re: #104 RogueOne

We could argue back and forth for years (and we have) whether waterboarding is torture or not but that isn’t my argument.

Not really, no. It’s agreed upon to be torture. You can decide it’s not, but then you’re in a very small minority— assuming you know what it actually is. If you don’t think that repeatedly making someone experience the fear, panic, and pain of drowning is torture, then you’re using an amazingly narrow definition.

My argument is that the claim that we executed people for waterboarding is an exaggeration.

We tried people for torture, in which we included waterboarding. We executed people for having conducted torture. Your bizarre line of logic could be used to say that any individual form of torture done by someone who also tortured in other ways doesn’t rise to the bar. It’s a deeply odd argument.

During WWII, and since then, we have considered waterboarding torture. That didn’t actually change. We just decided it was okay torture.

The depressing part is the attempts to minimize it afterwards, to pretend there’s some good, civilized way to torture where you still get to wear the white hat while you do it.