Jon Stewart nails it on the head again. Best quote is: “Apparently everyone’s not upset about the fact that we torture. They’re upset about the fact that we know about it.”
I do want to point out one little thing. When joking about how one prisoner was waterboarded 183 times in one month, Stewart thinks maybe it would lose its effectiveness — like the prisoner might get used to it and not be afraid of drowning. Waterboarding triggers a primal panic response. Here’s a video of a journalist who bet he could endure 15 seconds of waterboarding. Of course, he knew he would not actually be drowned, and he had a signal so he could stop it at any time. But it still totally freaked him out (and no, he did not last anywhere near 15 seconds).
3 Comments
I have played the “who can hold their breath the longest under water” with my kids dozens of times, and even though I can pop my head out of the water at any time, and I’m not inverted with water running up my nose, the panic response sets in at 40 seconds or so. Yeah, it’s torture of some form.
My understanding is this is used during the training process of Navy Seals. To call it torture is hyperbole.
Bugs, that’s like claiming that accusations of rape are hyperbole, because people have sex all the time.
Not to mention that waterboarding is used to train some military personnel on how to resist torture. Even they consider it torture, as did we when we convicted and executed Japanese for using it.
One Trackback/Pingback
[…] Jon Stewart nails it on the head again. Best quote is: “Apparently everyone’s not upset about the fact that […]