oh so true.

If and that's a large if any of this is true, and for the life of me I cannot imagine a suspected terrorist lying, then the perpetrators of this need to be caught and punished to the full extent of the law. period! I do not believe in torture, or keeping innocent people in prison under any circumstances, but right out of the Al Qaeda handbook is to tell huge lies knowing the American press will pick it up and print it giving Al Qaeda a huge propaganda win. Al Qaeda has been very very successful using the MSM as there own personal propaganda tool.

Moderateman,

The methods being employed- waterboarding, stress positions, prolonged periods of heat and cold etc are all examples of what has been affectionately called "Torture lite", and is considered by its users to be a humane way of coercively getting information out of prisoners. These methods are meant to get around the traditional idea of torture so that it can be rationalized and more easily sold to the public as OK. Seriously, what harm could come from making a guy stand around for a while, right? This is still torture in my opinion, but a different kind of torture that has been marketed to the people as a harmless tool that's helping freedoms' march in the war on terror (supposedly).

A few points that I'd like to make if I may;

All of these techniques are psychological in nature. They are aimed at breaking a subject mentally so that they'll talk, but the mind does not heal from wounds like the body does- psychological dammage is far more lasting and serious than a whipping or beating (although a beating can and often does cause psychological dammage) waterboarding makes someone think that they're drowning, for example. Physically they're fine but mentally the thought that you're dying will definitely scar you. Intelligence services have learned that psychological torture is far more effective than brute physical violence. It is the mind that controls the body after all, so that's what you want to go for as your target right?

So how does making someone stand around in 95 degree heat while blindfolded torture them?

Well first off, how long has the prisoner been standing around in that 95 degree heat, when was the last time they had any food or drink, and what kind of a stress position are they being made to hold? When was the last time they were allowed to sleep? Does the prisoner have the permission to go to the bathroom, or if he soils himself while standing there will that then mean additional punishment? Is water being withheld from him so that he is getting progressively more dehydrated and then when he asks for a drink of water they proceed to waterboard him? "Hey, you want a drink buddy, well hell, we've got just what you're looking for right here!!" The point is that under this kind of psychological operation, even the simplest things can be turned around to provide a source of torment for the prisoner. Furthermore, if anything is done long enough and repetitively enough I think it counts as torture. Yes, music at 90 decibels is mind numbing. For awhile. After you've been in a dark cell with a strobe light and pounding music for a day or two it would drive me quite nuts.

What I'm trying to get at is its' not like these prisoners are marched into a hot room, left to hang out there for a while and then taken back to their cells where they can rest and hang out after their demanding day of interrogation. All of this happens in concert with other techniques in a sequence aimed at breaking the prisoner, and it's very well thought out. During Abu Ghraib there were cases in which the MP's guarding the prison were asked by CIA and other intelligence folks to "soften up" prisoners, so that they could pull out the big guns on em' the next day.

Another aspect of alot of these "humane" interrogation techniques is the humiliation aspect. This goes inline with documented cases where prisoners were made to pile naked on top of each other, simulate oral sex on their fellow prisoners, wear womens' underwear on their head while being lead around on a leash etc. This is not stuff that's easily forgotten, but scars someone for life. In my opinion, mentally scarring someone for life qualifies as

1 a : anguish of body or mind : AGONY b : something that causes agony or pain

Agree/disagree??

I agree with your premises, but the point is this mind breaking as you call it is saving American lives, the waterboarding of Kalil Sheik Mohammed shook loose dozens of plots already in the planning stages to cause more horror on Americans, not just here but anywhere they could be found. They {the terrorists} have no respect for family they will intentionally kill American children and women as casually as you and I would flush feces down the toilet. I do not know if you read the comment section of this but I have been water boarded as part of my training, am I scarred for life, nope. When these light weight tactics are used in comparison to the tactics our enemies use against us, I do not see the problem, I personally sleep better at night knowing we are doing everything we can to keep America safe.

BTW I want to point out how much differently you have been treated here compared to the way I was treated at the chimp. When people disagree with you here they do so respectfully.

The problem is, even if you cite 1 example where torture actually proved usefull, it mostly is not.

You are trying to justify behavior to mistread lawful prisonners in order to break them psychologicly. It's a dangerous direction to take, a dangerous choice to make. You simply justify another step toward actual wrong behavior.

Saddam Hussein's treatment to prisonners were plainly wrong, and you are wrong to simply go a step toward it's direction. I think it's important that we try to incarnate the ideals for which our boys and girls are actually risking their life to defend.

This is a war of ideal, and losses are to be expected. Civilian losses. We are all in it, Canadians, United Staters, Europeans, Australians. But what would mean victory if torture has become a regular habit of our armies and governement, if our governement now are allowed to check our houses unchecked?

It would mean that the terrorist would have won. They managed to put fear in our mind so much that we set aside our what we are actually defending to beat them. We prove that terrorism is working.

And, waterboarding is torture. Period. It was used to force conviction of witches, quite effectively by the way. It is an horrible practice that no organisation should be ever tolerated to use. Organisation that put their members to such torture act are training them to endure torture, but such members can quite at any time during their training.

If you have been the unwilling victim of such act during your time as a military, whatever joke you can make about don't change the fact that you were actually tortured for the fun of it. If you put other peoples trough it in the following time, you simply turned the suffering on another man, which is simply the pleasure of being in power, or being the torturer. You should go see a psychologist if you actually enjoyed it.

Good overall answer, but I would disagree. Normal life involves a lot of "mental anguish" and unless one is a psychopath to begin with, the human psyche is usually made of sterner stuff and can deal with it and not leave PST for everyone that has ever been called a stupid jerk by an irate driver.

That is not to say that there is no such thing as mental torture - far from it. But childish pranks by juveniles are not it. I suspect most here have at one point in their life been the victim of a bully (and that is really all this is), and not had their life come to an end because of it.

I will also add that while I do not have a primer on what exactly is and is not torture, I will say that the screams of torture in most of these cases only serve to cheapen the true torture and desensitize people for when the real stuff happens. It is the "Boy who Cried Wolf" syndrome. Yell it enough times when it is not true, and no one is going to listen when it is true.

Then I have had many bosses who have tortured me!

You have been paid for it.
You could quit when you wanted.

Stop comparing apples with oranges.

As an aside, why is it that conservatives are all about Law and Order on the cop side, but all squirmy about it on the court side?

see ya

Sodaiho,

I agree with you here. The problem is we only know what NY Times published.

If this actually happened, there was found no connection, then two things should happen: The innocent should be compensated and the guilty should be punished.

Not if I wanted to ADVANCE in the workforce rather than work crappy jobs the rest of my life.

Anyway, I'm sorry to see your utter lack of a sense of humour. My point is, being forced to stand around is not torture, nor are many of the other things described (for the record, I'm of the opinion that waterboarding IS torture!). How are we SUPPOSED to interrogate these guys, sitting in a barcolounger with a couple of Cuban cigars and a bottle of 20 year old scotch?!?

I want the books open on our government. I want us to take a hard look and ASK whether our government is, indeed, torturing suspects. But I will NOT come to that conclusion based on heresay and exaggerations!

this is the crux of my little article, what does the left expect us to do to get information? ask nicely? "oh please Mr. terrorist that hates all things western and not Muslim please please tell us your next plan to kill us?"