rssThe More You’re Waterboarded, the Less Like Torture It Is
Monday, April 27, 2009 at 12:46 pm
- 7 Comments
According to Andy McCarthy, senior fellow at the National Review Institute, the idea of calling waterboarding torture is just silly. And the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed was waterboarded 183 times just reinforces how ridiculous calling it “torture” really is.
As he said on a conference call with reporters organized by the Federalist Society this morning, “as reprehensible as people may find it [waterboarding], it’s not an infliction of severe pain.” What’s more, it’s “not of long term duration such that it would be considered infliction of severe mental pain under cases that interpret that,” either.
“As far as mental suffering is concerned, that involves at least the creation of a fear of imminent death,” said McCarthy. “While it’s a favorite talking point that people were waterboarded 180 times … it undercuts the fear that there was going to be imminent death. After the first or second time you get the point that there’s no death to be feared here.”
So the more a detainee is waterboarded, this astute legal reasoning goes, the more he gets the idea he’s going to survive, and the less like torture it really is.
But isn’t the idea to terrify the guy into talking? Otherwise, why do it?
7 Comments
Comment posted April 27, 2009 @ 11:23 am
Unbelievable. A revelation, astounding new information on waterboarding. Amazing, it becomes fun if you do it enough. I wonder why this was not known in the past 200 years. I guess those past torturers never learned this mind boggling truth.
183 times, they probably would have stopped seeing that they were no longer torturing him effectively, but were just following orders.
Look in the mirror some day if you can, sir and ask yourself where you lost your soul.
Comment posted April 27, 2009 @ 11:35 am
McCarthy believes that fear of death is a requirement for it to be torture based on mental suffering? How completely absurd can someone be?
When you are under severe mental suffering, death is often the desired outcome. Why do you think people commit suicide? It's often an attempt to end the mental suffering they are enduring. I've been depressed enough to understand this (though I've never actually thought to take my own life).
I refuse to believe the McCarthy is actually this foolish. It's sophistry, pure and simple.
Comment posted April 27, 2009 @ 12:04 pm
I say until some GOP operatives demonstrate on TV how awesome it is to be waterboarded by someone who doesn't like you, already beat you up, and may just let you drown a couple times for fun, then they should just shut their little overstuffed cakeholes. If they had the courage of their convictions they'd be paying their dominatrixes to waterboard them instead of wearing the giant diapers like David Vitter.
Comment posted April 27, 2009 @ 7:04 pm
I say until some GOP operatives demonstrate on TV how awesome it is to be waterboarded by someone who doesn't like you, already beat you up, and may just let you drown a couple times for fun, then they should just shut their little overstuffed cakeholes. If they had the courage of their convictions they'd be paying their dominatrixes to waterboard them instead of wearing the giant diapers like David Vitter.
Pingback posted May 3, 2009 @ 12:53 pm
[...] policies — thinks that Al-Marri’s sentence isn’t long enough. McCarthy is the same person who last week said that serial waterboarding isn’t torture because “After the first or second time you get the [...]
Comment posted July 27, 2009 @ 12:03 am
If the idea is to scare the guy into talking, why would you be mad about enhanced methods? You know what is torture? Burning to death in the World Trade Towers.
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