America Tortures - No doubt about it

[spanone]

Waterboarding Recounted

~snip~ A former CIA officer who participated in the capture and questioning of the first al-Qaeda terrorist suspect to be waterboarded said yesterday that the harsh technique provided an intelligence breakthrough that "probably saved lives," but that he now regards the tactic as torture.

Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein abu Zubaida, the first high-ranking al-Qaeda member captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, broke in less than a minute after he was subjected to the technique and began providing interrogators with information that led to the disruption of several planned attacks, said John Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator in Pakistan.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/10/AR2007121002091.html?hpid=topnews

[IndyOp]

1. A discussion on Sam Seder this Sunday revealed an aspect of this I hadn't

thought of before. "Waterboarding" is a hell of a semantic manipulation -- it sounds like skateboarding, snowboarding. I have long been aware of and angry about people using the phrase "simulated drowning" to describe this torture when it is, in fact, "actual drowning" - but I hadn't thought about how the positive emotional connotations of skateboarding and snowboarding were blunting the emotional reaction that people should be having to this torture.

[LynnTheDem]

2. "war on poverty"; poverty = bad. War on poverty = good. War = good.

War on drugs; drugs = bad. War on drugs = good.

War = good.

USA has been excellent at propaganda and mind manipulation for decades. The rest of the world has known of it & seen it for decades.

The saving grace may be that so many Americans now know of it & see it, too.

[IndyOp]

4. After watching "Power of Nightmares" in which I learned that Leo Strauss -

a neocon icon used to believe that Gunsmoke the perfect moral tale for Americans because it was easy to tell who was good and who was bad and at the end of every episode the good guy kills the bad guy, the following occurred to me...

At the end of every episode the good guy kills the bad guy.

At the end of every episode the good guy kills...

Good guys kill...

Good guys kill - that is what good guys do, they kill.

[MedleyMisty]

5. Fits in with the other thread

about how apparently the modern American definition of "hero" is someone who kills somebody.

[thunder35]

3. pretty sick!