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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (109837)	4/26/2009 1:59:25 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541465

>>Hitchens makes the point without understanding he did, by subjecting himself to water boarding. If it were truly torture, he wouldn't have subjected himself to it. Can you name another form of "torture" a writer would willingly subject themselves to? The very nature of torture is to avoid it at all costs.<< GS - Sometimes I have a hard time getting all the way through your posts, because you often say something so wrong right away. The above paragraph is an exercise in truly screwy logic. Hitchens subjected himself to waterboarding because he believed it wasn't torture. Once he had experienced it, he changed his mind about it. Does that prove waterboarding is torture? Not conclusively, no. But if you read his description of the event, you can't conclude that it isn't, either. Much of your post rests on the argument that a cannot be b because you believe that x wouldn't do y. That wouldn't get you a passing grade in logic 101. There is some disagreement in the intelligence community about the efficacy of torture, or even "harsh interrogation methods," but by and large most experts agree that there are better ways to go in terms of getting solid information, without giving our enemies more reasons to hate us. You discount the arguments against torture by saying that the experts who've been writing about its lack of utility must be cowed by the "spiteful nature of the Obama PC crowd." Personally, I would think that they could just not write the articles in the first place if they didn't believe what they were going to say in them. Nobody's forcing them to speak out. - Allen

To: greenspirit who wrote (109837)	4/26/2009 9:14:19 PM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Respond to of 541465

My two cents on this is: That "waterboarding" is not torture if done in a "school" setting. In other words when is done to our troops as part of a military exercise if they're "captured"; or someone undergoes it to experience the physical effects--the terror is gone. You're going to be completely uncomfortable, but you know that it will stop before you're seriously compromised. When you're really undergoing it part of its effectiveness is that one doesn't know if and when those doing to it you will stop. This is especially true when you're tied up and your captors have loaded weapons. Additionally, you don't know what they have planned for you even if you tell them everything they want to know. In short the "terror" is missing from these "canned' experiences and IMHO that IS what makes waterboarding torture as apart from an extremely unpleasant physical experience.