So if its your pleasure to brand me a far right, kool aide drinking Bush supporter then go for it

OK, you are a far right kool aide drinking Bush supporter, a true ditto-head.

In comments last week to the House Intelligence Committee, Hayden acknowledged for the first time publicly that the CIA has used waterboarding against three prisoners.

If your sole argument is about the three people who were waterboarded. Then this should suffice.

The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for all detainees in U.S. custody, including CIA prisoners.

CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said last week that current law and court decisions, including the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, cast doubt on whether waterboarding would be legal now. Hayden prohibited its use in CIA interrogations in 2006; it has not been used since 2003, he said.

So what are we debating?

Again Bush sought a ruling from DOJ that concluded that Waterboarding could be construed as legal but if conditions in the US changed then it could become illegal. They used it on 3 prisoners and then conditions changed. it was then banned and not used, even though the threat of its use hung publicly over the debate for quite some time and seems to even be doing so now.

I am not trying to defend torture nor waterboarding. I am simply saying that as with anything that changes in this nation a public debate goes on over it and that the conditions for which new policy is implemented is set by the resolution of the debate. If we willy nilly give in on grounds that we do not want to appear to be in favor of torture then the bar could be lowered to such a point that the supreme court would rule our prisions unconstitutional..

While I know most on the far left would love that……….the other 80 percent of Americans would not. So if its your pleasure to brand me a far right, kool aide drinking Bush supporter then go for it

I on the other hand am more interested in public policy that addresses this issue in a rational and sensible manner then in fearing being seen as a torture supporter.

“And so Pinochet arrives in the UK, a Spanish prosecutor makes the request, and the British authorities have no option but to take action on the Spanish request”

That is just an extradition treaty. Now technically all parties to the international court have extradition requirements in sending people to the Court, but that's different than jurisdiction which implies that they would capture and try someone (which he makes reference to in the previous paragraph).

This is a debate about what constitutes torture.

Only in your head. The rest of us know that waterboarding is torture.

In this podcast a panel discusses Bhikhu Parekh’s new book, http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=266873“>A New Politics of Identity covering the impact of globalisation on ethnic, religious and national identities. About the book:

In it Bhikhu Parekh develops a theory of identity that combines respect for diversity with a commitment to redistributive justice and rationality and applies this theory to a range of key current debates on national identity, nationalism, fundamentalism and terrorism setting out the case for dialogue, global citizenship, and multiple ethics within the framework of a shared global morality.

He discusses our overlapping identites — religious, national, ethnic, and human — then wonders about creating institutions that ensure basic human rights globally “in an emancipative way, rather than in a hegemic way.”

I find that idea very appealling. Of course if we can't even agree on a definition of torture in this one country…

Oh wait…

(And yes things as light as waterboarding and stress positions have counted as torture and prosecution sought against people that authorized that and only that.)

And head lawyer that started this whole bout of “soul searching” about what torture really is? Yeah he's said there there is a hypothetical situation where it'd be legal for the President to order the crushing of the testicles of a terrorist suspect………'s child.

They are just debating what torture is. This is the questions that are always put before us when shifts in longstanding policy are brought forth. Just as over the years we have fought tooth and nail over Abortion and when its legal and when its not, what types are acceptable etc…etc.

This is a debate about what constitutes torture. Not about whether torture is defensible or not.

Some just dont want to have the debate and rather just use their definition as to what constitutes torture while others of us see troubling problems because if the bar is lowered to low then our prisons, jails and detention facilities might become next. Is a suspect who is handcuffed and set in a room for a few hours and made uncomfortable tortured? Does the suspect who is questioned and refused a glass of water or denied food or drink or a cigarette tortured.

Careful how low you lower the bar. There are always unintended consequences when any policy is haphazardly changed to meet the whims of some group or another.

I say that if possible we create a commission to review all the evidence (and you know, actually hold people in contempt and in jail to get them to testify if need be) and then have trials if there is enough evidence. Or if it's found that we can't have trials for some immunity legal reason, send them to the ICC at the Hague (which is different than “universal jurisdiction” under individual countries. Although I have to confess I don't have time to listen to the interview so it's unclear whether he was talking about the ICC or about countries prosecuting people themselves.)

The point is that to initiate either action it should be done by us and fully public …although this won't happen because a lot of people still in power would be implicated. In a just world all the people that have colluded to protect the people that have broken serious crimes (including many Democrats I'm sure) would turn themselves in and face consequences. Yeah right.

Thank you I knew you would come through in helping to prove my point.

I said To double down, we have a slew of people around the country and on this site who gladly spew parsed and rationalized statements defending the torturers.

You then responded with this statement I dont think too many people are defending torture. The antiwar left just keeps lowering the standard of what constitutes torture that now our prison system is dangerously close to “Torturing our inmates” just by having them behind walls.

So I have said before and I say again, that if we let YOU define what is and is not torture then we are going to have to overhaul our prison system, which I believe is most likely on your agenda anyways. It is why the debate.

That comment of yours is the essence of my point; you are so busy defending the torturers by defining down the definition of torture due to some convoluted “parsed and rationalized” statement that you’ve forgotten what this country use to stand for, like I said above Sad, Sad, Sad.

The right is defining itself into a box. Unlimited military spending, torture, warrantless spying, unprovoked wars. They need to take a look at what they've come to stand for.

Easy, we let the right set the terms of the political debate.

I dont think too many people are defending torture. The antiwar left just keeps lowering the standard of what constitutes torture that now our prison system is dangerously close to “Torturing our inmates” just by having them behind walls.

I am pretty sure that waterboarding is a form of Torture, and guess what the US government agrees with me.

Waterboarding: A Tortured History

In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

“All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators,” writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced “a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk.” The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier.

Cases of waterboarding have occurred on U.S. soil, as well. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was charged, along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions. The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.

And I am sure that none of this was torture:
Abu Ghraib

I dont think too many people are defending torture. The antiwar left just keeps lowering the standard of what constitutes torture that now our prison system is dangerously close to “Torturing our inmates” just by having them behind walls.

This has been the debate. What is torture. I do not personally find torture to be depriving one of sleep or food for a couple days, playing loud music or flushing their bible down the toilet to be torture. Obviously many of you do and it is you who have reshaped the debate and brought us to the point that once again America should be ashamed for our actions.

So I have said before and I say again, that if we let YOU define what is and is not torture then we are going to have to overhaul our prison system, which I believe is most likely on your agenda anyways. It is why the debate.

Those on both sides point to the other, shake their heads and say, How did we sink so low.

About Europe, I disagree with Marlowecan. The world is not so clearly divided between Left and Right, as he would always have it. Europe is a complicated patchwork of the left and the right, the past and the present, national ties and foreign inluences, shifting powers and alliances, dreams and fears. Russia is a real and present power, which can threaten and does so. Russian aristocrats (hardly members of the left), have been admired members of European society, and no one has ever asked them how many peasants slaved and died to provide the family jewels they inherited.

About Bush & Co., I think we would bring further shame on ourselves if we couldn't clean up our own mess in some fashion. Some manner of formal accounting has to take place – by us. But, as I stressed before, it shouldn't be done as punishment for individuals. It should be done as a restoration process for the office of he presidency, the primacy of the Constitution, and the reafirmation of the three equal branches of government. Deterrence is the watchword.

Sad, Sad, Sad

To double down, we have a slew of people around the country and on this site who gladly spew parsed and rationalized statements defending the torturers.

Am I the only one who somtimes want to cry for what my country has become?

This is totally wrong. You are only exposed if you happen to be on the right, like Pinochet.

Case in Point: the former Soviet bloc…with many members now firmly in the European Union. These countries all had secret police who conducted tortures FAR beyond the waterboarding that seems to perpetually outrage US liberals.

There is no need for extradition. These former torturers — good Communist party members in their day — are now happily walking the streets of the European Union. . . knowing they are absolutely immune from arrest because they were once considered on the Left.

Look at the Germans. . . whose efficiency is notably lacking in prosecuting the former Stasi. The bizarro obscenity of the refusal of the German police to prosecute former East German leaders who ordered a “shoot-to-kill policy” on the Berlin Wall for example.

Everyone here has probably seen videos of such shootings. Countless dead (not tortured . . . DEAD!)

Yet the Germans say they cannot find any written order authorizing the policy or speaking of it. It is just a mystery why guards shot so many people for decades.
So many dead . . . and no one is responsible.

Thus, I think Sands is a typical liberal witch-hunter. Europeans, hot to prosecute Rummy, could easily look in their own backyards at the murderers and torturers walking the streets of the EU.

Oh, but they are former Communists. We will just turn a blind eye to that.

Evil Rummy. Evil Bush.