Dick Cheney Says, "Surf's Up Bitches!"

then why do our best intelligence people break within a minute of being submitted to it.

Waterboarding consists of tying a prisoner to an inclined board, wrapping his face with cellophane and pouring water on him, stimulating a gagging reflex and convincing the victim that he's drowning.

Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), a reserve Naval Intelligence officer who's been subjected to the technique himself, told me that "everyone breaks" when waterboarded, usually in less than a minute, and that U.S. combat troops, pilots and others who might be captured routinely undergo the procedure as part of their training.

According to ABC News, CIA officers said that the highest-ranking al Qaeda operative yet captured, Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, held out for two and a half minutes before begging to talk. The CIA claims it got valuable information from him.

These are the same guys (our soldiers) that are put through this kind of treatment to be prepared for torture at SERE camps:

The theory behind the sere program is that soldiers who are exposed to nightmarish treatment during training will be better equipped to deal with such terrors should they face them in the real world. Accordingly, the program is a storehouse of knowledge about coercive methods of interrogation. One way to stimulate acute anxiety, sere scientists have learned, is to create an environment of radical uncertainty: trainees are hooded; their sleep patterns are disrupted; they are starved for extended periods; they are stripped of their clothes; they are exposed to extreme temperatures; and they are subjected to harsh interrogations by officials impersonating enemy captors. (Colonel Hans Bush, a spokesman at Fort Bragg, declined to “disclose the details of the specific challenges our students face.”) Research in social psychology has shown that a person’s capacity for “self-regulation”—the ability to moderate or control his own behavior—can be substantially undermined in situations of high anxiety. If, for instance, a prisoner of war is trying to avoid revealing secrets to enemy interrogators, he is much less likely to succeed if he has been deprived of sleep or is struggling to ignore intense pain.

Yet, these guys, who go through this for weeks and pass - still break within a minute of waterboarding.

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