A BRIEF LESSON ON WATERBOARDING

Walter Pincus provides a brief history of the U.S. attitude towards waterboarding.

The money quotes are here:

Inside the CIA, waterboarding is cited as the technique that got Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the prime plotter of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to begin to talk and provide information -- though "not all of it reliable," a former senior intelligence official said.
...
The KUBARK manual was the product of more than a decade of research and testing, refining lessons learned from the Korean War, where U.S. airmen were subjected to a new type of "touchless torture" until they confessed to a bogus plan to use biological weapons against the North Koreans.

How many times and in how many ways does it need to be said? Torture doesn't provide reliable intelligence. So those who advocate torture must have a different motivation.

I suspect it's because they like to inflict it. It's the power thing.

Tags: waterboarding, torture