Top Bush administration officials signed off on using torture against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality. "Who would have thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to approve torture?"
The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/INTERROGATION_TACTICS?SITE=AP&SEC...
undergo it themselves .
Torture is what the Islamic radicals do to our guys - cut off their fingers and heads.
Our govt is so weak , it doesn't know what torture is . When we have another major terrorist attack , then we may approve of true torture to get information, but we probably won't.
And yet, the U.S. tells others not to torture and others actions the people of other countries, while we send people to country's that do use torture to extract answers.
Good for us, bad for them.
Double standard?
"Our govt is so weak , it doesn't know what torture is." So, Chuck, are you saying that we would be strong if we cut off fingers and heads? You've got a bizarre sense of what strength is.
The only difference between waterboarding and drowning is how long you take to do it. The process is the same and both are extremely terrifying.
"Waterboarding induces panic and suffering by forcing a person to inhale water into the sinuses, pharynx, larynx, trachea, and lungs."
"Anybody who considers this practice to be "torture lite" or merely a "tough technique" might want to take a trip to Phnom Penh. The Khymer Rouge were adept at torture, and there was nothing "lite" about their methods... The similarity between practices used by the Khymer Rouge and those currently being debated by Congress isn't a coincidence. As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.
"Bottom line: Not only do waterboarding and the other types of torture currently being debated put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half-century; they're also designed specifically to generate a (usually false) confession, not to obtain genuinely actionable intel. This isn't a matter of sacrificing moral values to keep us safe; it's sacrificing moral values for no purpose whatsoever."
http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php
In total agreement with you Pete. I can't believe a small minority in this country don't see this. Then again, some kooks still believe Elvis is alive too.
times total , and the 911 plotter finally squealled out his info. Again , this waterboarding is given to our special ops forces as part of their survival training.
My point of defining torture is that we don't do it. Our country is too weak to give, for example the kind of torture that John McCain endured on some days at Hanoi hilton. -
And it should ONLY be applied in a case of an imminent attack - ala Jack Bower on the '24 ' show. Do any of you watch that ? Do you agree or disagree with it ? He applies mild torture on tv.
Did you say that you define torture as something we don't do? So if we draw and quarter people, that's not torture because it is we who are doing it? Ridiculous line of reasoning!
I'll bet you would vote against the Bill of Rights, too, if it came to a referendum.
Torture (as it's used by the Bush administration) is not designed to extract intelligence in the so-called "ticking timebomb scenario"----it's used to get false confessions out of people in order to justify the administration's nefarious acts.
Andrew Sullivan has a good article on this.