If it were torture, it would commence whether you talk or not until you're dead.
That's the wrong test for whether something is torture or not.
The whole Inquisition was about torturing people until they confessed.
It puts the lotion in the bucket or it gets the hose, real simple.
I don't have any sympathy for people who want to bomb our cities and kill innocent civilians. But I have 2 cents to throw in.
STAGE2 and Bruxley are witches, they just haven't admitted it yet. Those boys from North Carolina that worked on Hitchens could get the truth out of them.
In the Soviet gulags they used to throw people in a cage where they couldn't sleep, they were cramped together too close. When they were starting to fall asleep sometimes they'd get awakened on purpose. It was filthy in there. And there were 1000's of bedbugs, so many you'd get bit from head to toe until you couldn't stand it. Bedbug bites don't hurt at first, then they itch something awful. When they were making people sit in the waiting room, the stools had legs too long and no foot rests. None of this is torture according to the pro-waterboarding crowd.
Well a lot of people couldn't take it. They said literally anything, just to make it stop. And stop it did. They confessed to being anti-soviet agitators, and then they got shot. The reds sent quite a cross section to the wall. Peasants, ex-soldiers, even party members.
Not torture. Those were anti-soviet agitators, not ordinary citizens. You have to believe that. Why would the soviet intel services lie. The law protected ordinary citizens. Once you cross the line into anti-soviet agitation, you don't get the protection of the law.
I can imagine STAGE2's response already. That's another country, he'll say. Irrelevant comparison, he'll say. Hmm, sorry that doesn't convince me. I hate terrorists just as much as you do, so don't bother with the sympathetic accusation. It's just that I don't see in black and white.
If you let those boys from NC take a crack at you, using nothing but waterboarding and sleep deprivation, I wager you would confess to being whatever they want you to.
Whether we should use waterboarding on people accused of terrorism, that's where I'm on the fence. Still haven't decided. I lean towards yes.
If the pre intelligence is there, they are pretty sure the guy was a dirt bag, then I say waterboard him. It's just that I don't need to spin the terminology to justify it. Waterboarding is a type of torture, it just doesn't leave marks, and the victim can live to tell about it. If that's what it takes to save a city, then use it, but be darned careful with that. Somewhere a line has been crossed, we need to stay close to that line.