Water Boarding is an act of torture and is immoral.

" I agree with my opponent that perhaps the best testimony comes from those who have carried it out: "NEW YORK—Fifteen former interrogators and intelligence officials with more than 350 years collective field experience have declared that torture is an "unlawful, ineffective and counterproductive" way to gather intelligence, in a statement of principles released today." http://www.humanrightsfirst.org...... "listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information."" Quotes like these are evasive, because whatever their field experience may be, it is not demonstrably experience in the waterboarding being defended-- Abu Ghraib, last I heard, was being run by a military police unit that wasn't even properly trained CO's, it isn't comparable to CIA waterboarding of the sort anyone's defending. Since my opponent seems to be attacking for a lack of sources without asking for which sources he wants to see, here's the source on the statements of what results occurred when the CIA used waterboarding: http://www.globalresearch.ca... " "Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence, publicly denounced the practice. He revealed that waterboarding is used in training at the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School in San Diego, and claimed to have witnessed and supervised "hundreds" of waterboarding exercises. Although these last only a few minutes and take place under medical supervision, he concluded that "waterboarding is a torture technique – period"." This particular quote is beating a dead horse, I never disputed that waterboarding is torture, since we are in agreement on that matter, we can usefully omit that measurement by this point. " "the current U.S. Army Field Manual recognizes that torture and inhuman treatment is ineffective, stating that "Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."" Let's take a look at this. First of all, they don't reference which field manual they are talking about (Wikipedia says the US Army had 542 field manuals in circulation as of 27 July 2007). I've managed to find in field manual 2-22-3, however. Let's look at the context. It's essentially a beginner's guide to HUMINT collection in pursuit of "The commander's needs." This is the manual new interrogators are expected to learn, it provides "Doctrinal guidance," among other things-- Hmm, doctrine. Do you think, maybe, if there's something that they'd REALLY REALLY get in trouble letting a just-trained person holding the rank of Private do something, they might tell him it's ineffective even if it's not true? Or in this case, plain fallacious. Pretty much ALL interrogation efforts yield unreliable results and induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to here. It's up to the organization ordering the interrogation to counter this influence by creating a context in which lies can be quickly found out. And torture isn't a first resort, it's a last in one's interrogations, so "damaging subsequent collection efforts" is irrelevant when not dealing with an interrogator who doesn't have a logical sense of the correct order of operations down. " "The guards at the Guantï¿½namo Bay prison camp are the "overlooked victims"" Stop right here. Volenti non fit injuria. Volunteer and victim are mutually exclusive statuses. " My opponent claims that water boarding has been used three times to positive effect. It does not take much of a stretch of imagination to suppose that it may well have been carried out many more times with less effective results" Irrelevant, as the argument is not over the specific amount of waterboarding it is moral to administer, only whether there is a nonzero amount. Waterboarding should not be used where less compromising techniques have not been attempted or have succeeded, obviously. The point is that it can occasionally retrieve intelligence from otherwise valueless prisoners. A bit of advice for the future: Latin can be freely looked up with these wonderful computing devices, and a "Straw man" is not an accusation that you are made of straw, it is an accusation that you are misrepresenting an opponent's position :).