Well it doesn't have the same lasting harm as say a propane torch, pliers, drills, electro-whatever, acid, etc.

I dunno man. I'd rather have all my fingernails pulled out than be a vegetable for the rest of my life.
Waterboarding can and does cause brain damage due to hypoxia.
I'd rather take a propane torch to the hand than have to spend the rest of my life on a ventilator.
Waterboarding can and does cause lasting lung damage.

lol/10

Waterboarding CAN cause those things. And the other tortures I mentioned CAN be benign as you suggested.

But maybe they want to drill holes in your joints, or burn your eyes, or make you drink acid.


/e And after you talk, they probably won't let you live anyways.

This post was edited by Ghot on May 19 2018 10:12am

waterboarding only causes those things if its done horribly wrong. Its been specifically worked out to cause neither hypoxia nor drowning, by restricting the duration and inclining the head so water doesn't go into the lungs.
theres no benign method of propane torches, fingernail pulling, drilling holes or gouging eyes.
that legal quirk of a torture method that causes no lasting harm is precisely what let the bush administration wrap it up and claim its not torture in order to justify it.

anything can be disfiguring, permanently debilitating or murder, if you do it hard enough; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Darren_Rainey

This post was edited by Goomshill on May 19 2018 10:44am

It's irrelevant really. Torture is an immoral and despicable practice. Especially when it's so often used on people that don't know anything.

The common arguments against it are mostly wrong. I don't think ISIS or the Taliban would treat our soldiers any worse because we waterboard them. They already torture and murder anyone they capture. Waterboarding probably did help us get valuable intelligence, according to some of the people who took part in it.

I also don't buy the argument that it's against American values. Waterboarding isn't the same as ripping off fingernails or drilling holes into people. And if America can blow women and children into little pieces with bombs, I think we can waterboard our worst enemies in a critical time of war.

That said, we're not facing the same situation as we were after 9/11, so bringing it back would probably do more harm than good.

This post was edited by IceMage on May 19 2018 11:48am

There was a period before the total collapse of the country and rise of the islamists over the ba'athists, that Jessica Lynch and Shoshana Johnson were treated more humanely by her iraqi captors as a prisoner of war than how we tortured detainees at abu ghraib
The government and the media lied to the public as part of a concerted propaganda campaign to claim she was getting tortured and gangraped by all those dirty brown cocks

it was those detainees across Iraq who got liberated and stormed up the countryside and formed ISIS

problem with that (if it's even true - i'd be sceptical about the testimony of people responsible for and involved in such cruelties - ofc they'd try to justify it) is that you also got a whole lot of fake confessions and worthless info. a significant portion of tortured people (as well as guantanamo prisoners in general, who were imprisoned for years without any charges) were also completely innocent, which should make anyone defending it really ashamed.

i think the argument should be even easier than the one in favour of capital punishment argument: while the latter might be somewhat justifiable in theory for clear cut cases, the unreliability of the results (several studies have shown that torture is extremely unreliable and ineffective in terms of intelligence gathered from it) makes it even harder to argue that for torture - and that's not even addressing the significant amount of people tortured who didn't even know anything.

the only argument i fully agree on is concerning ISIS and other radicals treating their prisoners differently if they know they're from a nation that tortures their people or not. i think that's bs, they are animals that torture and kill people just for refusing their radical interpretation of islam... if america decides to treat their 'prisoners' the same or not is more or less irrelevant to THEM. i'd just hope it's not to the majority of americans...

This post was edited by fender on May 19 2018 12:30pm

I don't think interrogations are needed when you know the answers to the questions

But that's just me, I guess.