What does a guy have to do to get tortured around here?

I’m trying to get waterboarded.

For the unfamiliar, waterboarding isn’t a beach activity you’ll be seeing next spring break. Instead, it’s part of the pack of “enhanced interrogation” techniques the Bush administration has used as part of its intelligence-gathering in the war on terror.

Popular at such vacation destinations as Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding has been under fire in the public, the media and Congress for being torture, and not allowable under our laws, or the laws of most other supposedly civilized nations.

The White House holds the opinion that waterboarding isn’t torture, so much as something that feels convincingly similar to torture.

It may just be my seasonal affective disorder talking, but I decided the best way for me to decide whether or not waterboarding was really torture was to go ahead and see for myself.

It could be fun, in a way – a sort of personal challenge to see if I could go longer than the CIA guys who, according to a 2005 ABC news article, only last an average of 14 seconds before cracking.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed apparently won admiration from his interrogators by lasting a full two-and-a-half minutes.

But how does one go about getting himself “tortured” in the name of science and journalism? One friend helpfully suggested I get myself labeled an enemy combatant and sent to Cuba.

Unfortunately, I had some plans for the rest of my life that conflicted with that. And most stateside law enforcement officials aren’t willing to torture you for information if you don’t actually have any.

After some googling, my friend Plamen and I found ourselves on the phone with a Chicago-based BDSM dungeon. We posed our question to them, and ended up on hold for quite a few minutes before being told they’d have to call us back.

Ten minutes later, we got a call from a very friendly “mistress” who spoke to me about what waterboarding actually entailed. The subject is laid back on an incline, with something – a sack, a cloth, sometimes cellophane – over their head.

Then, water is poured over their face, it goes up the nose, triggers the gag reflex and makes them feel like they’re drowning.

A self-professed “torture expert,” my “mistress” told me she has 15 years’ experience in this line of work. Could she be the one to waterboard me?

Not a chance.

“I couldn’t guarantee your safety,” she said, because waterboarding is specifically designed to get at least some water down your pipes.

She could alter it slightly so that wouldn’t be a possibility, but, “If you’re not getting water into the lungs, it’d just be splashing water onto your head, and that would be ‘Whee!'”

She didn’t want me to continue my search, either.

“I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than having to continuously cough up water,” she said. “Even if you could find somebody who would do it … don’t.”

Instead, I’ll have to rely on the words of others who, having been tortured, have a bit more knowledge of this sort of thing.

Others such as John McCain, who was tortured as a P.O.W. in Vietnam, told Newsweek in 2005, “… there has been considerable press attention to a tactic called ‘waterboarding,’ where a prisoner is restrained and blindfolded while an interrogator pours water on his face and into his mouth – causing the prisoner to believe he is being drowned … In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.”

I’m certainly not qualified to argue.