Ann Coulter corrects the record re Japanese and water torture

When linking Bill Whittle's correction of the record about Truman and the A Bomb, I said:

Japanese did not think like Westerners: neither sharing our valuation of human life, nor our valuation of merciful avoidance of brutality. Japanese did not flinch in the face of death and brutality - whether on a small scale or on a massive scale. An excellent introduction to Japanese culture and thinking is "Shogun", by James Clavell.

The pre WWII Japanese were up there with the most brutal societies and cultures in history.   It was a way of life for them; an everyday reality.  Feudal lords would behead subjects over arbitrary and minor infractions.  Remember that as you read Coulter:

Start with the fact that the average Gitmo detainee has gained 20 pounds in captivity. There's even a medical term for it now: "the Gitmo gut." Some prisoners have been heard whispering, "If you think Allah is great, you should try these dinner rolls."

In terms of "torture," there was "the attention grasp," which you have seen in every department store you have ever been where a mother was trying to get her misbehaving child's attention. If "the attention grasp" doesn't work, the interrogators issue a stern warning: "Don't make me pull this car over."
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waterboarding was most definitely not a "war crime" for which the Japanese were prosecuted after World War II -- no matter how many times Mrs. Jonathan Turley, professor of cooking at George Washington University, says so.
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Given what the Japanese did to prisoners, waterboarding would be a reward for good behavior.

It might be: waterboarding PLUS amputating the prisoner's healthy arm, or waterboarding PLUS killing the prisoner. But waterboarding on the order of what we did at Guantanamo would be a reward in a Japanese POW camp.

To claim that the Japanese -- architects of the Bataan Death March -- were prosecuted for "waterboarding" would be like saying Ted Bundy was executed for engaging in sexual harassment.

What the Japanese did to their POWs made even the Nazis blanch. The Japanese routinely beheaded and bayoneted prisoners; forced prisoners to dig their own graves and then buried them alive; amputated prisoners' healthy arms and legs, one by one, for sport; force-fed prisoners dry rice and then filled their stomachs with water until their bowels exploded; and injected them with chemical weapons in order to observe, time and record their death throes before dumping them in mass graves.

While only 4 percent of British and American troops captured by German or Italian forces died in captivity, 27 percent of British and American POWs captured by the Japanese died in captivity. Japanese war crimes were so atrocious that even rape was treated as only a secondary war crime in the Tokyo trial, similar to what happens during an R. Kelly trial.

The Japanese "water cure" was to "waterboarding" as practiced at Guantanamo what rape at knifepoint is to calling your secretary "honey."

The Japanese version of "waterboarding" was to fill the prisoner's stomach with water until his stomach was distended -- and then pound on his stomach, causing the prisoner to vomit.

Or they would jam a stick into the prisoner's nose so he could breathe only through his mouth and then pour water in his mouth so he would choke to death.

Or they would "waterboard" the prisoner with saltwater, which would kill him.
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Finding out who started the tall tale about "waterboarding" being treated as a war crime after World War II would take the talents of a forensic historian, someone like Christina Hoff Sommers.

After years of hearing the lunatic feminist "fact" that emergency room admissions for women beaten by their husbands soared by 40 percent on Super Bowl Sundays, Sommers traced it back to an unsubstantiated rumination erupting from a feminist rap session.

But the claim was passed around with increasing credibility until it ended up being cited as hard fact in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and on "Good Morning America."
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What Americans need to understand is that under liberals' own "laws of war," they will invent apocryphal incidents from history in order to give aid and comfort to America's enemies and to undermine those who kept us safe for the past eight years.

What I most detest about the left, maybe, is the way they pass around a lie - and keep repeating it and repeating it - until eventually it is accepted as fact. Their behavior is 100% immoral (9th Commandment: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor."), and they do not care. Examples:

• Judge Robert Bork is a racist.
• Clarence Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill.
• Women earn 78% of what men earn.
• "Stolen election" of 2000
• Bush lied people died.

All bald faced lies. All largely accepted as fact: both in America and around the world.