowledge of what people can bear to destroy that and works far more effectively at getting confessions - mostly false confessions, and useless, because memory is one of the first things to go during the process, but that usually doesn’t matter. Torture is used after all not for information gathering, but
for crushing the spirit of the resistance (mostly in military dictatorships)
for getting confessions to “validate” sentences in court (during witch hunts)
If you don’t want to accept that what experts developed and what victims describe as terrible as being terrible because you lack the expert knowledge of how the human brain and reflexes and panic work, then I don’t see how you can be convinced.
Oh, and one thing to note: if you ever look at report from amnesty international and other groups who work with torture victims, either trying to get them granted asylum, or try to help them cope through therapy later, they all tell you that contrary to Hollywood, the effects are lasting. The more psychological the torture is, the longer lasting the effects are.
I don’t care whether it’s considered torture or not (personally I think it is), I’m purely wondering how it works. The answer as I take it from the replies seems to be that water actually enters the respiratory system, which triggers an instinctive feeling of drowning and panic. Although I’m still not quite sure to what extent the water enters and travels through the respiratory system, or how the different methods of conducting the waterboarding change the effect it has on the victim. For a method so controversial there seems to have been very little precise detail out there on how it works.