Amnesty International judges the United States guilty of "widespread torture." But the waterboarding at the center of the controversy over harsh interrogation techniques has thus far claimed just three confirmed victims: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. I am supposed to feel bad, but I don't. Mr. Mohammed is, according to the 9/11 Report, the "principal architecht of the 9/11 attacks." Mr. Zubaydah also played a role in planning the 9/11 atrocities. Mr. al-Nashiri organized the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 American sailors.

Is waterboarding torture? I don't know. It seems to do violence to language to apply the same word to it as one applies to bamboo shoots forced under the fingernails or jumper cables to the testicles. It's also worth noting that the Navy Seals have used waterboarding as a training technique in the past. It's interesting that the New York Times never complained very loudly when waterboarding was used on the American military.

Whatever word one uses to describe waterboarding, it's safe to say that it's unpleasant, which, I assume, is the point. In those scary days after 9/11 everyone, everyone, assumed another attack was imminent. Did the Bush administration's interrogation techniques make everyone's assumption wrong? We don't know. We just know an attack didn't follow when everyone assumed that it would. The people working to that end deserve our thanks, not our scorn.

Designed to attaint the previous administration, President Obama's release, over the objection of his own CIA director, of Bush-era CIA legal briefings on various interrogation techniques gives terrorists a heads-up on what to expect should they ever find themselves in the hands of the Great Satan. "What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That's very valuable information," former CIA chief Michael Hayden explained to Fox News yesterday. The document dump plays politics at the expense of national security. The president obtusely referred to the waterboarding of the three murderers, rather than their acts of terrorism, as a "dark and painful chapter in our history." Such holier-than-thou rhetoric will no doubt impress the American government's new Latin American and European friends, but what American who lived through 9/11 is scandalized that the attack's mastermind had water poured into his nose as a method to extract information?

Had the average American, rather than George W. Bush, overseen interrogation tactics against 9/11 terrorists, my sense is that these three dregs would have been forced to dine on their eyeballs a long time ago. This is not to defend vigilantism, downplay the unpleasantness of waterboarding, or even defend it as an effective or just interrogation method. It's just to say that what is most shocking about the CIA interrogation memos is how restrained U.S. intelligence acted in dealing with three murderers who had information on future murder schemes.

Go watch a waterboarding video on youtube and tell me it's not torture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58

Not to mention that this is the least of what we did. Haven't you seen the HBO specials on Abu Ghraib? People have been killed.

Great job on 96.9wtkk on Friday Dan. It was frustrating listening to a moonbat like Goldman not answer a question. That is what they do best. They can never give a single answer to a question.

Sounds like shadysider only gets his news on you-tube and HBO has never seen an Iraqi prison.(Both "unbiased" sources I am sure, do you use wikipedia too?) Americans are not killing prisoners in Abu Graib or any other prison in Iraq. Get over your own rhetoric.
And I watched that lame video, please are you serious? That was a interogation technique in a controlled enviroment. Now I imagine that there are no safe words for terrorists to use except information on the next attacks, and if it takes 30 seconds on a table with water poured over their mouths with absolutly no threat of death...well then let me pour the water.

Maybe we should just tickle them until they pee. What? We can't do that? Better go arrest my dad, then.

Wake up, America. These people are using real bullets. If we don't find a spine real soon we are going to lose this thing. Then there will be no debate. Kinda hard to complain about a little waterboarding while they're using your head as a soccer ball!

Daniel
Las Vegas

It's chicks like Shadysider and its ilk who have and will continue to corrupt the security that insures that we're not attacked on our own turf.

So, so far, Obama has given away pieces of America to The EU, many of those sworn to our demise in the Middle East, Mexico, Central and South America, has waved love letters at Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and bent over for North Korea and he hasn't even gotten to Africa yet.

Soon, water boarding or not water boarding will not be the issue.

We now have a power structure in government that should be considered radically left and very dangerous. At every turn in the hierarchy radicals, in Obama’s image, are in control and now see their very own taxpaying citizens as more of a threat than foreign terrorists.

It should be stressed that the most dangerous element of this current process to seize and to hold power will be the legalization of 20-30 million illegal aliens. 90% of whom will represent a locked voting block for the current administration and will keep them in power and control for some time to come as we watch our country slip further toward a Venezuelan style government.

The battleground will be at the border and we all need to stand up and be vigilant with regard to not letting the United States become a fascist nation.

Defining torture negatively:

If it can be demonstrated (waterboarding), IT'S NOT TORTURE.

If it's found on Fear Factor (being put in a box with bugs), IT'S NOT TORTURE.

If it's part of some people's S&M routine (slapping), IT'S NOT TORTURE.

If it's found in amusement parks (faux walls), IT'S NOT TORTURE.

If it's the way many people were brought up (being yelled at), IT'S NOT TORTURE.

It's odd that the ends justify the means as it pertains to harvesting of embryonic humans for medical research, but they are NOT justified when it pertains to winning a war against murderers who target innocent human beings.

Beyond how it spins or affects their hold on power, maybe human life really has no meaning or value to these folks at all...

"if it takes 30 seconds on a table with water poured over their mouths with absolutly no threat of death"

I love how blatantly 'unbiased' your point of view is, seeing how it is reported that they were 'boarded' 266 times. I guess 30 seconds wasn't enough. As well there is risk of death with water-boarding with asphyxiation and 'dry drowning'. Nice try.

266, 1266, whatever it takes.

As has been mentioned, there are bigger issues than the questions of morality or ethics regarding the pouring water down someone's nose...

"Democratic Party financier George Soros, who puts much of the blame for Islamic terrorists on America and former president George W. Bush, can celebrate his first foothold inside the Pentagon.

It is in the person of Rosa Brooks, far-left former Los Angeles Times columnist. She was once counsel to billionaire Soros' Open Societies Institute, whose funding arm bankrolls a number of hard-left pressure groups, such as MoveOn.org. MoveOn.org, of course, is the Washington outfit that smeared Gen. David Petraeus as a betrayer of his country, and depicted Bush in a Web ad as Adolph Hitler.

Brooks, who has also likened Bush to Hitler and claims the former president is "psychotic" and "fanatical," will not be a minor player. The Pentagon's No. 3 official and top policymaker, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, has selected Brooks as a "principal adviser."

The title means Brooks will have the constant ear of the Defense Department's policy chief as Flournoy weighs in on the budget, troop deployments, secret missions and weapons buying. In the Pentagon bureaucratic elevator, every major decision flows through Flournoy's shop on its way to the defense secretary."

Know what I mean?!

Torture is always wrong. Period. There can never be any justification for its use. Ever. People who torture are evil. They would have us degenerate and debase our values to satisfy their own monstrous, unspeakable appetites. They fact we even discuss "the efficacy" of such a practice illustrates how far these people have already eroded our values.
Any government official, agent or operative that participated in the use of torture needs to be discovered, charged and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Neil,

Let’s say you or your Mother or some other loved one were on a plane and let’s also say that there was a man who knew that that particular plane was to be taken and used as a missle by flying it into the White House to kill everybody aboard and a resident Obama. And the only way to get the information to save yourself or your Mother or some other loved one and the President of the United States and his family would be to torture the man to get the information required to stop the attack.

Would you then consider torture as a means to get that information?