Rather than take them up on their offer directly, instead have them tell us which of their relatives they’d allow us to waterboard. Or, if they’d rather, they can give us one of our own choosing (age 18 or older).

they would at least know what they were talking about. . . for once.

First of all, does volunteering to willingly submit to an illegal practice make the practice somehow all good?

I know BT’s question was rhetorical, but I still have to say it: The question of volunteering doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to the person undergoing waterboarding. Ask Daniel Levin, who lost his State Dept job not long after willingly submitting himself to waterboarding, then writing a memo describing the terrifying, dehumanizing process as “torture” and “abhorrent.”

If Ashcroft really were to voluntarily undergo waterboarding–oh, let’s just call it by its right name: the slow, controlled, systematic drowning of a person under controlled conditions that can usually be stopped just before death–by experts, under expert supervision, his initial willingness wouldn’t matter in the slightest after a few moments. Once his lungs began to fill up and he couldn’t stop it, he would be reduced to flailing, panic-filled, do-anything-to-stop-it horror, even if some remaining part of his mind remembered that the supervisors would stop the process before it killed him.

Which is as good a reason as I can think of for taking him up on his offer.

But that’s just me.

bn

Because he’ll never be put to the test and he knows it.

But the “appointment” will be when half a dozen guys dressed in all black, including the balaclavas over their heads, to break down their front doors at 3:00 am some randomly chosen day, pull their “suspect” out of bed by the feet or hair, throw a hood over his head, shackle him, then drag him out and throw him into the back of a van. Then drive him around for a few hours before stopping at some godforsaken, deserted location so far from anywhere that all he can hear are the birds, if there are any. Then they toss him naked into a dark 4′x4′x6′ “cell” for a few weeks with nothing for company except 100 db heavy metal 24/7. Food and water are provided at bare subsistence levels, at random intervals. After a couple of weeks of this, haul him out and interrogate him, throwing a few punches here and there. In other words, just follow the procedures in the Guantanamo Operations Manual.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Guan…..al_torture

If you don’t convince the prick this ain’t no drill, it won’t be a fair test.