U.S. soldier waterboards 4-year-old daughter

The Daily Mail reports that a U.S. soldier and father to a 4-year-old girl waterboarded her when she couldn't recite the alphabet.

According to the Mail Online, 27-year-old Joshua Tabor, a soldier at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Washington, decided to use the CIA information procuring technique because he knew his daughter was "terrified of water." For those who've managed to sit out the details of the war against terrorism, waterboarding is the much-debated practice of pouring water over a victim's head until they think they are drowning. Officially denied the label of "torture," it was used by the CIA on detainees at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration before it was banned under the Obama administration.

Police found out about the waterboarding incident after Tabor was spotted walking through the neighborhood in a Kevlar vest, threatening to break windows. When they went to Tabor's house, his girlfriend led them to a closet in the house where the girl, beaten and bruised, reportedly told them "Daddy did it." She has now been taken into care while her father, who admitted to placing his daughter on a kitchen counter and submerging her head in water, is facing charges of assault.

Though authorities have yet to go on record linking the incident to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Tabor's confusion between torture techniques and parental techniques highlights the particular difficulty many of our vets are facing as they make their way between combat and civilian life.

Once called "battle fatigue", PTSD is defined by the National Institute for Mental Health as an "anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened." With symptoms that range from "frightening thoughts and memories" to feeling "emotionally numb, especially with people they were once close to," the disorder is on the rise, reportedly afflicting as many as 1 in 8 soldiers returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.