One source that PaddyMac won't be using to bolster his wrongheaded arguments is an actual columnist and author, Joseph Galloway. Mr. Galloway is a military columnist and former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newpapers. He wrote a column titled "Memo to Media: I Witnessed 'Waterboarding'-And Yes, It is Torture". Here is an excerpt from that column:
Waterboarding was torture when it was used during the Spanish Inquisition; it was torture when it was used on Filipino rebels during the 1890s; it was torture when the Japanese Army used it on prisoners in World War II; it was torture when it was used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; and it's torture when CIA officers or others use it on terrorists.
When George W. Bush was the governor of Texas, the state investigated, indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison for 10 years a county sheriff who, with his deputies, had waterboarded a criminal suspect. That sheriff got no pardon from Gov. Bush.
Waterboarding is torture in the eyes of all civilized peoples, no matter how desperately President George W. Bush tries to rewrite the English language, with which he has only a passing familiarity, anyway. No matter how desperately his entire administration tries to redefine the word "torture" to cover the fact that not only have they acquiesced in its use, but they also have ordered its use.
The bizarre Patrick McIlheran, who never hesitates to shove his faith into our faces, or at least purports to defend those who would, said he would never fear simulated drowning for he never commits crimes. Forgetting the crimes of logic he commits each time he writes, I propose a thought exercise. Jesus the Christ was lawfully arrested by Caesar's state. In fact, the Nazarene submitted to the arrest. Before he was subjected to lawful capital punishment, he was scourged, pierced in the side and made to wear a crown of thorns. I ask the pseudo-Catholic McIlheran, would it be lawful then to put crowns of thorns on the heads of the people we would interrogate? May we pierce them in the side?
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