In the early morning hours yesterday, the home of Joe and Ann Scheidler (my bosses) was vandalized. Asphalt chunks were thrown through two of their windows, and a strange note was attached to one of them.Do we really need to get into the nuts and bolts of what constitutes torture?
Yes, we do. Most will agree that taking a power drill to a man’s shoulder or pulling out his fingernails with pliers for punishment or to extract information is torture. But when the subject is waterboarding, clarity vanishes again. Some consider waterboarding to be mere psychological torture — which, as we’ve already established, is morally indistinguishable from physical torture.
But waterboarding is not a harmless dunk in the tub, as former Vice President Dick Cheney once likened it, and it is not psychological torture. In waterboarding, a subject is strapped to a gurney. His feet are elevated slightly above his head. A cloth is draped over his face. And water is poured on his face so that it enters his nose and mouth and flows into his lungs. CIA interrogators are instructed to pour the water immediately after a detainee exhales, to ensure he inhales water, not air. They use their hands to “dam the flow” of excess water from a detainee’s mouth. And detainees who are scheduled for waterboarding are put on a liquid diet, to minimize the risk of death should they inhale their own vomit.
This procedure became official American policy in our so-called War on Terror, but it was not always so. Waterboarding has been condemned by the United States government since at least 1898, when American soldiers were court marshaled for waterboarding prisoners during our occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. In World War II, we hanged Japanese war criminals for waterboarding American and Allied troops. In the 1980s in Texas, a sheriff and three of his deputies were convicted by the Justice Department for waterboarding prisoners to extract confessions.
And yet, there are those exceptions: American security is at stake. If waterboarding saves even one life, isn’t it worth it?
If torturing a terrorist suspect saved a city from destruction, or if it saved even one life, it would still be a barbaric, savage act, unworthy of a civilized society. If expediency were enough to justify an immoral act, then abortion would be justifiable.
Amazon pulls 'rape' computer game
A computer game in which players compete to rape women and get them to abort their babies has been pulled from sale on Amazon.com.
Rapelay, a Japanese "rape simulation" game which revolves around the premise of "hunting" down and raping a single mother and her two daughters, had been available via the online retailer's US site until an investigation by the Belfast Telegraph drew attention to it yesterday.
One website review of the PC game describes "tears glistening in the young girl's eyes" as she is attacked in graphic detail.
In the game, players begin stalking a mother on a subway station before violently raping her. They then move on to attack her two daughters, described as virgin schoolgirls.
