Thank you so much for doing this experiment and for documenting it so well. You have performed a great service for everyone… I want to say, for everyone on the planet, but that might be construed as over-the-top praise.
One point concerns me deeply: this experiment sounds like it might be quite dangerous. I am so glad you survived to get the message out.
A question for you: At the end of the experiment, did you get stuck in some way, restrained by panic or by the equipment, so that it took you some amount of time to free yourself from the saran wrap and finally draw a clear and dry breath?
Even if that (getting stuck) did not happen to you, it could easily happen to someone else who tried this. Death could be the result. So, I strongly suggest that others not try this alone. In fact, doing it alone may actually turn out to be quite a bit more dangerous than having someone else (a person you trust with your life) do it to you, or at the very least having someone there to observe and help out if you get into trouble.
Even weight lifting is supposed to be done with someone spotting you.
Those ‘interrogators’ probably have a lot more tricks up their sleeves so that if it is possible to condition oneself out of the involuntary reaction to this they would be able to refine it to the nth degree and bypass your defences.
This form of torture sounds about as bad as rape, where the victim has all control ripped away from them - the mental torture that does the damage.
Imagine being in a position where the interrogator can press that button at any time of their chossing and as often as they like, it woud not be long before you dreaded the sound of the keys in your cell door.
It was pretty horrifying to read, and I’m glad you are safe and well Scylla
As bad as this is though, is there any situation where such treatment is justified ?
After all, defenders will say the fear is temporary, that it achieves the desired results without a protracted and physically damaging process, is this perhaps better or worse than other methods of interrogation ?
I am not defending it at all, seems pretty brutal to me but do you have an alternative to getting relevant information quickly enough?
There is a real debate here, is the US right to do this to save lives, or will the material gained be accurate?
I would probably say anything and admit to anything to get them to stop, I would imagine that anyone who says differant is severely overestimating their own abilities.
The component of not being able to breather was not a problem, though certainly not pleasant. I didn’t let it go on long enough to feel severe distress from this, or even marginal distress.
What has horrible was the moment when I couldn’t expel water out, and instead began to inhale it. Now, if your head is lower than your lungs, you can’t actually pull the water up into your lungs, but when it hits a certain it triggers a reflex, and that reflex is total and absolute panic.
You claim that you were in control, then you claim that you inhaled water(not healthy!), panicked and had involuntary motor reflexes. How helpful would your partner had been if you had started flailing about and had inadvertently pushed her away?
I reiterate-there is no safe way to experiment with this technique at home.
Started to inhale. What’s supposed to make waterboarding safe is that your head is lower than your lungs and you can’t actually pull the water into your lungs this way. You don’t actually inhale the water. It just feels like it and triggers the drowning reflex.
The moment I panicked I was able to breathe again, cause I was not restrained. I wanted her there only if I passed out. I thought that would be impossible, but I wasn’t sure. What I was afraid was passing out while inverted and asphyxiating.
I agree. I wouldn’t do it again. But I think it was safer than when I get up on a ladder and clean the gutters.
Scylla, I admire your dedication to fighting ignorance. I hope some of the pro-torture folks on your end of the political spectrum will read this and come to their senses.
Now don’t pull any lamebriain stunts like this again! Geez, you coulda killed your fool self! I don’t know what we’d do without old Scylla to kick around!
P.S. 100-mile run? You are out of your freakin’ mind!
This is similar to what happens when people hang themselves, I think, but of course in that case it’s too late to do anything.
Scylla, especially with this post coming up on Reddit and thereby gaining a world-wide audience, I think you’ve done a great service. Thank you again.
But to warn others: Scylla did this against a background of a great deal of relevant experience, **and **with a lot of caution and forethought, **and **with his trusted spouse watching.
If YOU do it, you will probably – as my dad used to say – wake up in the coroner’s icebox.
Don’t try it. You don’t have to, because Scylla tried it for us.
Scylla, thanks for taking one for the team like that. You are a braver man than I.
For myself, I was unsure about waterboarding as a torture technique until I saw a video of it being performed on a willing volunteer. From the sheer violence of his struggles, I was clear he was being tortured. You could tell that he would have broken his own arms or back to escape. It was quite telling.
Video of a bunch of slackers waterboarding a volunteer. He appears to cope with the saran wrap, but you can clearly see that the towel messes him up badly. He doesn’t look at all well at the end of the video.
Seconded. There are no words. Consider me a new fan, Scylla. You should consider applying to the SDSAB.
In the meantime, though, have you considered videotaping the process and sending it to CNN or something? It could make a big difference.
Do you understand how MASSIVE that “besides” is? OTOH, I appreciate your dedication to this, and I think this one line tells us everything we need to know about the whole thing:
ISTM that the key difference is that water never goes into the lungs.
The reason it is simulated drowning is the fact that you don’t die. Drowning is to DIE by suffocation underwater.
Sure it feels like dying. Drowning = dying. Look it up in the dictionary.
So, substituting the words, you can call waterboarding simulated DYING. Maybe that phrase would get the point across that it is torture more clearly to its proponents.
I’m in the “WTF,** Scylla**?!!” camp. Even given that you examined the question carefully and minimized the risks, it was a pointless excercise. If the odds were a hundred to one that you wouldn’t have your 'nads torn off with red-hot pincers, would you risk it for a toaster oven? I’m guessing “no”, but I’m not so sure anymore.
Were you going to prove to yourself that it is torture? Well, of course, it’s torture, if it weren’t torture, it wouldn’t work! And if it didn’t work, nobody would use it! It would fall to be the bottom of the tormentors fun book down with “the comfy chair”. It has a long history of use because it works, and it works because…(wait for it!)… its torture!!
That’s reason numero uno. Numero two-o is that we liberal scum told you it was torture, and we are right more often than you are. Next time you get a harebrained idea like this, check with me, or Dio, or Elvis, get the sane perspective. Failing that, ask permission from your wife. If she says “Sure, honey, great idea!”, fire the cabana boy.