There are numerous headlines this week about torture:
But these headlines make no sense unless they are put in context and given historical background:
- President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Malcolm Nance (an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence), Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples (the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) and many other interrogation experts and high-level politicians say that waterboarding is torture
- The United States has always considered waterboarding to be a crime of torture, including when the Japanese did it in WWII (and see this)
- Everyone claiming waterboarding is not torture has changed their tune as soon as they were exposed to even a small dose of it themselves. See this, this and this
- Former Navy Judge Advocate General Admiral John Hutson said that "Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough"
- One of the Military's Top Interrogators Says Torture Cost Hundreds 'If Not Thousands' Of American Lives
- Torture Is Not a Partisan Issue . . . George Washington - Who Was Neither a Democrat or Republican - Forbid All Torture
- One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
- 9/11 Mastermind: "During ... My Interrogation I Gave A Lot Of False Information In Order To Satisfy What I Believed The Interrogators Wished To Hear"
- The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) - who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry - recently said: "The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened"
