Quote Originally Posted by Shivan View Post
Personal value judgment. Let the U.S. Congress (a) define waterboarding (b) determine if it is illegal under international and/or U.S. law and (c) act accordingly.

Actually, I live in the Mid East off and on, and speak Arabic. Having mingled with Arabs from all walks of life, waterboarding, Abu Ghraib, etc. is only an issue among Western liberals. Arabs think of us a far too genteel and naive in many aspects. The greatest grievance among many Arabs towards my dear Uncle Sam is that they cannot get visas to America.
True points that our eastern establishment media will not address. Perhaps a pure example of western arrogancy, not being able to see past our own collective nose as relates to being offended by the realities of war.

I have come more and more to see this cultural divide as symptomatic of the dysfunctions attendant to the dolorous "nation that separates its warriors from its scholars."

Perhaps you are aware of a dangerous trend I've noticed emerging from the "seminar caller" sector online and on-the-air. Prosecutions of previous war crimes, i.e. severe water torture via-a-vis stomach flooding followed by stick beating to rupture, are being semantically conflated with present water-boarding techniques.

The result is that "seminar callers" are able to make the "point" that the US approves the same thing they claimed was torture when others did it, which is, of course, untrue. What saddens me is that most journalists, radio hosts and others are unlearned of the actual history and let the argument go on unchallenged.