John McCain says :

<i>“All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today,” Mr. McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, said in a telephone interview. Of presidential candidates like Mr. Giuliani, who say that they are unsure whether waterboarding is torture, Mr. McCain said: “They should know what it is. It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.”</i>

It isn’t just the Geneva Conventions we also signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture in 1984 and ratified it in 1987, under the leadership of the great Ronald Regan, you know, one of our real presidents.

A lot more countries agreed to that.

Honestly these are agreements made by the civilized world that we decided to adhere to. By not adhering to them we tell people that we do not want to be part of the civilized world.

Bowing to the Supreme Court, President Bush has extended international treaty protections against "humiliating and degrading treatment" to all military detainees, administration officials said Tuesday.
<A href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-11-detainees-geneva_x.htm">Look man the supreme court already said the conventions apply to detainees 2 years ago.</A>

Everyone in the civilized world believes you should not torture people that are your prisoners. Torture is not proven effective at garnering information anyhow. Finally, for Martin, you keep saying mental duress is not torture. I am not talking about mental duress, I am talking about mental torture. Waterboarding counts as both actually. Unless you have ever almost drowned in your life then you have no goddamn idea how much feeling like you’re drowning really sucks.

Many definitions of torture define a mental component but you just choose to ignore that fact and spew the bill o’ rielly definition of torture you decided to use for this type of discussion. Look you can torture someone mentally and physically. Even our own supreme court had decided that enough is enough. Whatever happened to the "morally superior" America? I like it a whole lot better than the, "Let’s act like barbarians because we are fighting barbarians" America. We only degrade ourselves and we offer no advantages to anyone for not taking the stance that we as a people need to uphold a higher moral standard.

These rules are made so that when governments collapse and nothing is there to guide the people temporarily that we still have a society. We still have a code of conduct that transcends government, and code we can work with to keep order and stability and most of all and identity as civilized human beings. Once we begin to ignore those rules we lose a lot more that the respect of others.

I’m trying to avoid swerving us into other arguments, but my argument on gay marriages or civil unions is that if it’s accomplished legislatively, there’s not likely to be a problem (which is why I advocate doing it legislatively), but if it’s ruled by judges to be a Constitutional Right then judges are almost certainly going to have to explain in fairly short order why it doesn’t apply to polygamists as well. A will almost certainly lead to B there pretty quickly. But we probably won’t jump to Z, because zoophiles may like their animal mates but animals can’t enter into contracts, hetero marriages around the country are unlikely to implode, and Western Civilization is unlikely to collapse.

I think I’ve said Canada’s hate speech laws do not seem compatible with the Canadian concept of free expression to me, but that it’s up to the Canadians to decide because all rights like the American concept of free speech or the Canadian concept of Free Expressiond do have limits somewhere and it’s not on me to tell the Canadians how to set their own limits.

Etc. Etc. A may lead to Z but it doesn’t necessarily always do so, and that’s all I mean. I was mentioning it again only because Jaymaster brought it up again.

It may be that we *want* to abide by those rules when dealing with a faithless enemy. It may also be that we should abide by stricter rules; there’s nothing which makes the Geneva Conventions automatically superior, and I’m not sure why people think they are.

 This string has legs and shows that Willow chose a great emotion grabber of a topic. Considering the vemenence ( could be the wrong word..strength of  convictions..) of the replys. The tit for tat responses. It looks like it getting heated, yet being kept at understandable levels. Good job everyone.

Mental duress is not torture. The unlawful enemy combatants are not covered by the Geneva Conventions. And if the actions of our executive were illegal as you assert, the legislature would’ve acted in their oversight capacity. They haven’t. You haven’t bothered to respond to that. Unlike you, I won’t perform amateur psychoanalysis to identify your reasons.

But, I posted a definition from a well know dictionary that includes mental duress when describing torture. So if you only read the definition you want to read or part of a definition then you can say what you want but it doesn’t change the fact that mental duress is torture if it is inflicted with malice of forethought for the purpose of causing agony. That’s actually going above and beyond.

Here’s another definition for you.

Torture, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, is "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

We as a country signed this act long before this war started. If we were going to decide that torture was perfectly acceptable we should have refused to sign.

"(Article 17): No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."

Apparently the Third geneva Convention spells out that there is mental torture and that it is prohibited. Not only that, if waterboarding weren’t torture, which it is, it would still be prohibited.

I can keep pulling examples where torture has already been defined by the Western World as unacceptable but I have a life. Seriously, the law is on the anti-torture people’s side. You need to change the rules in order to make any argument of any kind a moral one.

"WHO ARE YOU TO JUDGE ME?! WHO ARE YOU TO DEFINE MORALITY?!"

You hear it all the time from heroin or crack addicts. It’s childish and a form of denial when someone knows they have done wrong but still refuse to admit wrong doing. Serial killers use this excuse too. It makes for a fun and esoteric debate but in reality we have agreed on standards of morality as a society and unfortunately unless you change those standards going against them is ultimately immoral.

Shenanigans.