Waterboarding

I want to find some information about what is Amnesty International demanding. Before to hope for human-rights groups to be successful in their fight, and actually succeed in making waterboarding part of the past, it should be carefully considered whether this is a good thing.

Immediately after new regulations came into force, torture professionals would immediately find new, more cunning and hidden ways to perform their soul-shrinking job.


The option of tolerating waterboarding cannot be compared to accepting torture.
One thing is a policy which aims at solving the issues linked to governmental violence, and one thing is assessing the least evil. To me, the choice MIGHT be between knowing WHAT they do to special prisoners, and NOT knowing anymore, until in some years the public opinion will be informed of the new method.
More cunning ways of torturing prisoners might favour the development of chemical drugs,
mind-altering and brain-washing practices, in addition to more imaginative approaches which I can't think of but they can.

I was having a conversation with a friend about this.
The core point seems to be the ethic vs real politik clash: we know we cannot realistically put an end to torture as a practice: I wonder what any of us would do in a worst-case scenario, if he was entitled to decide whether to torture or not a prisoner who knows for instance where a bomb is located

On the other hand, a democratic mind-set cannot accept the practice of torture without renouncing its social principles, or at least creating a precedent for further exceptions to Western Standard Ethics.

Unable to carry out a thourough analysis, and very uncertain about the ways the world goes and should go, me and WB began listing some tortures, present and past. How can a torture be better or worse than another? It is just torture. Yet, if the degree of injustice does not change, what changes is the rate of physical brutality.

Cutting and mutilating are gone in the west, as most techniques which permanently damaged the body of the victim. Psychic traumas and consequences are many, unfathomable and varying from case to case.

Certainly between waterboarding and most other types of torture, I would be induced to think that waterboarding probably is the least traumatic both physically, and mentally too, for I guess there must be some direct proportion between the physical pain endured and the extent of the mental trauma: this certainly is not true generally, as I said I am just jotting down some uninvestigated ideas.

I have a very poor opinion of desicion-makers around the world, and am very jaded about most things happening recently. So I expect to see something fixed out of good intentions, and then distorted into something even worse. Any action for prisoners should be sure that the reaction, however righteous, won't worsen their actual conditions.

here you can find out more: http://waterboarding.org/
and in this washington post article