{"id":2227,"date":"2010-01-21T17:32:56","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T17:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2010-01-21T17:49:52","modified_gmt":"2010-01-21T17:49:52","slug":"what_torture_is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2227","title":{"rendered":"What Torture Is – And Isn’t."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve made no bones about my stance on torture – it’s bad. See this post<\/a>, for example.<\/p>\n

And then today I was flooded with links to this CNN dialog about torture, where Christine Amanpour and Phillipe Sands hammer author Marc Thiessen on the issue:<\/p>\n


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…and frankly, I’m appalled at Sands and Amanpour. <\/p>\n

The idea that what we call ‘waterboarding’ – where a cloth is placed over someone’s face, and water poured over the cloth to give the sensation of drowning – is comparable to actually handcuffing someone with their head underwater (which usually leads to actual drowning) as was done by the Khmer Rouge is factually wrong, deeply offensive, and unhelpful to the very real debate of what the rules ought to be.<\/p>\n

There’s a real debate over what the treatment of captured non-American resident terrorists ought to be (note that American residents ought to be entitled to the protections of American law as they are prosecuted for treason). Clearly real torture is Right Out, as should be a Chicago 7-style trial by farce.<\/p>\n

Having the commentariat confuse harsh treatment (which I’d certainly say our version of waterboarding is) with torture (which the Khmer Rouge version certainly is) doesn’t remotely help that discussion, and doesn’t remotely add to their credibility – such as it is.
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Torture is bad, we’ll all agree. And if I get to define what torture is, I can make anything you do bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2227"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}