re: #108 golgoth

Waterboarding is torture.
[Link: en.wikipedia.org…]

[Link: www.nationalreview.com…]

Take what you want about popularity of it against terrorists, when other countries do it against dissidents or US soldiers we will have no right to complain because traitors like Thiessen think it isn’t torture.

If I were to be captured, waterboarding would be the least of my worries. Not that it’s a prospect to fill the heart with joy, but there’s worse. There’s crippling injuries. Bones broken repeatedly, shoulder joints destroyed—-as with McCain. There’s worse still. And to top it off, or perhaps I should say to lop it off, there’s beheading.

Language has a tendency to take words that used to be full of import, and apply them to successively smaller realities. Take, for example, “weapons of mass destruction”. Our Somali friend who wanted to build and detonate a car bomb at a Christmas tree lighting is charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

What did the word mean originally? It was a synonym for nuclear weapon. But, oh, perhaps we should include weaponized applications of pathogens? An epidemic of plague could have as much effect as a nuke, right? And in fact, did: the Japanese in WW2 used this disease against China.

What about poison gas? A major gassing of a big city might kill as many people as a nuke. Or nearly as many.

What about massed conventional bombing? The firestorms in various Japanese cities, and Hamburg, and Dresden, they ought to be included, right?

Well, if many bombs, collectively, count as a weapon of mass destruction, then how many does it take? Evidently, from the charges, just one will do.

By that same logic of inflating words and diluting the semantic content, waterboarding belongs to the same category of human rights abuses as the rack, the wheel, tiger cages, and drawing and quartering.

Yes, it’s torture. And yes, one single car bomb is a weapon of mass destruction.