Waterboarding is An Acceptable Means of Intelligence Gathering

=== REBUTTALS === PRO begins her argument by attempting to define torture only as physical pain, but different sources define it as, 1. to cause extreme physical pain to, esp in order to extract information, break resistance, etc: to torture prisoners 2. to give mental anguish to 3. to twist into a grotesque form — n 4. physical or mental anguish 5. the practice of torturing a person 6. a cause of mental agony or worry[1] She also uses the testimony of Col. Thorsness, a Medal of Honor recipient and POW in the Vietnam War. As we all know, John McCain, also a prisoner of war by the NVA, has been a vocal critic of the practice of waterboarding, stating that it's "indisputably torture." It's advocates say things like, "It doesn't hurt you, it just scares you and leaves you with no lasting damage." In essence, they're saying that as long as you don't have any lasting, physical trauma, mental anguish or trauma could not be considered tortuous. I find that very ironic considering the sheer amount of PTSD cases treated by the Dept. of Veteran's Affairs and private practices all over the country, or the amount of servicemen who have taken their lives because of the things they've seen and/or have done. Consider also Chinese Water Torture. All that CWT entails is strapping someone down so that a SINGLE drop of water hits the same spot every 5-30 seconds. The idea is that it drives the victim mad, which is why they used it. No lasting physical damage, and yet it is clearly defined and, more importantly, DESIGNED as torture. It's design is to instill prolonged mental anguish. Now, if we were to go by PRO's definition, no one was actually physically harmed, therefore it couldn't possibly be torture. Makes me wonder how PRO would answer after having been strapped down against her will and either employing waterboarding or Chinese Water Torture.[2] More to the point, rape and molestation could quite easily be considered by PRO's own definition to not fall under the purview of torture. Yet, somehow, I highly doubt that she would not consider such a violation as a form of torture when it so evidently is. PRO then uses ADM. Denton, another torture victim, to explain why what the NVA did was worse than torture, which is a non-sequitur. Just because one version of torture may be considered worse torture doesn't invalidate the other side, nor does it justify the use of torture. Anything less is a complete contradiction. All proponents of waterboarding use Khalid Sheik Mohammed as the granddaddy reason to testify to its effectiveness and the importance of it. The problem is that no one is considering the source. The source is from the intelligence community which is designed to operate in a shadowy underworld where secrecy is preeminent, and one that is trained in disseminating propaganda and disinformation to achieve its own ends. We would have no way of verifying their claims without actually watching the interrogation videos of Mohammed, and quite frankly, the US government would never release that. Secondly, let us suppose that Mohammed did in fact break from being waterboarded and that he yielded a treasure trove of useful information. Do we have any control to measure how many people give credible information versus how many people either didn't know the information their captors sought, or how many sent the US on wild goose chases to waste funds and resources of the US government? Thirdly, how would you know the difference between someone who legitimately does not know where Osama bin Laden was versus someone claiming not to know where he is? The methodology would be just continue to waterboard him until he gives up the information. And what if bin Laden wasn't stupid enough to tell anyone about his whereabouts? What then? At some point in time, when it becomes apparent to the one in custody that they won't stop unless they give some information, what reluctance would they have in fabricating something just to MAKE IT STOP? Just to verify their claims could take days, weeks, months, or years, all the while forcing the US to spend inordinate amounts of money and allocating multiple personnel on a mission that leads, literally, nowhere. Actual case studies contraindicate PRO's claims: "Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear." -- U.S. Army Field Manual; 34-52, Chapter 1 [3] "History has shown us that physical pressures are not effective for compelling an individual to give information or to do something' and are not effective for gaining accurate, actionable intelligence." -- Terrence Russell; SERE instructor [4] "Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo." -- Jay Bagwell ; Interrogator and Counterintelligence Specialist [5] [6] This list of dissenters includes people who are both experts in this field and who have actually employed and/or studied the effects of various techniques, to include waterboarding. The overwhelming consensus among them is that it is: 1. A moral travesty 2. Hypocritical 3. Ineffective 4. Creates more animosity than it does mitigate threat levels And if that doesn't strike a nerve, then consider the Bill of Rights itself, where Cruel and Unusual Punishment is a breach of basic human rights. === CONCLUSION === Proponents of waterboarding are willing to trim a little fat off of the Constitution in the interest of serving their own goals under the misguided guise of "protecting the nation." It does nothing of the sort. It further endangers America, not only making it more prone to seething hate, but it creates an atmosphere of tolerance to brutalization. We don't live in the Dark Ages any longer, and these antiquated forms of terror do more to obscure our own sense of humanity than it does anything useful. "In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it; that the vast clandestine apparatus we built up to probe our enemies' resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that the practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves; and that the vast army of intelligence personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences to them and us." -- Malcolm Muggeridge === SOURCES === 1. http://dictionary.reference.com... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org... 3. http://www.globalsecurity.org... 4. http://documents.nytimes.com... 5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com... 6. http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com...