Some of my favorite quotes from this editorial include:
Eighty-one spine-crawling pages in a memo that might have been unearthed from the dusty archives of some authoritarian regime and has no place in the annals of the United States. It is must reading for anyone who still doubts whether the abuse of prisoners were rogue acts rather than calculated policy.
Or this comment on Yoo's brilliant legal reasoning
American and international laws against torture prohibit making a prisoner fear “imminent death.” For most people, waterboarding — making a prisoner feel as if he is about to drown — would fit. But Mr. Yoo argues that the statutes apply only if the interrogators actually intended to kill the prisoner. Since waterboarding simulates drowning, there is no “threat of imminent death.”
1 comment:
I confess that despite the fact that Dr. Carpenter showed us the video on waterboarding, I STILL don't understand the concept of "simulated drowning." What I saw in that video was *actual* drowning. It's as though someone falls into a pool and is rescued by a lifeguard who performs CPR. The fact that the lifeguard rescued the drowning person does not make the drowning simulated, merely incomplete. In fact, I think that is the term I will use from now on to define waterboarding: "incomplete drowning."
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