Don Rumsfeld came out again and said waterboarding isn't torture.
However:
- President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Malcolm Nance (an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence), Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples (the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) and many other interrogation experts and high-level politicians say that waterboarding is torture
- The United States has always considered waterboarding to be a crime of torture, including when the Japanese did it in WWII (and see this)
Indeed, all of those who said it's not torture - including radio personality Mancow (and see this) and writer Christopher Hitchens - have changed their tune as soon as they got waterboarded themselves for even a few seconds.
Pretend tough guy Sean Hannity said years ago that he would get waterboarded for charity. But for years on end, he has chickened out.
People who advocate waterboarding might talk tough. But as former Navy Judge Advocate General Admiral John Hutson said:
Fundamentally, those kinds of techniques are ineffective. If the goal is to gain actionable intelligence, and it is, and if that’s important, and it is, then we have to use the techniques that are most effective. Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough.
Indeed, George Washington - the father of our country and one tough man - was against torture.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson - the number two man at the State Department under Colin Powell - said today:
Let me waterboard Donald Rumsfeld and then we'll see if he says it's torture or not!
Wilkerson also says that that many of those being held at Guantanamo Bay are innocent (see this and this), that waterboarding didn't produce any actionable intelligence and that Rumsfeld and his cohorts are only defending torture to try to escape prosecution:
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