I’ll admit that the word “death” fits better than “kill” here. The point I was trying to make is that if no one dies, no drowning has occurred. “Simulated death” doesn’t sound like some kind of cute magic trick, does it? Because you can look at it that way, but that’s missing the point. I never said “simulated bleeding” although the phrase “simulated bleeding to death” would be closer to what is meant. Doesn’t sound like a magic trick to me–it sounds like causing someone to lose so much blood that it feels like they are going to bleed to death.

To be more precise, no, it’s technically not accurate to say “I’m drowning!” if you don’t die in the process. It is a reasonable thing to say if you are reasonably concerned that you will drown, but not accurate if you do not drown.

I’m really getting sick of this. Accurate language is only worth so much. Honestly the most important thing is that you find something to call it better than “waterboarding” that reflects what’s actually going on.

So, why would “simulated drowning” describe the real thing stopped just before the victim dies? Would you describe beating someone to a pulp as “simulated killing”? I doubt it.

So, you would say, to someone with their hands around another’s neck, “you’re strangling him!” (though the victim, rather like waterboarding, can’t say “he’s strangling me!”, because they can’t use their airway). If the waterboarding continued for several minutes, it would kill the victim. You can’t breathe properly during it.

This is my last reply to you–you clearly aren’t going to listen to me if you haven’t already.

then presumably there’s nothing inaccurate about saying “I’m drowning” while you’re being waterboarded, or saying “stop drowning that man!” to some torturers while they’re waterboarding somebody. People can and die from being waterboarded, and have done so, so I also don’t think you could say it’s inaccurate to say that “the USA drowns people and should stop drowning people”. If you put someone in a state where they’ve got water in their lungs, then you are actually drowning them - I don’t see how this can be changed to “simulated drowning” simply because you’ve got an intention in your mind that you’re going to let them back up.

I like the term, and I really don’t think it’s attempted exculpation. “Forced partial drowning” is a bit of a mouthful. “Simulated drowning” is a little easier to say, IMO. I think belle is right that the term simulated “can just as well mean “so fucking alike that no one could tell the difference in the fearful urgency of the moment.”” I think it’s true that the word has devolved or whatever, but I still think the term works because I think that meaning is clear.

I think we can at least agree that both terms are better than calling it “waterboarding” because this term obfuscates what’s really going on. It sounds a lot like “washboarding,” which is something very harmless. I think that this is the reason the new term has been introduced. I sincerely doubt Cheney could’ve said with a straight face “Simulated drowning is not torture.” But that’s what he said about waterboarding, which is really the same thing.

But the important point either way, yours or mine, is that there’s an attempted exculpation going on here, of a very nasty kind — whereby the the concept of the “physical sensation of drowning (except stopping before death)” is being deployed by apologists as being somehow OK because of the stuff in brackets.

Oh yes, agreed.

We don’t currently have an agreed-on verbal way to distinguish “drowning the process which may or may not end in death” from “drowning as in actual-death-by-suffocation-in-liquid”; that is, a distinction that helps makes it immediately clear that the former is still unacceptably evil even when it isn’t identical first and last with the latter.

Well, the former is obviously torture, which helps to distinguish it from murder in the latter case. I still think that my suggestion of forced partial drowning gets at it, though I doubt we can expect people who perform it or order it to agree publicly on that description.