“Consider the testimony before Congress Thursday of Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a counter terrorism expert who taught at the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. He went through the waterboarding procedure to evaluate for himself if it was torture.

In my case, the technique was so fast and professional that I didn’t know what was happening until the water entered my nose and throat, It then pushes down into the trachea and starts the process of respiratory degradation. It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts. As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening: I was being tortured.

Yes, he was being tortured. No if ands or buts. Torture. What part of that procedure is so hard for new Attorney General Michael Mukasey to understand?

In previous wars, the United States condemned torture. Now we not only endorse it but export it, sending prisoners overseas so other countries can extract misinformation through pain and suffering.

And what does this get us? False information that is used to launch illegal wars against other nations. Recent reports confirm that an al-Qaida operative was tortured to the point where he told us what we wanted to hear about Iraq, not was actually true.

When torture doesn’t work, we simply allow ourselves to be conned. CBS recently outed “Curveball,” the so-called “top scientist” from Iraq who fed us false information about mobile chemical weapons labs in Iraq. Turns out he was a low-level worker with an active imagination.

America on the world stage is viewed as both a bully and a bumbling joke that can’t do anything right. We ignore the United Nations, violate international law and turn Iraq into the safe-haven for terrorism that we falsely claimed was there before we launched an illegal invasion….”

More by Doug Thompson in “Where, and when, did we go wrong?”at Capitol Hill Blue.