[LUconn]

we hanged Japanese officers for war crimes in 1945 for water boarding. Its status as torture has already been decided by our own courts under this precedent.

This is a popular thing to say these days but it's not true. I think John McCain started it.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/? ... RhYjBmODk=

Yeah yeah, it's a blog but it's got cited facts included.


This all boils down to your opinion. Or really Barry's opinion. Wearing scary masks can induce a heart attack. Is that torture? Blasting John Tesh music an hour a day is painful. Is that torture? Making someone think they're drowning while they're actually in no danger is terrifying. Is that torture? You say yes. I say no. I don't think you can get technical enough to definitively sway someone from their opinion. Hence the arguing with nothing but others' opinions to back it.

[Covert Hawk]

we hanged Japanese officers for war crimes in 1945 for water boarding. Its status as torture has already been decided by our own courts under this precedent.

This is a popular thing to say these days but it's not true. I think John McCain started it.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/? ... RhYjBmODk=

Yeah yeah, it's a blog but it's got cited facts included.


This all boils down to your opinion. Or really Barry's opinion. Wearing scary masks can induce a heart attack. Is that torture? Blasting John Tesh music an hour a day is painful. Is that torture? Making someone think they're drowning while they're actually in no danger is terrifying. Is that torture? You say yes. I say no. I don't think you can get technical enough to definitively sway someone from their opinion. Hence the arguing with nothing but others' opinions to back it.

Excellent find, sir

[Covert Hawk]

Here, found the same story in a different article...

In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. "All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators," writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

It also said this...

On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk." The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier.

and this...

Cases of waterboarding have occurred on U.S. soil, as well. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was charged, along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions. The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.

Of course this was the most disturbing...

There's no evidence that either the Nazis or the Soviets used the technique, Rejali says. These regimes, he says, weren't concerned about public opinion, and so they often used harsher methods that left permanent scars or killed their victims. If anything, Rejali says, waterboarding has been an interrogation technique preferred by the world's democracies.

Of course I am sure you have heard this argument before...

"Almost every time this comes along, people say, 'This is a new enemy, a new kind of war, and it requires new techniques,'" he says. "And there are always assurances that it is carefully regulated."

[Covert Hawk]

we hanged Japanese officers for war crimes in 1945 for water boarding. Its status as torture has already been decided by our own courts under this precedent.

This is a popular thing to say these days but it's not true. I think John McCain started it.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/? ... RhYjBmODk=

Yeah yeah, it's a blog but it's got cited facts included.


This all boils down to your opinion. Or really Barry's opinion. Wearing scary masks can induce a heart attack. Is that torture? Blasting John Tesh music an hour a day is painful. Is that torture? Making someone think they're drowning while they're actually in no danger is terrifying. Is that torture? You say yes. I say no. I don't think you can get technical enough to definitively sway someone from their opinion. Hence the arguing with nothing but others' opinions to back it.

Not that I read the Huffington Post article much, but hey I always like to hear both sides presented. After all someone has to be right...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-bega ... 91153.html

[ALUmnus]

That doesn't sound like an opinion to me and neither does this...


Of course if you don't want to listen to a Congressman, then listen to a former CIA agent...

Still don't think Waterboarding is torture, then ask Mancow what he thinks...

So under this theory, Mancow, Hitchens, and military personnel undergoing training are all being illegally tortured, willingly. Why are their "torturers" not being prosecuted and thrown into prison? If waterboarding fit nicely under the definition of torture, do you really think someone would willingly administer it to a civilian like Mancow if there were permanent physical side-effects or chance of death? Would Mancow have undergone that if he thought there was a good chance he'd die or have permanent physical harm? Would the military risk killing all of its soldiers-in-training if this were the case? Nope.

You really need to start differentiating between fact and opinion, because most people's opinions are not factual (and I'm not excluding myself from that).

1. Because they were willingly being tortured you said it yourself
2. There are chances of Death, it can induce a heart attack. (see said video above)
3. Mancow lost a bet, and that is why he had to do it.
4. You can say that about any training in the military, should Army rangers not jump out of planes because the parachutes might not open.

We prosecuted Japan for waterboarding during WWII. It can induce heart attacks. It seldom provides reliable information.

If you can provide a legitimate source to dispute any of the above claims, then present it.

1. You said it was a fact that waterboarding is illegal. Just doing it willingly would not make it legal.
2. This can be said of anything.
3. So what, according to you he's still participating in illegal activity.
4. This is not even in the same ballpark.

"It seldom provides reliable information". Maybe if the Obama administration would have released all the documentation in these waterboarding incidents, we'd have the legitimate source that shows what results we got, but for some odd reason, they only want to release pictures that might upset some people.

[RagingTireFire]

Good Lord, son, I hope you haven't graduated yet. If you are going to go through life dismissing factual statements just because it doesn't fit into your nice little political philosophy, then don't expect anybody to take you seriously. Look, if you responded with a video of Oliver North talking about how it is not torture, I would at least respect you. But dismissing what a congressman, CIA agent (who aren't politicians, by the way) and a radio jock who thought he could last 30 seconds and then gave up after FIVE, just because you don't like there conclusions. Come on.

For the record, I couldn't give a crap about waterboarding. I think that there's too much noise on either side of the debate for any serious person to make an actually informed opinion on the matter.

My point to you, hawkie, was that just because a person is famous or carries a certain amount of gravitas does not automatically make their opinion on this topic -- or any topic -- fact, particularly if that person is a congressman who recently ran a presidential campaign based largely on withdrawing troops from places where waterboarding would take place. Also, just because a radio jock can't take something for 30 seconds does not prove anything concerning torture as most of the radio jocks that I know consider being without caffeine for 30 seconds to be torture. Further, I would never respond with a video of Oliver North on the topic because the fact he would have made the video at all would indicate that he has an agenda, similarly the fact that the CIA agent made a video concerning the topic in the first place indicates that he has an agenda and, therefore, neither or their opinions can be trusted as fact.

Again, personally, I don't care. I might have cared at one point but then the politics got involved.