You may have seen the video of this guy “Mancow” volunteering to be waterboarded. Here’s a video. (I think this just happened today. I know I’ve heard of a few others doing this, including someone here at the SDMB.)
Based on that video, I have a question. If someone knows that the waterboarding they’re about to undergo is a test, and that everyone in the room intends no harm to you, then why not just hold your breath? Why is it still so unbearable that, for example, Mancow can’t last more than six seconds, and declares the treatment torture despite his intention to have demonstrated otherwise?
I’m probably just not understanding what I’m seeing in the video. But if I asked my wife (who, to be clear, I trust implicitly ) to please poor water over my face while I had a towel over my nose, and told her please make sure not to actually harm me, then why I wouldn’t just be able to hold my breath and make it for several dozen seconds? (As long as I can hold my breath.)
When you get a gallon of water all up in your grill at once it doesn’t matter if you can hold your breath or not. Where’s that water going to go when you decide to inhale? It’s still there and as soon as you try to draw breath again it’s going down those air passages.
Additionally, as you can see in the Vanity Fair waterboarding video, the waterboarder can put pressure on the subject’s chest in case he gets any clever ideas like holding his breath:
Holding your breath pretty much just means that you’ve stopped inhaling-exhaling. It doesn’t mean that you’ve closed off the airpipe into your lungs. Generally water doesn’t go up your nose when you hold your breath because you’re not upside down and because of the surface tension of water, but that ceases to work when you’re specifically pouring water up it.
But more importantly, waterboarding works via taking advantage of a quirk of the human physiology. I think we’d need to see a graphic of where all the water goes that it doesn’t with, for instance, a Neti pot, but the point would be that once water gets near your lungs, your brain goes into panic mode regardless of anything.
I just haven’t been clear on exactly where the water does go. I’ve read descriptions, but they’ve seemed inconsistent to me so I’ve never been completely clear on exactly what’s going on.
In the video linked in the OP, they mention holding the subject’s nose. That threw me for a loop. Do you hold the nose closed during waterboarding?!
But I was asking about a case in which I know that the person doing the waterboarding doesn’t intend to harm me. (Let’s be clear, I’m not asking about victims of waterboarding, I’m asking about voluntary subjects testing out waterboarding to see what it’s like.) I assumed this meant they would not be forcing water into my lungs, which I assumed meant I would not have to hold my breath longer than is possible.
I think you’re missing the key element. Water boarding is NOT about water getting into your lungs. In fact avoiding that is the whole point: the goal is to not kill the person. The subject is on an inclined plane. This means that water can be poured down their mouth and nose (involuntary) and fill their windpipe up to a certain point (involuntary), thus triggering the “oh shit i’m drowning” response (involuntary). They may still have air in their lungs (and certainly they are unlikely to have serious amounts of water there) but their brain is still convinced they are drowning.
From what I’ve read in a couple of places, it’s a reflex, like gagging.
Try sticking something into the back of your throat. Even though you know that you can remove that object at any time, and that there is no danger of the object blocking your airway, you still gag.
Once the water reaches a certain level, the reflex kicks in. It’s not about thinking you are going to drown, it’s your body reacting to water.
I thought that Mancow video was a little weird too. Certainly the Vanity Fair video of Christopher Hitchens undergoing waterboarding looked a LOT different; in that case, they didn’t plug his nose and pour a stream of water onto his bare face; instead, they put a mask on his face, then put a towel over the mask, then poured a small amount (it looked like the amount you’d get when taking a sip of water from a glass) of water onto the towel, waited a couple seconds, poured another little sip of water onto the towel, waited, poured another little sip … and after just a few little bits of water were poured onto the towel, Hitchens gave the signal and was totally shaken and ashen-faced. And he agreed that it was torture, too.
So why the different methods? What is the commonality – how far does water get into your sinuses and airway?
Scylla’s experience was quite an educational read, but I’m not sure how the method that real waterboarders used on Christopher Hitchens works compared to the waterfall-pouring method.
Also, they prevent you from holding your breath, and they can pour water on your face indefinitely. Outlasting the torturer is not a viable tactic as far as trying to breathe goes.
) to please poor water over my face while I had a towel over my nose, and told her please make sure not to actually harm me, then why I wouldn’t just be able to hold my breath and make it for several dozen seconds? (As long as I can hold my breath.)