This is water boarding
Water boarding isn't "torture lite." It's the real thing. Invented by the Spanish Inquisition -- for use when the rack didn't suffice! -- it was used by the notorious torturers of the Khmer Rouge.
Water boarding is illustrated in a painting at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photo by Jonah Blank.
This is what Congress voted for today. It was bad enough when Bush was violating the Constitution and the Geneva Convention by extra-legally torturing prisoners. But it makes me sick that Congress rubber stamped it!
Sick. Sick. Sick.
posted by Luke Francl @ 11:58 PM |
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4 Comments:
Guess where else they use waterboarding?
Any ideas?
US "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" training. Every US military pilot, special forces guy and intelligence agent goes through it. Hence, every single one of those servicepeople is subjected to "torture"; humiliation, coercion, the whole works.
Oh, by the way? The Khmer Rouge did a LOT worse than waterboard people. But I'm sure you knew...well, wait. Y'all are Democrats. The party that ensured the Killing Fields would happen in the first place.
Never mind.
Interesting trivia. So Mitch, you're pro-torture then?
Aside: It's unfortunate that "waterboarding" sounds like something you'd do with the kids in Wisconsin Dells.
So Mitch, you're pro-torture then?
Of course not, but I expected one or another of you to try to phrase it that way.
But is it "torture" when we do it to our own people as a training exercise - and absolutely identically to the way it's done with terror suspects? When it's a technique that causes no physical damage, and is purely psychological (albeit intensely coercive)?
Remember - under international law, including the Geneva Convention, we're completely entitled to give these people summary courts-martial and line them up and shoot them.
So given that most of them know *something* that we need, and that they have *zero* rights under international law (they are NOT entitled to trials, habeas corpus, or even life under the Geneva Convention), how far do you slide the definition of "torture"? Sleep deprivation? We do that in American criminal investigations. Ditto psychological coercion. We waterboard our own people.
Reading some of what I hear from the left and media (pardon the redundancy), "torture" means what they say it means, no more, no less.
By the way, saying this is what the Khmer Rouge did is incredibly misleading. The KR also ripped out peoples' fingernails and toenails,, pumped water down peoples' throats, hammered peoples' hands and feet flat, pounded their genitals into putty, stuck bamboo needles under finger and toenails and elsewhere, forced people to watch their spouses and children being raped and murdered, cut off parts, buried them alive...I dont' think even Michael Moore has accused us of this.
So - is XTReem Psychological coercion, against people who legally should be *dead*, "torture"?
I'm not sure where you're deriving your interpretation of international law or U.S. law, but the Supreme Court already decided Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to al Qaeda. That's why we just went through this whole charade in Congress, leaving the door open to America torturing terror suspects:
Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, declined to answer a reporter's question about whether "waterboarding", a technique that rights groups and even the State Department have long denounced as torture, could be permitted under the compromise.
His refusal came just hours after one of the three rebel senators, John McCain, asserted that the deal's language barred waterboarding and other "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions.
The huge faulty assumption in the right's thinking on detainees is rather obvious from your blanket statement, "given that most of them know *something* that we need." That is not a given! Seton Hall Law School has studied what information the military has made available about Gitmo detainess and the results paint a troubling picture. 86% of those detainees were captured by Pakistan in exchange for a large bounty and labeled "enemy combatants." Here's a typical flier:
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
For Taliban, the Government's bar is so low for enemy combatant status as to include "Posession of Casio watches" or "Wearing of olive drab clothing."
Even these nefarious conditions for enemy combatant status are better than the current state of affairs: You are an enemy combatant if we say you are. End of story.
Does this detainee bill not trouble your libertarian leaning in the least, Mitch?
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