This government does not torture.”
-- George W. Bush

All right! Waterboarding is a very unpleasant experience, which is sometimes fatal. I can also imagine that a small percentage of root canals are fatal, but no one routinely refers to them as torture—just very unpleasant.

That said, if I were grabbed off the street by five guys in ski masks who jabbed a hypodermic in my neck, threw me in the back of a van, striped me to gooseflesh, gave me an enema and jammed a wad of cotton where only a proctoscope belongs, forced me into diapers and an orange jumpsuit, plugged my ears, duck-taped my eyes and put a sack over my head, shackled me in a stress position to the cold, aluminum deck of an unheated cargo plane for 15 hours, strapped me in a chair at some black dental site in Karachi and commenced the root canal in a shower of Punjabi expletives . . . then okay, maybe taken in toto I’d consider that experience torture.

On February 13 the Senate narrowly passed—on a 51-45 party-line vote—an intelligence bill that will, among other things, ban waterboarding as an “enhanced interrogation technique,” a Bush-era euphemism for torture.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, traded his principled stance against waterboarding for a White House endorsement of his candidacy and voted against the ban. Torture is now officially a plank in the GOP platform. Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama were too busy campaigning to go on congressional record as either supporting or opposing the ban.

Such a narrow political plurality against the torture of a human being is possible in an overly-religious nation because of the mistaken notion that torturing a person begins and ends with “waterboarding” and because that term sounds a lot like “waterslide” and “water park.” Who hasn’t gotten water up the nose while playing in a pool but still enjoyed the overall experience?

**** Cheney refers to waterboarding as “a dunk in the water.” Attorney General Mukasey refuses to call it torture unless, of course, it’s happening to him. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) defended his vote against the ban on waterboarding by saying, “It is not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in no real danger . . . the impact is psychological."

I have news for Mr. Lieberman. If I were strapped in a straitjacket and locked in a 2x3x7 foot box, the exquisite psychological pain of that experience would find no rival in burning coals. And I would say anything to make it stop. Torture, physical or psychological, is about as singularly personal an experience as birth and death.

Waterboarding has become the cause célèbre in the torture controversy that began in this country with the revelation of tortured Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. Considering the attention it gets—3,810,000 Google hits—one can be forgiven for thinking it is the only “enhanced interrogation technique” being used. In reality, it is only the most benign sounding of the Bush-era chamber of horrors, which includes, but is not limited to: electric shock, hypothermia, heat injuries, forced sexual acts, prolonged stress positions, beatings, dog attacks, withholding food, water, and medical attention, sleep depravation, sensory overload, and mock execution.

We have already become a nation “comfortable” with the idea that waterboarding is torture. In a November 2007 CNN poll, 68 percent of the respondents agreed that waterboarding constitutes torture. But only 58 percent of the respondents believe the U.S. should not use the technique. For now, there is a narrow moral plurality against its use.

Waterboarding is the thin edge of the wedge that will work its way into the political and moral discussion and slowly, but inexorably, desensitize the nation to the overt and covert use of all forms of torture. Torture will become a “regrettable” but necessary weapon in the war on terror, much as the madness of “mutual assured destruction” was thought to be integral to surviving the Cold War. Once in the arsenal, torture, like nuclear missiles, will become an unassailable tool of national defense.

Keep in mind, a particular torture technique is not applied in isolation, but is part of a longer torturing experience that includes kidnapping, extraordinary rendition, prolonged isolation, denial of legal rights, no communication with family, draconian sentences, loss of hope, psychosis, suicide, and execution.

Keep in mind also that too often the victims of a torturing experience are the innocent, the constitutionally protected dissenter, the political opponent, the disenfranchised . . . the children of the disappeared.

On June 18, 1940 the Russia army invaded Lithuania and began arresting community leaders and intellectuals. My aunt’s mother was a librarian, one of her town’s intellectuals. She was arrested and charged with espionage. To extract a confession, her interrogators used pliers to rip the flesh from the inside of her upper arms. I don’t know what she told them. She was, after all, just a woman who loved books. Regardless, she was convicted and condemned to death. After languishing for months in a death cell waiting to be executed, her sentence was commuted to fifteen years in a Siberian gulag. She did not see her husband or her children for a quarter of a century.

Her torture did not begin or end with the pliers—a Stalin-era “enhanced interrogation technique.” The scars from the pliers were visible on her arms, which she hid under long sleeves. The scars of twenty-five years were visible in her eyes, which she hid in books for the remainder of her life.

A society that accommodates itself to the idea of torture, be it torture of minutes or hours or months or years, forfeits the right to think of itself as moral or humane. That nation is not the beacon light of liberty and justice shinning on less enlightened countries. It is the umbra.

_______

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13041

Wow this again

I like water

Your own words ....Please

it just seems like on this beautiful sunday
you could find something better to do than
rehash the hash.

Iallready have done some wonderfull things today but that isnot the topic of this thread.....Please keep your comments on topic and not about me, or you THANKS

Like I said before, I hope any supporters of torture have the joy of experiencing it so they can know what they support. McCain has been a adversary to torture and he experienced it, that should tell people something.

The pro torture crowd dosnt like it when you use those commie tricks of reality and cognative reasoning

You miss the point Madisonman... Or maybe I'll just refer to you as MAD from now on.. It is more fitting.

Some of the people you are calling 'Pro Torture'? Are probably not... They are just against you. So..in essence? It might be a good thing to be a little more quiet... For fear of the people who might agree with you. May just jump to the other side in an effort to put distance between themselves and where you stand.

There are threads on this subject already in existence. You could choose to post your borrowed material in those threads, yet you choose to open up another thread on the same subjects over and over again.

I could get into the 'Why you might do that' line of thinking... But that would involve some pretty pitiful sounding descriptive terms, which most of us have probably already worked out for ourselves..

jistme I could care less what you think......about me or my motives. You like others can choose to not view a topic or you can choose to discuss the topic. No one makes anyone read them

Jist, I will have to disagree on this one. Madison is expressing his concern for what he sees are the problems in this country. I do understand that some people do not like to read this sort of thing, hell, I don't. Not because it is a touchy subject or repetitive but because I cannot believe my fellow humans would and do resort to this abomination as a "method" to an end.

what I find disturbing is that the same excuses used by the pro torture crowd all sound verry familiar to the excuses used at the Nuremburg trials by the nazis. I am sickened america has sunk so low

I'm on the same page as you in this. I do not like this about our countries tactics any more then any one....

However.. I tend to league with people who have their own mind and speak well for themselves... Rather then parrot something line for line over and over.... Who has not demonstrated an original thought in pages and pages of text. They tend to help defeat the side they stand on.

I suppose you have to say something, but I prefer you stay on topic and keep your comments about me to yourself. thanks

Waterboarding is fun... Great waves in Hawaii I hear

Waterboarding is the thin edge of the wedge that will work its way into the political and moral discussion and slowly, but inexorably, desensitize the nation to the overt and covert use of all forms of torture. Torture will become a “regrettable” but necessary weapon in the war on terror, much as the madness of “mutual assured destruction” was thought to be integral to surviving the Cold War. Once in the arsenal, torture, like nuclear missiles, will become an unassailable tool of national defense.

Keep in mind, a particular torture technique is not applied in isolation, but is part of a longer torturing experience that includes kidnapping, extraordinary rendition, prolonged isolation, denial of legal rights, no communication with family, draconian sentences, loss of hope, psychosis, suicide, and execution.

Keep in mind also that too often the victims of a torturing experience are the innocent, the constitutionally protected dissenter, the political opponent, the disenfranchised . . . the children of the disappeared

Do Unto Others as you would have them do to You.

Its absolutly insane anyone can defend what is being done in our names in Iraq. The evidence that the war is based on lies is overwhelming.....we never should have gone in and now that we are in we act like Nazis or Stalins guards in a gulog....all of these crimes defended by the most piouse among us. Its just insane

masisonman: getting your throat cut is also very unpleasant and is most often fatal, so is strapping a bomb to people and detonating it in a crowded place. Gee let me see do I want to be water boarded or have my throat cut, decisions decisions, decisions, I just can't seem to make up my mind.

Do you get to choose your own topics now or is your professor still picking them for you?