From the Editor: What the Khmer Rouge and the U.S. have in common
Today, David Corn—Takoma Park resident and author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War—writes about torture techniques common to the Khmer Rouge and the United States: This is What Water Boarding Looks Like (scroll down).
Corn cites John Blank, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, regarding the recent vote in Congress on interrogation techniques.
“The crux of the issue before Congress can be boiled down to a simple question: Is waterboarding torture? Anybody who considers this practice to be ‘torture lite’ or merely a ‘tough technique’ might want to take a trip to Phnom Penh,” writes Blank.
Blank provides Corn with photographs and descriptions of the interrogations conducted by the Khmer Rouge to break their prisoners, raising the question of why regimes like totalitarian Cambodia and North Korea have become models for the United States.