Posted by Damozel | If Giuliani really does (as he claimed) need schooling as to whether waterboarding is or is not torture, Dr.Allen S. Keller, Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture is prepared to fill him in:
Waterboarding involved tipping a person back, covering his mouth with a cloth and repeatedly pouring water over the cloth to make him gag and experience a drowning sensation. If it is done long enough, Dr. Keller said, there is a risk that the person may drown or have a heart attack(New York Times).
And John McCain, the only "frontrunner" among the Republicans I can stomach, said the Giuliani and any other candidates who are unsure whether waterboarding is torture "should know what it is. It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.” McCain also said that Giuliani's views on torture reflect his "inexperience." (New York Times) Yes, that's going to leave a mark.
McCain:
"All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today (New York Times).
McCain thinks torture is wrong on moral grounds, but he also believes it is ineffective because---guess what?---"torture is ineffective because its victims will say anything to make it stop." (New York Times).
Of course, many of the Republican candidates have gone all "quien es mas macho?" with respect to "aggressive interrogation techniques." Lately, Fred Thompson, the actor currently playing the role of candidate for the highest office in the land, said at a stop here in Florida ""that he would not use waterboarding “as a matter of course” but that in certain circumstances officials had to “do what is necessary” to prevent attacks and save lives."" (New York Times) Romney's I've already said what I think about the argument from expediency: a moral person, and a moral nation, can't justify the means by the end. Retired Retired General James 'Spider' Marks, Romney's pick for National Security Adviser, would evidently "torture in a heartbeat" and not just wimpy stuff like waterboarding and sleep deprivation but real torture, such as a knife in the leg. (BN-Politics)
But speaking of sleep deprivation, Human Rights Watch's Jennifer Daskal, their counterterrorism specialist, would like Rudy to know that his ludicrous statement that if sleep deprivation is torture, he himself is a victim, is exactly that: ludicrous. "“They talk about sleep deprivation,” he said. “I mean, on that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president of the United States. That’s plain silly. That’s silly,"" he said.
“Perfected by the Soviets, sleep deprivation is one of the cruelest, most painful forms of torture,” Ms. Daskal said.
For his part, Dr. Keller said he was troubled by the distinctions being drawn between torture and enhanced investigation techniques.
“We should use a common-sense approach,” he said. “If it looks like torture, if it smells like torture, it probably is torture.”
Of course, nothing Giuliani says or does surprises me since he was quoted by the New York Times back in August as saying:
What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do. (BN-Politics)
Or, as the pigs who ruled Animal Farm expressed it:
Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
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