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Waterboarding was not a part of the training when McConnell went through SERE, although it sometimes has been. “You know what waterboarding is?” he asked. “You lay somebody on this table, or put them in an inclined position, and put a washcloth over their face, and you just drip water right here”—he pointed to his nostrils. “Try it! What happens is, water will go up your nose. And so you will get the sensation of potentially drowning. That's all waterboarding is.”
I asked if he considered that torture.
McConnell refused to answer directly, but he said, “My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain.”
Did waterboarding fit that description?
Referring to his teen-age days as a lifeguard, he said, “I know one thing. I'm a water-safety instructor, but I cannot swim without covering my nose. I don't know if it's some deviated septum or mucus membrane, but water just rushes in.” For him, he said, “waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful! Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture.”
I queried McConnell again, later, about his views on waterboarding, since this exchange seemed to suggest that he personally condemned it. He rejected that interpretation. “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways,” he said. “I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning.” That would certainly be torture, he said.
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Couldn't the information be obtained through other means?
“No,” McConnell said. “You can say that absolutely.” He again cited the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “He would not have talked to us in a hundred years. Tough guy. Absolutely committed. He had this mental image of himself as a warrior and a martyr. No way he would talk to us.” Among the things that Mohammed confessed to was the murder of Daniel Pearl. And yet few people involved in the investigation of Pearl's death believe that Mohammed had anything to do with the crime; another man, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was convicted of killing Pearl.
So what he said to Lawrence Wright was that he did not consider waterboarding torture and he thought it a necessary technique .
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SEN. FEINSTEIN: Then the quote that I'm reading directly from the article, “Whether it's torture by anyone else's definition, for me it would be torture,” is not correct.
MR. MCCONNELL: I said in — what I was talking about was water going into my nose given the context of swimming and teaching people to swim. So it's out of context.
Now, when the journalist was checking facts, he called me back and said, “Here's what I'm going to say.” And I said, “That's not the subject of our discussion, and I ask you not to put that in the article.” We argued for 90 minutes. I said, “That will be taken out of context. It is not what our discussion was all about.” And he said, “Well, you said it. I've got — it's in my article, it's out of my control.”
So here we are. I said to him, “I will be sitting in front of a committee having this discussion, arguing about what I said that was totally out of context.”
He did not have to go to the White House to consult because his testimony is consistent with the article .As he predicted ;it was the Senate Democrats who took it out of context .