so if you look closely at the towel, what is the object they are trying to conceal under the towel that seems to cover where they are dumping most of the water?

it’s a sponge. that’s part of the techniqe. they weren’t pulling any sort of “trick”.

it think waterboarding is borderline at best. conservatives should bear this in mind: in the ongoing repression in castro’s prison island, nothing which goes on there is very much better or worse than what we’ve done under the rubric of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and a lot of things we’re quite willing to recognize as human rights violations do not physicly injure.

so, no. it does not make us the equivalent of the japanese in wwii or the nva during that conflict. even the cuban comparison can be mitigated in terms of volume and motive (cuba’s violations happen within the context of domestic repression).

but i’m nonetheless relieved partially to hear that it only happened three times before being banned. it’s beneath us, i think.

i realize that from a practical perspective, it’s hard to see why. in fact, i remember the moment clearly; after months and months of the word “torture” being slung with such consternation and finally realizing that this was it, they’d been talking about waterboarding. it was like decending a staircase in the dark and putting your foot down on a landing when you expected another stair to be there. it seemed to be such a non-issue that rather than feeling victorious over all of the pageantry of outrage, i actually felt [i]betrayed[/i] by the progressive left – i expected a jesse macbeth sort of blood libel, but instead here i had found out that they were talking about something real but superfiscially trivial.

their propaganda slogan was something allong the lines of, “we’ve given them permission to do this to our guys”. my thoughts on that were clear now: if only they would restrain themselves so. if only we weren’t dealing with people capable of grabbing a handcuffed man’s head, knife in hand, and keep sawing through until…

the point that waterboarding is at least benign enough that there have been more volunteers to demonstrate how bad it is than there have been actual interrogation subjects is well-taken. and certainly in common parlance the word “torture” conveys a lot which isn’t there with waterboarding. a lot, in fact, which many of its critics, progressives in particular, have never had a problem condoning when undertaken by “counter-hegemons”.

and yet i’m a little put off by the cackling in here. i recognize that there’s a slippery slope in the formulation of “torture” which includes “mental anguish”. that would seem to be able to encompass everything down to the sort of shame one would hope is engendered in a perpetrator by a fair conviction in an open justice system, to say nothing of the sentence delivered. and i have no doubt that progressives toil towards making that exteme a reality.

the malign goals driving the phoney outrage of the left on the one side is enough for me to be unperturbed by the unserious cheering on display here. but i can’t really join in because, well, i also recognize that there’s a slippery slope on this side as well.

jummy on November 6, 2007 at 8:52 PM

like i said, a sponge, part of the technique.

it should be noted that all of this calling “fake!” sort of undermines the premise that “it can’t be all that bad if they’re doing it to themselves”.

jummy on November 6, 2007 at 8:58 PM