On Monday’s the Dog usually works his letter writing campaign for torture accountability, but with all the other issues out there it seems like a good time to remind everyone what this letter writing campaign is asking accountability for. Torture is hideous not merely for the physical damage it causes. It is hideous because of the sense of total helplessness it causes. It makes people live in total fear, for their lives, and total helplessness to make it end.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

Last year the Dog wrote the following first person example of waterboarding. It is taken from literature and descriptions from those who have actually experienced waterboarding, though not from the Dog’s personal experience. The intent is to give those of us who have never been tortured one small, imperfect, glimpse into what that might be like.

WARNING: For those who have been tortured, this description may be triggering to PTSD. If you have lived through torture yourself, please consider not reading this or read it knowing it is graphic and may be disturbing.

Your feet are shackled, and so are your wrists. When you were lead into the room, you saw that it did not have the usual table, this room had a board, and a drain in the floor. You are blindfolded by the guards and roughly forced to lie on the wet wooden board. Even though you are shackled they tie you down to the board with three ropes, one across your chest, on across your waist and one across your legs. You are now completely unable to move, your head is below the level of your feet making the blood rush to your head.

You can hear them moving around and hear a hose running, filling a bucket of water. Your heart begins to race as your mouth is forced open and a wet rag is stuffed inside. There is enough clothe that it fills your mouth, and prevents your teeth from meeting, even at the back of your mouth. You feel a person sitting next you on the board, and they put their hands on your stomach, just above your diaphragm and push down, keeping you from taking a deep breath through your nose. You sense someone else standing above your head, and then the water starts to pour over your face. Not a little, but a torrent of water, it is running up your nose, and you can not breath! Your gag reflex kicks in, but the rag in your mouth does not let you gag.

Your body begins to convulse, convinced in the most primitive of reflexes to try to do anything to get more air! You thrash but the ropes and shackles have you completely immobilized. You feel the water hitting your face, as the person on the bench presses down on your diaphragm, forcing what little air you have out, not in. You are now sure that you are going to die, that you are going to drown, not an abstract, but for real, and right now. Your chest buns with the need for more air, your eyes tear under the blindfold as you struggle to get one more breath.

You are no longer a rational human, you are now just a survival machine, ready to beg anyone, do anything to make the pain stop and get just one more breath. The water stops falling on you. You suck air in through your nose and try to suck it in through you mouth. Both bring more water along with the small amount of air you can get. You hear the hose running again and know that this is not over, it is just starting. Your heart is going like a trip hammer, and you are in a state of terror, like nothing you have ever experienced or thought of. You know if and when they ask you something, you will do or say anything, anything to prevent them from doing it again. Then the hands push on your stomach, and the water starts falling again.

You struggle, trying to hold your breath, but the gag reflex kicks in again, and again you become more animal than man as you struggle for breath your body wracked with pain and convulsively struggling to get free to breath.

This is the horror we inflected on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 183 times in less than a month. It is what happened to Abu Zabaydah 86 times. One time is too many, but we tortured these men over and over and over to gain no actionable intelligence.

Sadly, this is not the only kind of torture we inflicted on these men and others. Try to imagine yourself in a concrete room, where the temperature is in the low 30’s for days at time, where the lights are always on, where the guards come in and move you any time you start to sleep. These are also torture, though not as directly deadly, combined with the clear disregard for your life, they are nearly as damaging.

This is what the Dog fights for accountability for every week in the Weekly Torture Action Letters. If what you just read sickens you, if it makes you even vaguely ashamed of what your government has done in your name, the please consider joining this effort to convince AG Holder and the other decision makers that just because it will be politically hard to fully investigate and prosecute the people who committed these crimes and those who ordered it, it is not enough to justify letting the criminals get away with it.

There is no washing away this stain without full investigation and prosecution. Waterboarding was done in our names, torture was done in our names, and as always with torture, it produced nothing which would make us safer, it merely inflicted pain and fear and helplessness on prisoners in our custody. This torture did not make us safer; it merely made us more like the people we were supposed to be fighting.

If this upsets you, good. Do not just be upset, act. Below is a list of e-mail contacts for the officials who can make a difference on accountability. Write them and tell them why you insist on accountability, and join the Dog every week on Monday’s to do the same until we have accountability under the law for all citizens.

AG Holder, Deputy AG Ogden and Associate AG Perrelli can all be reached at AskDOJ@usdoj.gov. Be sure to put Attention then their name in the subject line.

The White House, Attention President Obama
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Majority Leader Harry Reid
Rep John Conyers - Judiciary Committee Chair
Chairman Leahy
Representative Jerry Nadler
(to get past Rep. Nadler's filter use Zip Code 11224-4561 and the address of 445 Neptune Ave, Brooklyn, NY)

The floor is yours.