DEAR GOP: WATERBOARDING IS NOT BOBBING FOR FREAKING APPLES

Before standing up and braying that waterboarding is just dokey, would Republicans please learn what the hell it actually is?

Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.):

"If we have another 2,000 people killed, I want Nancy Pelosi and [liberal philanthropist] George Soros, John Conyers and Pat Leahy to go to the funeral and say, 'Your son was vaporized because we didn’t want to dump some guy's head under water for 30 seconds.'"

Bill O'Reilly to Ellis Henican of Newsday:

O'Reilly: To save your life, I woulda dunked the guy in the water!

Former McCain campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard:

As to the morality of the methods used, I don't see anything immoral about smacking around a terrorist or making him sit in the cold or dunking him in the water....

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

IT'S NOT STICKING SOMEONE'S HEAD IN WATER. It's placing an airway-constricting hood over the head of an immobilized person, then placing a towel over the hood, then pouring water on the face until it's utterly impossible for the waterboarded person to breathe.

Let's me go back to the very disturbing video I linked earlier today of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded (and acknowledging that, hell yes, it's torture):



As Hitchens says in the video:

It's annoying to me now to read every time it's discussed in the press, or in Congress, that it simulates the feeling of drowning. It doesn't simulate the feeling of drowning. You are being drowned, slowly....

If you hold your breath, it has the effect of tightening the grip of the suff over your face and mouth and nostrils, so it's a smothering feeling as well as a drowning feeling.

You're being drowned while you're being smothered while you're being immobilized by the people your brain thinks are killing you. You can't flail. You can't struggle. And you'll agree to say whatever the hell anyone wants you to say to try to make it stop, whether or not it's the freaking truth.