Quote:
Originally Posted by ratbastid
No you wouldn't. Khalid Sheik Mohammad profoundly impressed his captors by going 40 seconds. Most videos I've seen of people subjecting themselves to waterboarding have them dropping the "safety signal" within eight or ten seconds. You know, the thing put in their hand that they're told to drop only if they experience unbearable suffering?
What I've seen and read about waterboarding indicates that your knowledge of your safety has zero to do with it. The fact you'll be sleeping in a nice warm bed later instead of a cold cell has absolutely nothing to do with the primal "I'm dying" response that is produced in your body and brain by waterboarding.
A prominent right-wing member of the Straight Dope forum waterboarded himself as an experiment. I'll give you the link to his whole thing in a sec, but the most compelling part of his story reads:
I waterboard! - Straight Dope Message Board |
Well, obviously its a lot easier to say you'd do it than to do it - which is the point everyone is raising. But 40 seconds for $40,000 would be a lot of money for me.
As unpleasant and horrible as I could imagine it would be, I think that the guy saying he'd rather have his fingers smashed with a hammer is plain wrong, or being misleading. A sensation of torture CANNOT be as bad as physical damage and disability. No one would prefer to never be able to use their hand for 40 years rather than 40 seconds of any kind of agony or horror if it ended and there was no more.