The pursuit of meanings of words can be a delightful hobby. That is why I use a dictionary so often.

torture
Verb
[-turing, -tured]
1. to cause (someone) extreme physical pain, esp. to extract information, etc.: suspects were regularly tortured and murdered by the secret police
2. to cause (someone) mental anguish
Noun
1. physical or mental anguish
2. the practice of torturing a person
3. something which causes great mental distress: she was going through the torture of a collapsing marriage

Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2004, 2006

It has been well established that causing extreme mental anguish or distress is torture.

POW is a technical term used within the military. You can use the term “enemy combatants” if it makes you feel better.

Not quite. Prisoner of War is used to refer to any combatant captured on the battlefield. That means they are covered under the Geneva Conventions.

If they are not POWs then they are CRIMINAL prisoners. Under American law they have the right to a criminal trial. American law enforcement has been convicted for torture because they elicited confessions of their prisoners through water boarding.

So either way you cut it, water boarding is torture and illegal.

Get a grip. He said what he said, he’s be happy to be water-boarded for charity.

He needs to put his fat ass where his mouth is and just do it.

But then I’m of the mind that US soldiers should all be dressed in bright red coats because it simply is the old-fashioned concept of what is fair, honourable and civilized. Like those against waterboarding.

RBG

I’d be one of who doesn’t care if POW gets mentioned referring to Vietnam(a conflict I was against then, said so then and history has proven me right) I’d still say our best guidelines for Vietnam then and with these… enemy combatant detainees/POWs lets check with Orwell for a name… what ever you call them, they are our prisoners and out of the fight, is to follow the Geneva Conventions. any thing less only weakens us.

I call bullsh*t on this one. Give us proof that military interrogators have called waterboarding a NECESSARY tool. And since when? We have prosecuted people who have done it in the past.

What ever happened to the vaunted conservative belief of getting the government off our backs? One terrorist attack, and the “conservatives” run crying to Big Brother — spy on us, torture us, do whatever you want to us, but save us from that big bad terrorist boogieman! Boo hoo!

What a bunch of wimps.

BTW, its been long enough not to have the right side bar back up and running.

Somebody should be given a dirty look if not more.

[Please elaborate, I don't follow - ed.]

Reading Alfie at #40 put me in mind of this as did the contribution of “context” by Reality Check at #45.

Before waterboarding became an issue, I always thought of torture as causing great physical pain often resulting in permanent body damage. I don’t think anybody says waterboarding does that, so why is it torture? I’m thinking, with no basis to do so, that “torture” got confused with “behavior in violation of the Geneva Convention for War Prisoners.”

The notion here is that by and large, draftees fighting in a declared war for their countries are not “bad” people. Just ordinary Joe’s doing their legal duties and as such they should be treated humanely when they are no longer fighting. Anything not humane was easily called “torture.”

Bush’s lawyers could easily have been bought and paid for. It would be based on the quality of their briefs, the history of the practice, the review of arguments making waterboarding torture and why they didn’t apply. STill a close call==depending on what you think torture is and when it should or shouldn’t apply.

Two difficult concepts rarely formally considered: Definition and Context.

Leave water boarding up to the military experts and not the politicians or mass media. If waterboarding was not effective, it would have been abandoned a long time ago by the military. It’s been around for as long as it has because it is very effective in producing results. Does it make some liberal go to bed at night and break out in cold sweats as they have nightmares about it? Probably so. Either way, I’m all ears to know what the better solution to waterboarding is.

People are making a big deal out of this waterboarding mostly because of who was in office. This has been going on for a while now and to do away with it without an effective replacement is utterly silly and naive.

52: Like it or not, the military has a need to extract information from POWs (or enemy combatants if you prefer).

Don’t kid yourself into believing that asking nicely will get any positive results. Are you THAT naive?

Even if whatever you’re citing is remotely true about Germans & WWII, do you honestly believe that’s the norm or the exception? More than likely, many people who “cooperated” probably did so because not cooperating either resulted in death (which we don’t do nowadays when interrogating) or we are granting political amnesty because the person in custody has very valuable information that would advance U.S. knowledge (i.e. rockets / biological warfare).

Since we’re not going to execute anyone or grant amnesty, what exactly would be the reason for a POW to cooperate?

You are missing the point… the point being that Hannity would probably confess to ANYTHING after just a couple of days of that treatment. Truth and torture do not go together.

Should torture be available as a tool. Yes… but only in the most extreme case. It should be truly an exceptional tool, not just a part of the imprisonment process, as it became during the Cheney administration.

Some ignorant person mentioned above that waterboarding has only been used on three people… ignoring the fact that a couple dozen people have been outright killed by torture during interrogation. And there is no evidence that any actionable intelligence has come from any of those deaths or torture…. the two memos that Cheney wants discussed are basically ‘cover your ass’ memos written after the poop hit the fan and the investigations into the actions of the Cheney administration had already started; they were not created to show that the process was working, but as an attempt to justify actions after the fact.