DarrylS

Have seen several links to this recently, and low and behold after WWII we prosecuted japanese for waterboarding our soldiers.. the US has also imprisoned law enforcement people for the same, why is it different now??

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...d=opinionsbox1

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."

Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

As a result of such accounts, a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.
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In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners' civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

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FreeTedWilliams

The Genova Convention protects UNIFORMED SOILDERS from waterboarding, not terrorists. I know that the left doesn't think so, but there is a big difference between the two.

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IcyPatriot

It's rather mind boggling how the left equates these as similar. I guess in their 1 dimensional brain killing is killing?

Harry Boy

IS IT AGAINST THE LAW TO CUT SOMEBODYS HEAD OFF

IS IT AGAINST THE LAW FOR A SMELLY TATTOOED PERSON TO "DRIVE BY" BY A HOUSE AND SHOOT A LITTLE OLD LADY IN A ROCKING CHAIR.


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Harry Boy (Genius)

In The Absence Of Law And Order Society Will Surely Destroy Itself

wistahpatsfan

Were the Japanese convicted of torture?

DarrylS

If a terrorists wears a uniform that terrorist cannot be waterboarded??? There is a lot of room for interpretation here... a terrorist can run around naked with a cross around his neck, and after arrest say he is in the uniform of the lord or something stupid..

Bottom line is that we prosecuted a sheriff for doing this, we prosecuted japanese for doing this it is wrong pure and simple.

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"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.

otis p. driftwood

Because an op-ed in the WaPo said it was?

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PressCoverage

Way to assign a strawman position to an entire group of people, and then insult them all in one felled swoop.

This is about principle, not some convenient loophole in the Geneva that chickenhawks love to hide behind... That Afghanie taxi driver our interrogators killed was neither a uniformed soldier OR a terrorist. Unfortunately, it's torture supporters who "equate them all as similar."

otis p. driftwood

Speaking of the strawman position...blah blah...insulting...blah blah.
If you were more intelligent, I'd think you were being bitterly ironic. However, you're not, so I imagine you're simply being stupid, as usual.

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Harry Boy

In the Middle East water boarding is for Sissy's, "tongue removal" or "disemboweling" is more manly.
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Harry Boy (Genius)

In The Absence Of Law And Order Society Will Surely Destroy Itself