Okay, enough of this...

[PsyOps]

Originally Posted by Ken King

I think the legislature has taken care of that for us. They even went ahead and defined "severe mental pain or suffering" too, just so there wouldn't be any confusion.

So... Placing a rope around someone's neck would fall under this definition. It's "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering". The end result, of course, being a probably slow painful suffocating death. The people that instituted the policy to hang these prosoners need to be brought up on charges and convincted of committing acts of torture.

[vraiblonde]

Originally Posted by PsyOps

Define torture.

Listening to liberals whine about waterboarding.

[Ken King (Premo)]

Originally Posted by PsyOps

So... Placing a rope around someone's neck would fall under this definition. It's "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering". The end result, of course, being a probably slow painful suffocating death. The people that instituted the policy to hang these prosoners need to be brought up on charges and convincted of committing acts of torture.

WTF are you talking about?

[vraiblonde]

I think that reading Beaver Cleaver's posts causes severe mental pain, and the ACLU does nothing about that. And I'm not even a terrorist, so I do not deserve this torture.

[Toxick]

Originally Posted by PsyOps

Define torture.

Well, you have dictionary definitions, and then you have legal definitions. I don't know if you're looking for that or personal opinion, but I've got an opinion on what torture is.



Torture is along the same lines as abuse - but worse by an order of magnitude.


As for waterboarding... I've been waterboarded before. Obviously not for political or militaristic reasons, but merely because teenagers do stupid things (and we'll just leave it at that).

I would say that waterboarding constitutes "abuse" - but not torture. There is no physical pain, and IMO, pain is the defining feature of torture. Waterboarding is annoying, unsettling, very distressing - however I would have a hard time defining the practice "torture". It is in the same neighborhood as Sleep Deprivation, IMO.


Torture, I would submit, is the deliberate application of physical pain outside the boundaries of ordinary human tolerance. (i.e. extraordinary pain). This would include things like the Chutes Under the Fingernails technique. It would include applications of electric shock. Branding. alligator clips on the nipples.

Remember the movie Payback? Remember "One little piggy! BAM"... Yeah... big-time torture.

Waterboarding? Not torture.


All in my humble opinion, of course.

[BOP]

Originally Posted by Nonno

""I forgot to mention last night that following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding," he told reporters at a campaign event.

"If the United States is in another conflict ... and we have allowed that kind of torture to be inflicted upon people we hold captive, then there is nothing to prevent that enemy from also torturing American prisoners."

McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as "water cure," "water torture" and "waterboarding," according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning. "

More at: PolitiFact | History supports McCain's stance on waterboarding

Watching you post inane thread after inane thread is torture.

The Jap soldiers weren't hung for waterboarding.

They were hung for shoving bamboo splinters under prisoners' fingernails and toenails, as they did to the father of a girl I dated while I was in the Navy. He survived the Bataan Death March, where many, many of our GIs did not.

They were hung for thousands of other things they did to American and our Allied military and civilians they captured. But not for waterboarding alone. Waterboarding would have seemed tame to the people who survived Japanese imprisonment.

[SamSpade]

Originally Posted by BOP

He survived the Bataan Death March, where many, many of our GIs did not.

My grandfather was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. He was 6 foot tall, and returned from Japan weighing 98 pounds. He described being jammed on a prisoner transport with hundreds of men in rooms so small, they could barely breathe.The cruelty inflicted on these men was beyond belief, as the Japanese did not recognize surrender as an honorable means of ending combat. As far as they were concerned, prisoners were beneath contempt because they should have fought to the death, and the men left to guard such prisoners weren't their best soldiers.

If you've ever seen "The Great Raid", my grandfather was briefly interred there before being placed somewhere else. They killed their prisoners - or at least, intended to - to keep the world from learning what they had done. Among these was something you saw in the movie - trapping prisoners, dowsing them with gasoline and burning them alive.

What they did to non-prisoner civilians is among the most horrific in modern warfare. Ask the survivors of Nanking.

They didn't do this to extract intelligence. These men by and large knew nothing very useful - and certainly the civilians didn't, such as those in Nanking. They did it because no one could stop them.

Anyone who even thinks to equate what the Japanese did to our soldiers to what happened at Gitmo is seriously deluded and not worth wasting time discussing the issue with them. I mean this. Don't bother. They have no idea.

[Larry Gude (Premo)]

Originally Posted by SamSpade

Anyone who even thinks to equate what the Japanese did to our soldiers to what happened at Gitmo is seriously deluded and not worth wasting time discussing the issue with them. I mean this. Don't bother. They have no idea.

It is a profound insult to the memory of those who were there, the loved ones they left behind, to what the nation went through, when we attempt to make these type of moral equivalency arguments.

There is a sickness in this, a complete lack, as you say, of any sort of rationality in these arguments.

[chernmax (Premo)]

Originally Posted by Beaver-Cleaver

Education and emergency services are social welfare programs?

That's because wasteful spending went to so many other MOM pork and special interest projects that there was no money left over for education and emergency services. Don't confuse or twist facts because Maryland (Dem & Rep) have a history of wasteful spending, then check the books and realize wait, we don't have enough money for our schools and emergency services programs and somehow a new B/S tax needs to be invented to make up for the new urgent shortfall!

I sure hope the schools and emergency services in their spare time get some kind of discount to enter the Blue Crabs stadium seeming how the $13 million the state dumped into it couldn't have possible helped them!!!

[Lenny]

..for a simpleton liberal to grasp.