Speaking of stumbling, you’ve almost stumbled upon some logic. Let’s explore this a little more.

“If I slap a prisoner once, is that torture? I don't think so.”

How about if you use a blowtorch to scorch a piece of skin and peel it back with a pair of pliers – just once. Would that be considered torture?

I’m hoping you’ll say yes.

You see, by reasoning together we have established that there are acts that aren’t in and of themselves torture and those that are.

You will say that waterboarding falls into the second column. That any application of it is the same as the blowtorch and pliers, torture pure and simple. I would contend that it falls into the first category, a matter of degree.

Is this agreed so far?

If you do not find the discourse on this site thought-provoking, then why are you here?

Perhaps you should take your backwards views to a more appropriate venue, where it can be appreciated by other anti-American polliterati.

Is it painful to be so shallow?

The ultimate point would have been to show that torture is nothing compared to living in the generational ignorance dictated by liberal policies on education in inner cities.

I wouldn’t expect you to follow the logic, or to recognize the painful truth behind the horrific suffering caused by mindless liberal policies and the lust for power through misled voting groups. Occasionally though, an independent thinker passes through and I thought it would be novel to have something thought provoking written in on this site for a change.

Assume that you are as evil as Dick Cheney, that you hate a certain individual and you want to inflict the worst possible damage to this person you can imagine.

What would it be?

Death? That seems a bit easy and doesn’t make the subject suffer mentally and physically as much as possible.

Torture? What kind would someone like Cheney devise to be the worst possible?

Something Else? What could be worse than death or torture? Let’s see what the morally upstanding group at TMV can come up with.

The decision to support war will always, ultimately, be a decision to support war crimes.

That's true, to an extent. As Rumsfeld famously said, “stuff happens” in war that you can't control. Civilians die and soldiers go off the rails.

However, that is completely different from high level officials creating a system to torture prisoners of the Long War.