[Breto]

Ahhhh Johnny boy. As you know the NVA tortured and what happened.... We surrendered to them.

Confusing what we did with what they did is to blur moral distinctions in a very big way. Go Away McLame

[762X51]

Will he never just shut the hell up and GO AWAY! Hey John...you lost, you’re a loser and always will be. Nobody cares what you think. Please retire to obscurity or just switch to the Democrat party and get it over with!

[LibLieSlayer]

I'd like to water board you mccain... make you tell the truth of how you sold out America to a kenyan in 2007.

LLS

[driftless2]

If waterboarding is torture, then I suppose any other kind of rough treatment could be considered torture: sleep deprivation, rough questioning, food deprivation. I would bet if you asked someone would they rather be waterboarded or have their fingernails pulled out one by one, they’d say waterboarded. Or waterboarded or beaten severely, they’d most likely say waterboarded. In short, if a person can call waterboarding torture, then anything beyond tough questioning can be called torture. I doubt that is the case.

[Steel Wolf]

"We didn't do it to the Japanese war criminals," he said. "We didn't do it to the Nazi war criminals. And think of what would happen if in another conflict an enemy, not a terrorist organization, takes Americans prisoner, then obviously they will feel that they could do the same thing that we have practiced."

I understand the moral arguments against enhanced interrogations / torture. What I don't understand is the 'practical argument', as shown above.

I don't understand it because it's stupid. Meta-stupid. It transcends normal types of stupid, into it's own dimension of higher boneheadedness.

The Imperial Japanese and the Nazis, as well as the Arabs, Vietnamese, Chinese, North Koreans and pretty much everyone we've ever fought, torture the crap out of their opponents. Military opponents. Political opponents. Whoever. And not in ways that don't leave marks. To DEATH.

The idea that they 'learned torture from us' or are somehow spurred to savage acts of reprisal because we're locking up detainees in a tropical beach resort, is so stupid as to make me want to check the speaker for lobotomy scars.

[Hugh the Scot]

McCain is absolutely right on this one. This is a national morality issue and no information obtained this way, whether you regard it as torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques”, is worth the cost to the soul of our great nation, the risk to our men and women in uniform, or our ability to face ourselves in the mirror.