NY Times Editorial:
There Were Orders to Follow. “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.’” This is like a perversion of purifying your karma ... you do a good deed with the intention of benefitting others, this benefits your karma (as I understand the function of karma). Now we get a legal interpretation that says deadly torture is not deadly because the intent is not to kill. Yet we live in a society where it is commonly accepted that if you are in possession of your wits, and you point a loaded gun at someone, you intend to kill - your intent is to harm. The loaded nature of the deadly weapon makes it assault, as I understand the law. Given the lawyerly interpretation above, you can see that any death by waterboarding would likely be classified by secondary symptoms ... heart failure due to tachycardia, lung damage, excess ingestion of fluids.
Yet for all this talk of waterboarding as a ‘good’ interrogative technique, we still don’t have Bin Laden, who was the original reason for flirting with the evils of torture.
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Bin Laden, symbol, metaphor, scapegoat, bogeyman, but dead for years, or shaved his beard and living in marsaille, bears little relation to the cobbled-together videos that appear around election times.... something tangible for the masses to grasp, focus their impotent revenge-lust upon, an excuse for the power-hungry to increase their power, amusing, sad