spectre

The video of the stunt:


Watching the video, it doesn't seem as bad as the article describes (no thrashing around, no throwing of the toy), but despite that, it's obvious that it had a profound effect on him.

I have to admit, I have a lot of respect for him having the guts to back up all of his rhetoric and endure what he had thought wouldn't be that bad. It also just sickens me more to realize that Cheney came out and said equating waterboarding to torture was to "libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims" when it's obvious based on the video that the sole purpose of that technique is to torture, and the reason for Cheney's statements are purely strawman arguments designed to make attacks on his administration's policies sound like treasonous attacks on the troops.

In light of yet another conservative coming out after having actually experienced waterboarding instead of just making statements about what he guesses it would be like, how can waterboarding still be justified as not being torture? I'd really like people's thoughts and ideas on this as I'm genuinely at a loss as to how that happens.

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Tully Mars

Wonder what excuse they'll come with with now? Yesterday Cheney's daughter, Liz(?,) said it wasn't torture. When told we prosecuted people for water boarding because it is torture she said two things- There were other circumstances then (what? I have no idea) and it worked so it saved US lives so it's legal. What does it matter if it worked? Legal is legal and illegal is illegal. Why would the ends justify the means? Legally that sounds like horse shit.

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Baraka_Guru

I think the problem is in playing word games: Is it "torture," or is it a "harsh interrogation technique"?

Is it that difficult to call a spade a spade? Is this cruel and unusual punishment?

I believe it is. The use of waterboarding is unconstitutional and against international law.

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ratbastid

Who's to say it actually worked, except in justificationland, where correlation equals causation?

I haven't been in a single car accident since 9/11/2001. Waterboarding must be making me a safe driver!

Never mind that I've NEVER been in a car accident...

Willravel

I should go start a thread about torture.

Bacchanal

Everyone here who wants to share their opinion on whether or not it's torture should have to perform the same experiment beforehand. Legal questions are fine, but don't say it is or isn't torture without knowing for yourself.

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Derwood

I'm surprised he actually admitted it was torture, since Mancow has more or less been lying about everything on his show for the past 15 years

Tully Mars

That's goofy logic. I certainly I don't need water poured down my throat to know it's torture. I'll take the Cow Man's word for it.

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Baraka_Guru

Ha. Clever little empiricist, are you? Fortunately, it doesn't need to work that way. I don't have to put someone to death with my own hands before arguing against capital punishment and whether that is unnecessarily cruel.

This is a moral question, not just a technical one.

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Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
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Seaver

My father went through 3 tiers of SERE school. He told me the other day he has gone through 3 days worth of continuous water boarding. He tells me it's not torture, I'm going with him.

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dksuddeth

Seaver, I'll respect your fathers SERE school training and 3 days of waterboarding, but in all honesty, he's an ignorant fool if he claims its not torture.

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Willravel

Dude, no need for that, dk.

Anyway, Seaver, I'll waterboard you. I'm getting pretty good at it (the trick is to bound the hands and torso in addition to the feet). My guess is that you can break 10 seconds, but I doubt you'll be able to say it's not torture.

Bacchanal

I understand that. I just didn't want to see an entire thread of:

"x says it's torture, so it is"

"y disagrees with x, so it can't be"

I'm half tempted to try it, so I might have a valid opinion. Maybe not though...

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timalkin

..

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Halanna

I actually think you should!

Anyway, meh, who cares about legality, calling it "torture" or ""harsh interrogation technique", doesn't matter.

It's not like America is running around grabbing people, strapping them to a board and using "waterboarding" to extract information.

You want torture? Look to history, to the racks, burning at the stake, quartering, disembowlement, a father who had no other choice but try and jump to his death from the World Trade Center(s) in the hope of survival.

Is it pretty? No. Is it necessary? Maybe. Society may have become more "advanced" in their abilities, but the end result remains the same.

Tell us what you know, tell us who else is helping you. Because we will end this, whether it's with arrowheads attached to spears, burning your crops, stealing your women, inflitrating your government, dropping a nuke on you, whatever it takes, we will end this.

We can't respect everyones rights when the perception of the rights changes or is challenged.

We are civilized.

We are advanced?

We still have to protect. At any cost.

How much blood has been spilt, from the Revolutionary War to today, to secure the way of life this Country enjoys. Millions? Hundreds of thousands? One is one too many. They died, we live. They sacrificed, we enjoy.

Waterboard? Do it. Give me a break. Do it. Do whatever needs to be done so all those who have died, sacrificed life and limb, given their only sons (or daughters) to protect and defend this Country, that their death is not forgotten, is not remembered.

Would YOU die to protect the American way of life?

Tully Mars

I care about the legality of torture. I also care whether the US is engaging in illegal activities.

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dippin

So its only torture if the person dies?

And what does the subject at hand has to do with dying for the "American way of life?"

And this is all, of course, based on an unsubstantiated notion that the torture worked...

Derwood

Supporting torture because you have an emotional attachment to those who sacrificed for the country is a dangerous way of going about things

Willravel

Anyone dumb enough to assume something as simple as waterboarding requires anything more than basic CPR training should probably avoid walking and chewing gum at the same time. We've been doing this since before the Spanish Inquisition, the idea that it's somehow complex communicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the process. Maybe you should learn more about waterboarding.

ratbastid

Pretty speech. Sad that the experts all say that torture is more likely to produce incorrect information. So, torture is actually BAD for America. Oh well.

Tully Mars

Be quiet, the terrorist will hear you.

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Willravel

This has probably been said across a dozen threads hundreds of times by now. When will people get this?

Baraka_Guru

If enough people take on this line of thinking, the American way of life is doomed to fail.

Arguably, it's doomed to fail by other means anyway. Why throw fuel on the fire?

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
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powerclown

I gotta tell ya, if I was living in Mexico sucking down margaritas on the white sands of the Mayan Riviera everyday, I wouldn't give 2 schnikees about much of anything except where to get a good burrito grande con salsa verde. Wanna trade lives?

Tully Mars

I gotta tell ya I still pay US taxes (Oregon Property too) and I care where my tax dollars go and what my home country does. I should also tell you I live on the other side of the Yucatan, gulf coast. But no I don't want to trade lives.

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Willravel

I guess that makes Tully Mars a patriot. That and his honorable service to our country.

Derwood

When they stop thinking of waterboarding as a government sanctioned revenge fantasy for 9/11

dksuddeth

there is absolutely no level of training sufficient enough to move torture to a higher level so that it isn't torture. whether somebody was trained to do it or not is irrelevant.

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JumpinJesus

Just exactly how many people have you waterboarded?

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dksuddeth

I've served 6 years in a position to do just that and no matter the situation, i would not want a government to torture any other individual to 'honor' my sacrifice because it would lessen any honor I gained by doing so.

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JumpinJesus

I wish I could attribute what I'm about to say to the correct source, because I don't want to pass off someone else's words as my own, but I don't recall who said it, so I'll just have to say that the words aren't originally mine.

That being said, I heard once that anyone can die for a cause. Dying takes no great sacrifice. We all do it eventually. It takes no extra feat of patriotism to get shot by a sniper's bullet. It's not a conscious act of devotion to die in a bomb blast. The true measure of dedication to a cause is killing for it. True dedication comes from the sense that you believe in something so strongly, you'll kill to protect it. So the question shouldn't be: would you die for your way of life? The question should be: would you kill for your way of life?

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Willravel

Three people. The first one was a dare and the second two were about proving it was torture. I figure I took CPR in high school (required course) so even if something goes wrong there's not a big chance of anything going wrong.
I know this is off your point, and I agree with the point you're making, but what does it mean if you're not willing to kill for your way of life? Isn't that just a different principle?

Zenturian

I would personally waterboard anyone if it meant I could possibly get information that would prevent an American from being harmed.

JumpinJesus

Personally, I don't think it means any less if someone isn't willing to kill for a way of life. I don't even think I believe the will to kill for a cause is the ultimate act of dedication. For me it's an effective method of pointing out the ridiculousness of the idea that the act of dying is somehow more noble than not dying or that those who did die died with intent of demonstrating dedication to a cause.

How does this relate to torture? Because the arguments used use emotion to elicit a response that doesn't mean anything other than we're emotional creatures who like to respond with emotion. The argument "Wouldn't you want a terrorist tortured if it meant gathering information that could save your family?" is a meaningless argument. It's supposed to tug at our emotions, to get us to believe that life is like an episode of "24" and we'll get the answers just in the nick of time and save those innocent people!

It also means that you cannot successfully argue a legal point with someone who makes these determinations from a purely emotional standpoint. We could sit here all day and unload truckloads of evidence that supports the viewpoint that torture is ineffective and immoral and they'll still respond with, "Yeah, but what if it was your family being held and the terrorist with the information to save them..." and so on and so on.

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Willravel

Torture isn't ever the most reliable method of extracting information (according to the experts, which have been cited in non-pub discussion threads time and again), therefore you waterboarding someone wouldn't be you trying your best to save American lives. It'd be you acting, as JJ said above, on emotion instead of logic. Logic dictates you use the method with the highest probability of success. Emotion means you fly off the handle and get people killed.

You're creating a hypothetical situation that can't happen in order to support your position.

ratbastid

Would you waterboard someone if you knew that they'd tell you anything you wanted to hear, true or not, to get you to stop and not do it again? Because that's what the actual TRUTH is.

Not that the truth matters, when Amurrka's at risk, but what the hell, you can't fault a liberal for trying.

roachboy

comrades, could we tone down the name calling please?

===================================

i kinda agree with jj--dying is in itself not a great achievement. it's not symbolic of anything. stories people tell about the deaths of others make them symbolic of something. but there is no meaning in death itself. certainly not for the dead.

i think the reason the thread's been a name-calling match really is that the topic has been worked through enough that what's left here is the basic conflict over framework that is the conflict between political positions. it's a pretty stark difference between frameworks: more conservative folk see questions of security over-riding questions of legality. others see the legality as the primary frame. conservative arguments tend to lead avoid the fact that it is the state that acted to inflict torture by trying to move the question onto a subjective level: this is the basis for such argument as there is about levels of pain and whether waterboarding is or is not torture. others see that the state was the actor, that the state is bound by law, that torture is a legal construct and that the bush administration violated the law in authorizing torture.

that's the differend.
now its lather'(rinse) repeat.

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Halx

Using logic, we can determine that any method beyond standard verbal interrogation is excessive and immoral. Why does the method even exist for the purpose of extracting information if not for the threat it imposes? It is so blatant. The fact that people support waterboarding, torture or not, is disturbing. It is clearly a case of "as long as its not me." Whether you consider it torture or not doesn't even matter because we all have different stances anyways. It still is what it is.

Let me put it another way: If it isn't torture, what is it? A creative way to administer truth serum? The dude wouldn't tell you shit before, but you poured a gallon of water on his face and now he'll sing like a bird! I wonder what happened! I guess it was holy water or something.

Get fucking real.

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powerclown

Torture certainly worked with me. When my older brother would sit on me, twist both my arms behind my back until the pain was too much and demanded to know where the tv remote was, I sang like a bird.

Zenturian

Listen, you are going around thinking that the powers that be are going around just grabbing people willy nilly and waterboarding them to get them to confess to things we want them to confess to. The truth is, after everything else has been done, we are waterboarding people that we already know that they have information that can save American lives. Then we waterboard them to get that information. How can anyone object to that.

If I knew that someone had information that could help save an American, I would waterboard them in a heartbeat. Anyone who wouldn't do that is selfish. They would be holding their own belief system higher than a countryman's life.

And beside, this false outrage over waterboarding is all moot. Its been done to only three people. And the information we got out of it is still classified by Obama. Which goes to show that it does work, or the information gotten out of them would be relased to show its uselessness.