"Hey buddy you thirsty?"

"US soldier supervises torture of a prisoner, 1968. This picture, in the Washington Post, lead to an Army investigation and a court-martial of the US soldier."

I've read a a first hand account of someone who waterboarded himself to understand what it felt like, and he describes it as such:

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

Sometimes my thirst for knowledge has a tendency to strike me dumb and aghast, as I do now, I don't have an opinion for or against waterboarding, but all accounts of it seems terrible, it made me wish to turn a blind eye against it, pretending that it doesn't exist.