One does not compromise with Straussians, neocons, chickenhawks or clueless bastards.  People who still support George W. Bush, torture and war profiteering at this late stage of human history are beyond reason or persuasion.  There is no point whatsoever in worrying about how such people see things, what they might say, or how they might characterize our actions or arguments.  These people should not be appeased or wooed, they should be marginalized and driven back under the rocks from which they have slithered.

The Ghoul draws the wrath of God
Evangelicals Crucfy Giuliani's GOP nomination bid:

In a presidential candidate straw poll of 5,775 evangelical voters at the meeting and online, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney came out on top, narrowly ahead of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

Giuliani trailed in eighth, with just 1.85 percent of the vote,

At a debate, he declared himself opposed to torture but refused to say whether he would outlaw waterboarding, instead offering that interrogators should perform "any method they can think of."

But when Americans are tortured by American police and jails all over the US, especially in Chicago and Seattle, nobody says a word.

You can say fire isn't hot, but that doesn't make it true. You can say Water boarding isn't torture.. doesn't make it true.

For those who insist water boarding (and other forms of 'intense interrogation') isn't torture, how about you sit through a few rounds of it personally. Better yet, if you have children/wives, let them be water boarded while you watch. See if that changes your views.

Unless you are sick sadists, then you don't get to watch.

It's usually described in the media in a matter-of-fact manner. The Washington Post simply referred to waterboarding a few days ago as an interrogation measure that "simulates drowning." But what does waterboarding look like?

Below are photographs taken by Jonah Blank last month at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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The crux of the issue before Congress can be boiled down to a simple question: Is waterboarding torture? Anybody who considers this practice to be "torture lite" or merely a "tough technique" might want to take a trip to Phnom Penh. The Khymer Rouge were adept at torture, and there was nothing "lite" about their methods. Incidentally, the waterboard in these photo wasn't merely one among many torture devices highlighted at the prison museum. It was one of only two devices singled out for highlighting (the other was another form of water-torture
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Bottom line: Not only do waterboarding and the other types of torture currently being debated put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half-century
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These photos are important because most of us have never seen an actual, real-life waterboard. The press typically describes it in the most anodyne ways: a device meant to "simulate drowning" or to "make the prisoner believe he might drown." But the Khymer Rouge were no jokesters, and they didn't tailor their abuse to the dictates of the Geneva Convention. They-- like so many brutal regimes--made waterboarding one of their primary tools for a simple reason: it is one of the most viciously effective forms of torture ever devised.

What is it about waterboarding that makes the White House so reluctant to renounce it? It's an old torture technique from the Spanish Inquisition that consists of immobilizing your target on an inclined board, head down, with cloth covering their face. Pouring water over the face simulates drowning. The practice leaves no physical marks. It's illegal under the Geneva Conventions and has long been treated as a war crime by the United States. We even use this technique to train our own troops to withstand illegal torture by our enemies. As retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, a former top Navy lawyer and now dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., testified at Mukasey's hearing last week, "Other than perhaps the rack and thumbscrews, waterboarding is the most iconic example of torture in history. It has been repudiated for centuries. It's a little bit disconcerting to hear now that we're not quite sure where waterboarding fits in the scheme of things."

For starters, Bush won't renounce waterboarding because it violates the two choice cocktails of anyone drunk on executive authority: Absolut secrecy and Absolut power.

First, secrecy. It has long been the view of the Bush administration that nothing can be deemed illegal so long as it remains a secret. Never mind that it's a secret only to people living in igloos without wireless service. That's why, even while there's a major movie out about rendition, we call it a secret. Since they have yet to make a movie called Waterboard, Mukasey could take the absurd position that he isn't sure precisely what it involves. Cute trick. Call it a secret, and there can be no legal debate. As the White House insisted Friday, "Judge Mukasey is not in a position to discuss interrogation techniques which are necessarily classified." If the soon-to-be-AG cannot hazard an opinion on the legality of waterboarding, even when he can read step-by-step accounts of it on the Internet, who are the rest of us to condemn it?

The problem with this argument is that the administration's use of waterboarding on detainees has been known publicly since at least May 2004. Everybody knows what it involves, and even if you live in an igloo without wireless, you can tell it's illegal. The argument that you can't call it torture until you've been "read into" the torture program is just a lawyer's trick that justifies keeping bad conduct secret to end-run the laws.

Next, there is the absolute authority argument. The real reason the Bush administration clings to its power to order waterboarding has little to do with any strategic argument and everything to do with the old standby assertion that to renounce his authority to waterboard would be to give away the president's power.

"Given the difficulty of distinguishing the insurgents from the population, American soldiers began killing Filipinos wholesale. Stories of indiscriminate warfare, mass graves, "concentration" of civilians into camps (cf. "strategic hamlets"), and atrocities like the "water torture" began trickling home. In the end, about 220,000 Filipinos perished in the war. The greater number of these died from disease, disruption of food supplies, and other causes linked to the war, rather than from actual combat."

http://www.antiwar.com/stromberg/s032000.html

Then the question turns on what is torture? Stress positions, loud music, sleep deprivation, aggressive questioning, hits, punches, waterboarding...

What is torture? We are all against it, but what is it?

Rudy seems to be saying that aggressive questioning works - that he has put a lot of mobsters in jail because of it. I have nothing against aggressive questioning, but where is that line? and, when is agressive questioning no longer effective? How do we know that the person being questioned even knows the answer and won't just make up an answer to stop the questioning?

Questions, that probably hinge on determining when aggressive questioning become torture.

To tell you the truth, I don't know where the line should be drawn. I'd like to think waterboarding is torture and the various means of aggressive questioning often cross the line of torture. That  sleep deprivation and humiliation by violating cultural norms and taboos (sexual and food, etc) are forms of torture. And even if they are not torture, that the US would take the high ground and treat people with a dignity above the standard in todays world and not set standards degrading human beings for others to follow.

But, shouldn't the congress or somebody just step up and write laws that actually define what acts are torture so individuals like the attorney General and the President can no longer say, "The US does not torture - it is against the constitution" and then hide behind a transparent veil where torture is not defined and specific acts are ambiguous falling somewhere between aggressive questioning and torture.

October 26, 2007, Paris, France - Today, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights filed a complaint with the Paris Prosecutor before the "Court of First Instance" (Tribunal de Grande Instance) charging former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with ordering and authorizing torture. Rumsfeld was in Paris for a talk sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine, and left through a door connecting to the U.S. embassy to avoid journalists and human rights attorneys outside.

"The filing of this French case against Rumsfeld demonstrates that we will not rest until those U.S. officials involved in the torture program are brought to justice. Rumsfeld must understand that he has no place to hide. A torturer is an enemy of all humankind," said CCR President Michael Ratner.
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This is the fifth time Rumsfeld has been charged with direct involvement in torture stemming from his role in the Bush administration's program of torture post-9/11.

Torture is anything you wouldn't want done to your mother.

No Time Left To Compromise With Evil

Some people believe we shouldn't complain too loudly, protest too vigorously or argue too passionately - the theory being that if we appear too leftist, too radical or too seriously committed to our beliefs that people who don't share those beliefs will be offended and therefore unlikely to become seriously committed radical leftists themselves one day.  Well I have big news; those dim bulbs are not likely to ever shine - certainly not in response to our stifling ourselves.
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Torture is an abomination, dropping bombs on babies is an outrage, people deserve healthcare and good treatment, and lying to the people is no way to run a democracy.  All of these things are true.

They are there to marginalized, treated as pariahs, and driven into the tar pits of extinction.

But I agree that would be torture...or murder or something equally appalling.