When is torture not torture?

[GliderGuider]

When the president says it isn't.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/reportsfromabroad/macdonald/20071023.html

This is worth reading in its entirety.

When is torture not torture?
When the president says it isn't
By NEIL MACDONALD
October 23, 2007

The torture called waterboarding is a pretty violent business.

The torturer straps down the victim, feet elevated above the head, then covers the subject's face — often with cloth or cellophane — and pours water onto it. This triggers the gag reflex, persuading the mind that the body is drowning, provoking an atavistic terror. The straining and flailing against the restraint straps can sometimes break bones. If the torture is protracted, lung and brain damage can occur.

Now.

This would be the Bush administration's description of the same procedure: The detainee, an illegal combatant who may have intelligence valuable to the Worldwide Struggle Against Extremism, is restrained, and subjected to a robust interrogation. An enhanced interrogation technique is used, which for national security reasons must remain classified. But the detainee is not tortured, because the United States does not torture people.

That's not a caricature. It is a composite of actual administration jargon. And the last bit of circular logic has become the fulcrum of Washington's policies on treatment of foreign prisoners: The U.S. does not practise torture. Therefore its interrogation techniques cannot be torture, because if they were, then certain prisoners in the United States' secret prisons would have been tortured, and that cannot have been, because the U.S. does not practise torture.

... lots more ...

A monstrous hybrid of Orwell, Kafka, Catch 22 and Monty Python.

edit: I stand corrected. My only excuse is that I was suffering disorientation caused by the shock of reading the article. But thanks to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine I can now recognize the effects and recover more quickly.

[TechBear_Seattle]

1. You forgot to mention Orwell

Room 101 was all about re-education, not torture.

[hedgehog]

2. 1984 should be requirede reading in every high school. nt

[katty]

3. when bush/cheney and condi tell U.S. it's NOT torture

otherwise TORTURE IS TORTURE and is EASILY IDENTIFIED BY THE REST OF THE WORLD.