|
Three Young Men Try
Waterboarding
And Tell the Tale
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN,
from the Web, January 31, 2008; Page A1
RIO RANCHO, N.M. -- One night
last month, Jean-Pierre Larroque drove into the desert here, lay down in the
road and waited for one of his best friends to waterboard him.
Just a few hours earlier, the
26-year-old Peace Corps volunteer had been debating with two close friends
whether waterboarding is torture. Finishing up a pizza dinner, Mr.
Larroque casually suggested that the three settle the matter by trying it out
for themselves.
They filled a two-liter Coke bottle with water, grabbed a small towel and headed
to a vacant patch of dirt road in this suburb of Albuquerque. With a video
camera rolling, one of the friends draped the towel over Mr. Larroque's face and
began to pour.
Waterboarding is the centerpiece of a bitter political debate about the Bush
administration's methods of interrogating terrorist suspects. The
nomination of Attorney General Michael Mukasey was almost derailed by his
refusal to take a clear stance on the technique, and Mr. Mukasey angered
Democratic lawmakers anew yesterday by again refusing to say whether
waterboarding is illegal. The Central Intelligence Agency has been
embroiled in controversy over the destruction of tapes showing CIA officers
waterboarding terrorist suspects. Waterboarding has been a subject in
recent Hollywood movies, including the Matt Damon film "The Bourne Ultimatum"
and Reese Witherspoon's "Rendition."
But waterboarding, which induces the sensation of drowning, is an abstract issue
for most Americans. Few are familiar with the details. Even fewer
know anyone who has been interrogated, let alone tortured.
Some elite military personnel are waterboarded to prepare them for possible
capture, but it is not part of conventional training. One civilian policy
maker known to have been waterboarded is Daniel Levin, a high-ranking Justice
Department lawyer who subjected himself to it in 2004 to see whether it
constituted torture; he decided it did. Republican presidential
front-runner John McCain, a veteran who was harshly interrogated while
imprisoned in Vietnam, thinks it's torture, too.
Curiosity
The number of regular Americans who have waterboarded themselves is small.
Some do it out of curiosity, some as a prank. All are voluntarily
experimenting with something the U.S. military -- along with most human-rights
organizations -- considers torture.
Waterboarding has been in use since at least the Spanish Inquisition. Many
medical professionals warn that it can be fatal. In Senate testimony last
fall, Allen Keller, a physician and professor at the New York University School
of Medicine, said that waterboarding creates "a real risk of death from actually
drowning or suffering a heart attack or damage to the lungs from inhalation of
water." For those who have gone through waterboarding, the long-term
effects can include panic attacks, depression and post-traumatic stress
disorder, Dr. Keller warned at the time.
Kaj Larsen, a military veteran and journalist, had himself waterboarded on
camera for a segment on Current TV, the left-leaning, youth-oriented cable
channel created by former Vice President Al Gore.
In an interview on National Public Radio, Mr. Larsen said the experiment was an
attempt to "let the public decide for themselves whether this is the kind of
behavior we should be engaging in." He told the interviewer it induced
"sheer panic" and felt "like having a hot coal in your chest that you can't get
out."
Wesley Sherwood, a teenager in Knoxville, Tenn., says he and his friends decided
to try it to win an online dare contest hosted by the Web site Makemeking.com.
A video posted on YouTube begins with Mr. Sherwood mugging for the camera as his
friends strap him to a sheet of plasterboard, cover his face with Saran wrap and
douse him with water. He holds up well until they drape a towel over his face
and waterboard him a second time.
After a few seconds, Mr. Sherwood begins thrashing wildly and breaks the board
with his head in an effort to get loose. The video, which has been viewed nearly
60,000 times, ends with Mr. Sherwood looking pale and very somber.
"You can't help but feel that you're going to drown," he says in the interview.
"You get a bottomless-pit sensation in your stomach and it's like all of the bad
feelings in the world rolled into one."
Mr. Larroque and his two friends, Walter Gaspar, 27, and Trent Toulouse, 27, had
frequently talked about whether waterboarding should be considered torture.
"It doesn't leave a mark like if someone put a cigarette out on your face, and
it's not going to kill you," says Mr. Larroque, a rail-thin man with wavy hair
and stubble on his face. "So the question we kept coming back to was
whether waterboarding could be torture if it mainly affected your mind."
Trying It Out
On Dec. 11, the three friends got together for pizza and beer at Mr. Gaspar's
house. They were watching cable-news reports about congressional efforts
to ban waterboarding when Mr. Larroque and Mr. Toulouse began to joke about
trying it out for themselves.
The conversations turned serious as they discovered that waterboarding required
no training or equipment. Mr. Larroque found a "How To Do It" guide at
Waterboarding.org, which opposes the practice. It said the only things
needed were an inclined surface, a container of water and a damp towel or piece
of plastic wrap. The plastic wrap is put over the mouth, leaving the nose
and eyes uncovered. The water is then poured into the person's nose, filling his
sinuses. The plastic, meanwhile, prevents the person from expelling the water.
With a towel, the cloth is used to cover the person's whole face before the
water is poured.
Mr. Larroque, who will move to Uganda in February to begin his Peace Corps work,
says it was clear from the beginning that he would be the one waterboarded.
Mr. Toulouse, who is studying psychology in Canada, didn't want to be the
subject. Mr. Gaspar, who works as a waiter in Albuquerque, participated
reluctantly.
"I just didn't like the idea of waterboarding my best friend," Mr. Gaspar says.
"It seemed a little outside the realm of Saturday-night antics."
That left the question of where to do the waterboarding. Mr. Larroque, who
wanted to film the experiment, proposed doing it in Mr. Gaspar's house, where
the lighting would be best. Mr. Gaspar vetoed the idea. "My fiancée
would be a little unhappy with me if she found a huge puddle of water in the
house with Jean-Pierre passed out next to it," he recalls reasoning.
Mr. Gaspar suggested going to an undeveloped part of town not far away. It
was just after 10 p.m. when Mr. Gaspar drove with his friends to a narrow dirt
road called Progress Boulevard.
The initial plan was to have Mr. Larroque lie on the hood of the car, but he
kept sliding off. Instead, they spotted a short stretch of road with a modest
incline.
With Mr. Gaspar filming, Mr. Larroque lay down on the frozen ground with his
arms at his sides and his head leaning back. Mr. Toulouse poured.
On the videotape, the water hits Mr. Larroque for about 10 seconds before he
jerks upright, sending the towel flying.
In a posting on his blog, Mr. Larroque said he was surprised by how fast his air
supply ran out. In other circumstances, he says he can hold his breath
long enough to swim the length of a pool.
"Waterboarding is like a one-way valve," he said in an interview. "You've
got water pouring in and the cloth keeps you from spitting it out, so you can
only exhale once. ... Even holding my breath, it felt like the air was being
sucked out, like a vacuum."
It left no lasting physical damage, making waterboarding arguably "a more
humane" way of forcing information out of an otherwise uncooperative prisoner,
he said.
On the other hand, Mr. Larroque remembers feeling blind panic as his air supply
ran out. Willingly inducing similar feelings in another human being would
be torture, he believes.
"This leaves no mark, no trace. It's almost like the ideal way of
torturing someone," he said. "This is torture 2.0."
Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at
yochi.dreazen@wsj.com
|
