Don't Drown Someone to Find Out Where They Live Thursday, April 23, 2009 By Caleb Cole - Advertising I have always thought working for the CIA would be one of the best jobs ever. Everything you do is a big secret, plus you would get to play with guns all day. At least that was the way I perceived it when I was younger. Lately, though, I have come to realize it probably wouldn't be the most glamorous job on Earth. Especially when mess they up. I recently read about one of these mess-ups--the use of what several papers and sources are choosing to call "harsh" interrogation techniques.   Now I know I don't fully understand all the circumstances surrounding the situation, but to call these techniques "harsh" is an understatement to me. The most questionable of these "harsh" techniques was waterboarding, where the victims are immobilized on their backs with their heads inclined backwards. In this position, water is poured over the face and into breathing passages. This process instantaneously institutes the gag reflex and causes the victim to experience drowning. The idea is to make the victim feel as though death is immanent and this fear will cause them to reveal the desired information. Although long lasting physical damage seldom occurs, almost all victims have extensive psychological damage from the perception of death so near.   In my opinion, to call this process "harsh" is a joke. I was unaware drowning someone was considered humane as long as you were doing it to gain information. What's worse than all this though is NOBODY is going to be prosecuted for these actions. Documents were published describing this technique among others used to investigate Al Qaeda suspects in overseas prisons. These were techniques used under the Bush administration, but now Obama is given this knowledge and what does he do? He lets the entire lot of them off without so much as a slap on the wrist. Documents were written allowing C.I.A. operatives to employ several of these "aggressive" techniques in order to gain intelligence. But as for the officers who ordered them to carry out these acts, that is a totally different story. How, for even one second, you could consider this tactic at all humane I'm not sure. I think somebody in the upper levels of this incident should be prosecuted, and I say this on the grounds if we learned of this happening to one of our prisoners we would throw all kinds of a fits just like the countries of these prisoners have. We would expect the full measure of punishment to be handed out to them and would do just about whatever it took to ensure they received it.   Since it is our boys who are at fault, President Obama has decided this is a “time for reflection, not retribution.” I will applaud him for doing away with permitting waterboarding as an interrogation technique, but I hope he plans on turning the other cheek when occurrences like this happen to us in the future and we are the ones begging for retribution. I'm a little disappointed to know nothing is being done about this misstep. What happened to these prisoners is, in fact, inhumane and in my opinion torture. So not all of aspects of working for the C.I.A. are glamorous, but I will admit what they do is completely necessary in ensuring our country's safety. I just hope in the future when we get caught red-handed doing something we shouldn't be that we don't just turn a blind eye and say, "Oh well, we've learned now drowning is wrong. Let's not do that again." We're better than that...I hope.

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