In all the Left's hysteria over waterboarding those poor little ole terrorists, they never mention the fact that the terrorists who were waterboarded could have avoided being waterboarded if they had cooperated, and they were waterboarded after other methods had failed to induce them to cooperate. The terrorists absolutely had it in their power to avoid waterboarding by cooperating, and this was made clear to them during the interrogations leading up to the waterboarding.
So, you're good with the police offering you to sign a confession or "fall down the stairs"? Because you if you co-operate you'll be fine, right? Falling down the stairs in that situation is practically
voluntary.
This is drastically different from the waterboarding that, say, the Japanese did on American soldiers during WW II. Not only was the Japanese waterboarding far, far more vicious in nature than the CIA's waterboarding, but the American soldiers who were waterboarded had no opportunity to avoid it.
So what you're saying is that the CIA behaves in a somewhat similar way to the universally condemned and demonized torturers of Japanese World War II prison camps, but you're fine with it because, in addition to torturing people, they ask them questions? I guess this excuses the Gestapo of the same era then? They asked questions. So did the medieval inquisition, so did many secret police service since and right up to the present day.
Both of the CIA directors who served during the time when waterboarding was being done have said that the intel that we obtained via that method prevented attacks and saved lives.
Good heavens, people with a vested interest in defending torture defended torture. Clearly, their statements must be totally reliable, because the CIA would never dream of saying anything that wasn't true to the American public...
Centuries of experience suggest that torturing people is a dumb idea. It's unreliable, great propaganda for ones' enemies and more importantly, its wrong. As Border Reiver has explained so clearly, the United States is subject to treaties which prohibit torture. Pretending that those treaties do not apply in this situation, for no more principled reason than that then government didn't want them to was both dishonest (because it was not true) and fantastically dangerous (because it undermines the rule of law).
You probably feel quite safe, protected by the US constitution, with access to the regular courts. You will probably never been suspected of terrorism. But if you were, I bet you'd expect to have a proper trial, a lawyer and charges set out against you. But the dangerous precedent set by the CIA's torture program is that, perhaps, you'd just get flown around the world to some quiet place and tortured. If all the protections of the law are only words, then they are only words
for you too.
