Waterboarding is a distraction. It keeps the general public from looking at this mis-administration's use of more serious war-crimes. The use of more severe torture that is done through private torture-contractors(called iterrogation contractors) and by rendering suspects to countries like Uzbekistan, a country in which their prez is fond of boiling people alive.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3943.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,963497,00.html

http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/us-and-uz.htm

well, i see your point. and i do not disagree. but please, waterboarding is not a distraction. perhaps the illusion of it is, the news clips of it is.but it is a war crime in and of itself...that's sort of my point, or rather, the point of my post is that this thing we trivialize is a very serious and inhumane Wrong, and that i find it shocking that such a thing is steadily being normalized in our media. i was just trying to help remind us, help inject the media a tiny bit with the idea that this type of assault on someone is a huge violation to the human spirit, as great a wrong as rape. that's really the point of my post.

John Wayne Gacy tortured his victims with this kind of drowning-but-yank-you-out-right-before-you-die-over-and-over thing. And yet, you're an alarmist, a crazy over-react-er, to be fucking terrified of and repulsed by your own government.

Thank you for speaking frankly about this here, Nez. It is hard to read and think about, and absolutely essential.

gracias, amiga. you said it well.

I say this every time I get, in the Internet airways, on the electronic page,

TORTURE IS EVIL.

It is the tool of tyrants and cowards (no real difference there) and should not be allowed. How can people say they are Christians and condone such a thing, was not Jesus Christ the most famous (or infamous) victim of torture. An entire world religion was born around the concept that torture was wrong, and yet, here we are today.

great way to point it out, rafa. what an irony eh?

I am one of "those" who believes we face a real terrorist threat. I am still haunted by flashes/flashbacks of the people, looking like dots, I saw jumping, falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11/01.

And still, I say torture is wrong. No waterboarding in my name. Stop these impotent efforts to keep me "safe." I believe in habeas corpus. Guantanamo is a thru the rabbit hole twisted fantasy of an effort and it must be abolished.

What galls me is that so many of those who accept and encourage the use of torture claim to love this country. From where I sit, those people have no faith in America or its judicial system. They act as if America and her inhabitants are too feeble to "fight the war on terror" in the sunlight.

carmen, forgive me for setting your main point to the side for a moment. and i agree. that sight of people leaping to their deaths, a rain of bodies...my god. it was horrifying.

but for myself, i'm not willing to lay that horror all at the feet of this "terrorist threat" idea. after all, there are far too many unanswered questions for the inquisitive and skeptical mind. to mention one thing only, bush's blatant ignoring of the warning signs and literal warnings...and there are really so many other instances of our government completely willfully NOT protecting us that their negligence inarguably enters the realm of complicity of the horrors of that day. without even going near the faulty equipment that the firefighters had. i guess i am one of "those" that think the greatest threat right now comes from the will to violence inherent in humankind (and seemingly man, especially), from our own government and the crazed and terrified and lusty (powerlusty) and violent minds that fund it and reap from the war machine now in motion. not to say there are not "terrorists" who have and continue to attack us, but like you, i do not think that torturing them really meets the bar for an honest attempt to root out all the factors that bring these realities about. i'm one of those, i believe, who thinks we face a real ignorance threat.

so, again (sorry!), to your main point. i guess i can see how some people, depending on their life experience, might lose faith in the American justice system. Just get the short end of it a time or two, and that can put you off. I've known people like that, and I've been one. But as far as Puto-tastic Jonah and his warpundit-ilk, I can't see it. I'm sure the justice system as is takes care of him okay. I don't think that's what he has lost faith in.

As I see it, our nation is an aggressive and often violent one. It is how we came to be, it is how we do things around the world, it is in our handgun death stats, in our homicide stats, in our cinema, in our games. We have been raised on glory stories of pioneering riflemen and cowboys and revolution and military might. I think the frustration of our foolish invasion and the guerrilla war that is teaching us truths of war and occupations we should already know is frustrating some and their violent "american" ideologies are getting sharpened by this frustration. One of those "there but hidden" things.

ideologies are great, but the animal lives within us all. our better natures temper this potential. and these pro-torture people, in their feral, quivering, snarling reactions to this conflict that was bound to arise when we did what cheney and bush themselves predicted would happen were saddam toppled, are proving to us what we all feared might be true: that one good attack upon our soil would reveal the lie of an open society's success.

I hear you.

"...that one good attack upon our soil would reveal the lie of an open society's success."

I don't see it as a lie, more of a myth. For me, it is still aspirational.

and i. what else can we hope for?