Corrections: Waterboarding
Waterboarding is torture, according to the 2006 U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation. (See “Waterboarding Isn’t Torture.”)
It also bans hooding, hypothermia, forced or simulated sex acts, religious degradation and certain types of threats. The Geneva Convention says, “Prisoners of war who refuse to answer questions may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”
The Field Manual allows 19 “approaches” to questioning, including incentives, emotional appeals, Mutt-and-Jeff routines, various deceptions, rapid-fire questions, falsely accusing the captive of a crime to elicit denials, posing as agents of another government and more. Muslim jihadis are not known to have a similar policy in place.
What irks me, I guess, is the incessant news-media pounding that there is equivalence between what we have done and what Muslim jihadis do. Equivalence is a dangerous and bogus standard used to sway debate and promote a destructive agenda of the socialist left.
“We’re completely corrupt and as bad as they are because waterboarding is torture.” I don’t buy this news-media and leftist-promoted reasoning, and you shouldn’t either.
One source (of five I checked, including DOD and the Code of Military Justice) specifically forbids waterboarding, and the Geneva Convention basically allows nothing. So what’s right?
It seems to me we must differentiate between: beating a person to death, dismemberment, crushing, electric shock, stabbing, poisoning, whipping, amputation and mutilation of civilians and soldiers — from extracting information from non-uniformed murderers by using harsh techniques — or else we’re arguing for moral equivalence.
The media and the left want you to believe that Muslim prisons and torture chambers reeking with the smell of death, are the same as American interrogation rooms, clean from all the water they pour, and prisons where detainees are forced to wear panties. Hey, in American prisons, women’s clothing is considered a benefit.
I’m not saying waterboarding isn’t cruel and unusual. I’m not saying the practice should continue, I don’t know. But I am saying we don’t peel back fingernails to punish people or get at information. Our enemies do. That’s a significant difference. Congress isn’t debating the propriety of using a blowtorch on a suspect, because they don’t have to, because we don’t. Our enemies do.
How rough can you get in an interrogation when innocent lives are at stake? That’s a tough question, one I have not addressed and can’t really answer.
If you’re angry at me (seven people unsubscribed citing my waterboarding entry as cause), because I raised the issue and questioned one group’s logic, so be it. I have to say what seems obvious to me. If the debate’s too harsh for you, go have a few glasses of water and chill.
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Too bad terrorists don’t meet the enemy combatant requirements as set out in the Geneva Convention.