Poll results: Waterboarding is torture

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A majority of Americans consider waterboarding a form of torture, but some of those say it's OK for the U.S. government to use the technique, according to a poll released Tuesday.

Asked whether they think waterboarding is a form of torture, more than two-thirds of respondents, or 69 percent, said yes; 29 percent said no. Asked whether they think the U.S. government should be allowed to use the procedure to try to get information from suspected terrorists, 58 percent said no; 40 percent said yes.

In the procedure, water is used on restrained prisoners to make them feel like they are drowning.

The practice became an issue during the recent confirmation hearings for attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey, who has refused to categorically reject the practice. Mukasey told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that while he finds waterboarding personally "repugnant," he could not answer "hypothetical" questions about whether the technique amounts to torture....

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/06/waterboard.poll/...

[pattmarty]

1. I'm fucking moving!!!! Spain seems like a nice destination.

[Brrrp]

6. Indeed. When Zapatero pulled the troops out of Iraq, he said...

"I cannot ignore the will of the Spanish people, and I would not do it even if I could."

Unlike the US, Spain has a democracy.

[bitchkitty]

11. It's an incredible place!

The food kind of sucks though.

[Brrrp]

13. It sure does.

The Mexicans learned everything good about cooking from the Indians.

[ixion]

2. okay, just as long as they realize that torture only begats torture

and that saying it is okay for us to torture means that it's okay for ANYONE to torture.

[Amonester]

3. 11% say waterboarding is torture and that the government should

be allowed to use the procedure...

MENTAL HEALTH health-care facilities provisions needed for 40% ( > 125 millions?)????

[daleo]

4. Some illustrious company, for the 40% who said yes:

"Waterboarding was used during the Spanish Inquisition and by Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the World War II Japanese military, according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch."

[gratuitous]

5. What's next?

A poll on whether water is wet? And if only 69% of respondents recognize that fact (it's not subject to poll results - water IS wet), does that mean water is in danger of not being wet anymore?

This whole thing is being designed to dupe people into thinking that torture isn't really torture, or that we haven't actually already decided this question. If the real world consequences of this little dumbshow weren't so deadly serious, both to the tortured and to the torturers, it might almost be laughable.

But make no mistake: The deliberate obtuseness of this outlaw administration and the cover being willingly provided by our bulldogs in the media is intended solely to cover up criminal wrong-doing that will be exposed and punished. The longer we delay that reckoning, the worse will be the consequences. Right now we have a chance to come clean and take care of these crimes "in house"; delay opens the door to outside agencies taking over the administration of justice. At best, it could be the ICC at The Hague. More likely, however, it will be left to some one or some group who isn't very worried about the niceties of judicial procedure, due process and criminal rights, but who is interested in retribution for our victims.

[CatholicEdHead]

7. Makes you think about the 29% who said it is not torture

I cannot fathom that mindset.

[AnneD]

8. I don't understand....

the disconnect between the politicians and the people they represent. Do they have shit in their ears or what?????

[Mark Twain Girl]

9. We need a poll to decide this??!! n/t

[maddogesq]

10. Poll: Most people who brush their teeth use toothpaste. Duh!. NT

.

[Orsino]

12. And 100% of those polled have never been waterboarded.

Another poll of the ignorant.

[davekriss]

14. Amazing

29% of polled citizens think waterboarding is not torture? Incredible. And chilling. It troubles me that 1 in 3 people who sit next to me on the subway are not appalled that the U.S. state straps individuals down to a board and nearly drowns them to get "information" out of them. This is OK to nearly a third of us. Incredible. Gives me the creeps.

But then 1 in x thousand of my fellow citizens are serial killers. And we as a nation heven't yet cacooned the School of Americas under a cement tomb. All we can do is fight to contain the evil and uniformed amongst us, to prevent them from being used as happy idiots by state powers with their own self-serving agendas.

I knew we were in deep trouble as a nation when, shortly after 9-11, Foxnews and others were debating whether torture is permissible. It is never, under NO circumstances, permissible.

...And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation; a child llike a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands that erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.

-- Carolyn Forche, The Return, 1980