So, is water-boarding torture or not?

Definately torture! I mean come on- they know it's torture! They don't care! Civil liberties are being taken away from American citizens- so you know how they feel about foreigners. This is just another episode in the greatest show on earth- AMERICAN POLITICS! But he knows if he says that it is torture, then he will be opening the flood gates for alot of charges against people who's back he feels he needs to scratch right now like... Bush- the one who nominated him right?

In a word, NO. I'm sure Daniel Pearl would have prefered this to being beheaded by a saw knife. They way some bleeding hearted, warm and fuzzy types have it, we would be having tea with captured insurgents instead of treating them as they are, criminals. To say the united states torures is not only a fallicy but an insult. You can be sure al quieda isn't debating they'r own techniques in the way the handle our people when they capture them.

He responded to a question by saying that he was personally opposed to water boarding but could not say if in a legal sence waterboarding was torture. That was a typical Lawyer answer. He then asked what water boarding was. I have heard two different descriptions of water boarding. Both involve straping a person to a board and one you tip the board into a pool of water and hold the person there until they almost drown. The second method is to strap the person to a board and cover their face with a cloth and pour water over the cloth giving the person the feeling of drowning. In the first you could die and in the second you are in no danger of dying but you have the sensation of drowning. The second has produced information that is valid and useful. I am not a lawyer but according to some people the first is clearly illegal whild the second is open to different inteerpertations. According to many international treaties and laws because the life or limbs are not in danger it is not really torture.

Yes, it's torture. When Mukasey said, "I don't know" I honestly made the "WTF?" face. It's just so ridiculous. There's nothing hard about defining what torture is. I looked it up in the dictionary for Pete's sake! "To cause mental or physical anguish" I thought even three year old's new what torture was! Anyway...just more insanity for the current American government. The Joy.

Since Bush and Cheney both say the US doesn't use torture, let's have them volunteer to be subject to it publically and then stand up and say that waterboarding isn't torture. Seems it would be a real patriotic duty to prove that it isn't, since rthey insist that it isn't. If not them due to old age, then perhaps one randomly chosen kid of theirs to take their place. Now that couldn't possibly be torture to see your kid go thru that, could it? (heavy sarcasm)

Um.....what exactly is water-boarding? I never heard of that before. If I hadn't seen the word "torture", I'd think it had something to do with watersports, like surfing or something. I don't think torture does any good. Aren't the people they torture, taught how to lie even under the most extreme circumstances?

Ah, but that's the beauty of the situation: whether or not water-boarding is torture is a matter of pure circumstance. Those circumstances being that it's only torture if anyone *but* America does it. We've prosecuted war criminals for using the exact same technique, citing it as torture. We've outlawed "submersion" of the head in water, yet pouring water over a covered face and forcing it into the nose of the victim, while not technically submersion of the head, still simulates the same thing as the outlawed torture technique: drowning. If water boarding were used on the officials who like to claim it isn't torture, they'd change their tunes really quick. It's easy enough to say something isn't as bad as it really is when you haven't been subjected to it. Plus, they like to give the illusion of getting results - which is why they use a torture technique to force what they want hear from the mouths of their prisoners, whether it's true or not.