As a SEAL bound for Vietnam back in the day I spent a few days at SERE school (Survival, Evasion, Resistance Evasion)at Warner Springs CA. It sucked to say the least but not nearly as bad as SEAL training. I was lucky enough to be the most junior enlisted man in the large group of "prisoners". That made me the whipping boy or in my case the guy who got the waterboard treatment. I spent quite a bit of time beign waterboarded.I passed out a few times. It sort of feels like being drowned on land. It was unpleasant but as you can tell I did not die since I am writing this. I would not say it was torture. It was rough persuasion. Torture is pulling out finger nails, having your shoulders dislocated etc. I had friend who was there and he had his moustache pulled out hair by hair. That isn't torture either.

Whether or not a given enlisted man thinks waterboarding is torture is beside the point. It's torture. Japanese soldiers were convicted of war crimes for using waterboarding in WWII, and waterboarding is illegal under US law (http://lawreview.wustl.edu/slip-opinions/waterboarding-is-illegal/). Bush and Cheney's excuse is that they're exempt from the statute because they're the executive branch, and can do what they want.

That it is wrong, nobody can deny. Whether it can be excused if it produces results... begs the question: does it produce results? It seems the evidence is accumulating that it doesn't. There are better ways of gathering intelligence.

I agree with you that what you went through was not torture. But there is a crucial difference between your own experience and that of a victim of actual torture:

YOU WERE IN TRAINING!

Although there may be no difference in method (waterboarding, pulling out mustache hairs, etc), there is most certainly a difference in kind. Had you been kidnapped, jailed, and waterboarded by a foreign power -- well, in Bushworld, it could be your own govt -- never knowing when the "simulated drowning" would end, and the actual drowning begin, then, and ONLY then, would you have experienced torture. You, by contrast, were in a safe environment, notwithstanding the extreme difficulties and dangers of advanced military training.

This is even more the case for those dishonest reporters who have undergone waterboarding for the purposes of writing an article about it. There was no interrogation, no sleep deprivation, no abject fear, and no danger of them being killed by a govt agent who was having a bad day.

For you to call your training "torture" is as absurd as calling a roller coaster ride an extreme sport.

Jim French