Bush vetoes waterboarding bill, plus a challenge.

Whoops, missed this one. Thanks to reader Thom for reminding me. I wrote earlier about Bush’s likelihood to vetoing the anti-waterboarding bill, but didn’t do the followup. Well here it is: he vetoed it.

Now I could spend the next 500 words or so railing against Bush for the veto, pointing out that torture is anti-American, hurts us more than it helps us, and makes it very difficult for us to take the high road amongst other things. That’s old hat, though. Instead, I’m looking at this bit.

“Limiting the CIA’s interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet. . . . If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the Field Manual, we could lose vital information from senior al-Qaeda terrorists, and that could cost American lives,” Bush said.

The argument made repeatedly is that we can’t let them know what methods we’re using because that would somehow help them. The old “show them our playbook” idea. That makes sense for military formations, but not interrogation techniques.

So, I have a challenge to anyone who thinks this makes sense: prepare yourself for torture. If you honestly believe it can be done, prove it. Let’s say, for example, you know you’re going to be put in extreme temperatures and waterboarded. You know it’s coming, it’s a given.

Now then, prepare. Explain how you could possibly prepare to be waterboarded and then tell me how you think you could get to a point where waterboarding wouldn’t affect you. If anyone can do this, I would be extremely surprised.