Cliff Carson,
Those tortured to death - would that be murder?
——-

the Department of Defense autopsies of those prisoners
who died as a result of what was done to them during
interrogation list the cause of death as homicide.

IMax, it is no pleasure for me to point out that you yourself need “to know what you are saying.”
  First of all, just insisting as you do on the relative virtue of whether someone was waterboarded only once or 100 times indicates that you are not aware of the callousness of such a distinction.  There is no real moral difference whether a torturer tortures once or keeps on torturing except that he only sinks lower in the pit that has already condemned him. There is no such thing as a “better” torturer and a “worse” torturer.
  That also applies to your comparison of the Japanese torturers and American torturers. (That very statement proposing a difference is itself absurd.)  A torturer is a torturer is a torturer no matter what natioinal establishment tells him it is okay.  My question to you is why you can’t recognize that simple truth. 
  May I suggest that perhaps the reason nobody ever answered you on this earlier is that we hoped you really didn’t think like that, and preferred to allow you the benefit of the doubt, or we simply thought the answer was so obvious that there was no need to spell it out.  Or perhaps we thought you were overstating to try to prove your point.

felicity,

I am opposed to water-boarding.  The problem in your statement below is the fact that the technique applied to Khalid Mohammad resembled nothing which took place in Japan during WWII.  These situations cannot be compared.

I mention this only because I think it’s important, on these particular set of issues, to take great care in the things we say.  We need to know what we’re saying before we say them.

Bush Official Warned About Torture in Secret Memo?

Who here was not previously aware of the running debates within the Bush Administration concerning “Enhanced Interrogations”?  Judging the statements of Presidential spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, that enhanced interrogation techniques will be considered on a case by cases basis, obviously this same debate continues in the current administration. - The Neo-new-Conservatives in the White House?

For various reasons I am opposed to water-boarding.  At the same time I have never seen a credible report documenting KSM being “water-boarded” 183 times.  Moreover, each time I ask those who make the claim to provide credible evidence of the claim, they have, without exception, come up wanting.

I’ve looked over archived TruthDig comments on this very subject spanning the past 2 years.  The belief that KSM was subjected to the technique nearly 200 times, used as a major indictment against the U.S. (and its case against the defendant), is near 100%.  How and why is that even possible?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/confess/

How long would Cheney last before he confessed his role in the 9/11 attacks?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/sing-it-out/

An open letter dated February 5th 2008 from ‘9/11 Widows’ contains this stinging rebuke to the 9/11 Commission:

‘I am willing to concede you were dedicated and laboured hard on a difficult task but I am certainly not willing to let you all off the hook for hiring or not firing Phillip Zelikow, for avoiding the anthrax attack, for producing an obviously compromised and incomplete report, for not naming names, for not issuing needed subpoenas, for ignoring important witnesses, for giving too much credence to tortured co-conspirators, for concluding that the question of who funded the attacks is of ‘little practical significance’, for softening the report to protect the Bush administration, for the embargo on Commissioner comment until after the election, for overlooking the missing trillions from the Department of Defense’.

Well, I think that covers everything the 9/11 Comission did or failed to do. Zelikow is the one who mocked members of the 9/11 families who were still grieving for dead family members with the sneer,‘Oh yes. It’s ALL CONNECTED, ALL CONNECTED’ when they dared to ask sensible questions about how and why those family members had died. Telling Zelikow that torture was illegal would be like telling Billy the Kid that bullets hurt people. All it would elicit would be a psychotic giggle.

Those tortured to death - would that be murder?  There are many documented instances of detainees being tortured to death.

I urge everyone to watch the Documentary “Taxi to the Darkside”.

And gerard you are correct to mention that the torturers as well as the tortured give up their sanity.

In the Mai Lai massacre the American soldiers were scalping the victims, over 80% of whom were women and children.

And I’m sure all of you have read about the “Murder for Fun” group in Afghanistan.

Does anyone believe the pretense that we are in the Middle East to help the people of the Middle East?

Excuse me—both tortured and torturers.

The whole program was and still is a crying shame—not surprising if you know how fear can unhinge the sanity of anybody, both bortured and torturers.

Khalid must own the all time record for water boarding, with 183 as his high
mark. After 3 or 4 anything anybody says is suspect. does anyone believe this
stuff? i refuse to believe anything the “authorities” tell me, a prudent position
given how many time we’ve been lied to.
Anyway, back to Khalid, after his “confession” in which he claimed credit for any
terrorist act anyone suggested, I remember a cartoon by Mike Lukovich showing
the familiar face of Khalid in that ratty t-shirt, on television, and he is saying ” ...
also when I was managing the cincinatti reds, I bet on my own team”

Japanese, and probably anyone else, aren’t allowed to
water-board American military personnel (we hung them
after WWII) but we’re allowed to water-board anyone we
damn please. Is that what’s meant by American
‘exceptionalism?’