Evidence of Water Boarding
http://tinyurl.com/3yj4th
I tend to lean with Phil on this, waterboarding has not proved itself worthy of a torturing technique, so until the government can prove it does extract enemy information, it should not be used. If all WBing provides is lies, it will kill more troops than those saved. The rack or traveling irons might have a better affect of extracting truth. I like the hypodermic needle in the eye torture where you remove the fluid insde the eye and then tell him if he doesn't tell the truth you squirt the liquid on the floor and fill the socket with air. Of course you only do one eye at a time.
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Which brings us to the second part of Mukasey's "new kind of terrorist" argument, the one that suggests waterboarding works wonders. There is scant evidence that this is the case. For example, when used against alleged al-Qaida mastermind Abu Zubaydah, waterboarding apparently produced a stream of statements from Zubaydah of such dubious quality—according to journalist Ron Suskind—that intelligence officers now widely believe any evidence gleaned from Zubaydah to be utter garbage.
Finally, Mukasey's new kind of terrorist justification implies that waterboarding can't be taken off the table, because this new enemy has some kind of heightened intelligence value; that an al-Qaida detainee like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might know more than your average Nazi spy or North Vietnamese colonel would have known in previous wars. This might be the strongest argument for coercive interrogation, but it still assumes too much. We rarely (if ever) know enough about a particular detainee to determine whether he knows something worth torturing him for. Even if he talks, we have little ability to verify the confession's truth and often must caveat it as the product of torture, as has been done with KSM's post-waterboarding statements. Worse yet, over the six years since 9/11, we have never stopped to systematically weigh the enormous, almost incalculable strategic costs of torture against the speculative benefits (if any) to be gleaned from its use.
If there really were tactical or operational reasons for us to continue waterboarding, you might expect the military to favor it. And yet the JAGs and the military oppose the technique in the strongest terms. They oppose it because they recognize it's not particularly effective, and because they have to worry about our soldiers being subject to such treatment if captured. Most of all, they oppose it because they recognize the value of clarity for maintaining the discipline of America's military. As one of us has written, "[T]here are few slopes more slippery than that from small war crimes to large ones. Any wartime action, no matter how heinous, can always be justified by some battlefield exigency."
Why can't we renounce waterboarding once and for all?
I thought waterboarding was surfing.......
By Phillip Carter and Dahlia Lithwick
http://tinyurl.com/2k6lqu