Christopher Hitchens volunteered to be waterboarded to demonstrate the effects of the procedure. Careful, the video is pretty disturbing.
The Bush administration may want to deny we torture but unless they want to condone the treatment of POW’s under the Chinese, it looks like that can’t.
I don’t care if Osama himself is in Gitmo. I don’t care if he is the only person on this entire planet that knows the location of a bomb which is going to kill millions of people. I don’t care if he killed my dog. Torture is never, ever justified. Ever.
That bullshit 24-esque scenario just exists to allow crazed, power-thirsty, people to justify the mistreatment of another human being. It detracts from the actual argument, which is that we’re torturing people at Gitmo who didn’t do shit. People we kidnapped from other countries based on tips from unreliable sources.
And even if they did do shit, torturing them won’t get reliable information. And then our government runs around, wasting time and resources on trying to track down unicorns or fairies or whatever else you’d tell someone to get them to stop fucking drowning you.