Strangely enough, this week’s clearest statement of what the fight in Washington is really all about didn’t appear in any newspaper or broadcast news outlet, but on an Internet site ( http://www.smallwarsjournal.com) popular with unconventional warfare and intelligence professionals. The author is Malcolm W. Nance, a veteran special operations consultant to various U.S. intelligence agencies and a master instructor in the U.S. Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program in San Diego. Nance also is an experienced Arabic-speaking interrogator. He wrote that one of the things he did when helping to develop the program that trains navy fliers and others on how to stand up to torture was to visit Cambodia:

Before arriving for my assignment at SERE, I traveled . . . to visit the torture camps of the Khmer Rouge. . . . I wanted to know how real torturers and terror camp guards would behave and learn how to resist them from survivors of such horrors. . . . It was in the S-21 death camp known as Tuol Sleng in downtown Phnom Penh, where I found a perfectly intact inclined water board. Next to it was the painting on how it was used. . . .

On a Mekong River trip, I met a 60-year-old man, happy to be alive and a cheerful travel companion, who survived the genocide and torture. He spoke openly about it and gave me a valuable lesson. . . . In torture, he confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a Buddhist Monk, a Catholic Bishop and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was actually just a schoolteacher whose crime was that he once spoke French. He remembered ‘the Barrel’ version of waterboarding quite well. Head first until the water filled the lungs, then you talk.’

Nance has no time for euphemisms and no doubt that waterboarding is anything other than torture: Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word. Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration — usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right, it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again.’

That’s what really is at issue in the Mukasey confirmation hearing. When the media characterize it as a political struggle between the White House and congressional Democrats or as a complex debate over national security in a post Sept. 11 world — two convenient dodges — they aren’t being realistic or fair. What the media really are doing is engaging in a sophisticated fan dance — a convenient act of concealment.

What’s really at stake is whether this country will continue to stand with the framers of our Constitution and our authentic moral traditions or whether we now will allow Bush and Cheney to put us shoulder to shoulder with Pol Pot.

Torture is not an American value. Torture is not constitutional. Therefore, those who support torture are anti-American and anti-constitution.

It’s been proven that interrogation techniques that don’t involve torture produce results. Answers given under torture conditions are MADE UP in order to stop the torture.

Stop watching Jack Bauer and join the real world instead relying on TV fantasy.

I’m not willing to take that risk, and I don’t think anyone else is if they carefully consider all of the implications of a statement like that.

If it takes 40 seconds of waterboarding to force an animal like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to come clean and start singing like a little birdy, then by all means have at it. My only regret in his case is that he was too big of a pussy to take more than that before he broke. If anyone deserves a couple of hours of waterboarding it would surely be him.

What ever it takes.

There are plenty more Islamo Fascist fanatics out there like KSM that deserve that and more, but don’t get it because the US doesn’t resort to torture anywhere near as often, or as severely, as some would have us believe.

Regards…