> You know, Ecki man, I love you but I'm bowing out of this conversation. > There's no reasoning with you. You seem to be completely paranoid on > this matter. You seem to be impervious to fact and logic. Oh, and by > the way, I'm getting pretty tired of hearing that water boarding is > "torture". I have friends who have undergone training to withstand > interrogation, and being water boarded is part of the training. It's a > thoroughly unpleasant experience, but calling it torture is like saying > being slapped with a wet towel is the same as being whipped with a bull > whip. One will cause your flesh to sting, the latter will rip it off.
I can't believe you're seriously equating waterboarding with being slapped with a wet towel, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you haven't really thought that one through. There's an enormous difference between undergoing something voluntarily for training, carried out by people on your own side, in conditions where you are in control, where you know the outcome and you know when it will end, and being subjected to the same thing by your enemies while you're kept in solitary confinement with no access to anyone else, not knowing where you are, against your will, time after time for months and years, not knowing when it will be over, but knowing that it's going to happen again and again and again, and listening for the steps in the corridor that tell you they're coming back. The strongest argument against it is that it is immoral and is not the sort of behaviour that a liberal democracy should be involved with, but even if we leave the morality of it to one side, it is illegal internationally under agreements that your country and mine have signed up to, so the people who do it, and those who authorise it, are breaking the law and should be treated accordingly, put on trial with the likes of Milosovic. By claiming that it is not illegal, and not even torture, they are also exposing their own people to the same treatment when they are captured by our countries' enemies, and you can be sure that if we in turn capture those enemies a plea of "it's legal and not even torture" will not be any help to them. And it doesn't work. Information obtained under that level of duress, whether you call it torture or not, is useless. People will say whatever their captors want them to say, just to try and make it stop. The very people who waterboarded Khaled Sheikh Mohammed have admitted that his information was useless. It doesn't even work as a deterrent. On the contrary, it just breeds more terrorists. It's the behaviour of the grossly stupid. B -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
