Kit Bond Keeps Digging on Waterboarding
The other day, Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) played down waterboarding, saying that it’s just like swimming. Today, Sen. Bond decided to clarify his remarks, although he kept up the pretense that we aren’t actually using waterboarding even though everyone knows that we are.
Bond explains that there are multiple types of waterboarding. There’s the freestyle, the backstroke, the sidestroke… oh, wait, that was yesterday. Nevermind.
One of the types of waterboarding is the kind that the Japanese used on American POWs during World War II, and for which they were convicted of war crimes. That, of course, is torture. There’s also the “practice” waterboarding that we use on our soldiers as part of an interrogation survival training course, which is not torture.
Now, Bond is so caught up parroting that we don’t use waterboarding that he doesn’t quite mention where what the United States is doing at Guantanamo and elsewhere fits on this spectrum, but it looks to me like there are two categories of waterboarding.
- Something one country does to punish and interrorgate its enemies (torture).
- Something one country does to teach its own, volunteer soldiers how to survive such tactics (not torture).
Which of those two categories does Kit Bond think the United States fits into?
Watch Kit Bond “clarify” here.
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Make love, not war!
Comment posted at 1/12/08 at 3:23 am