DescentBB

flip wrote:I think a distinction can be made between torture and deprivation. Torture is to inflict.
Deprivation is to deny.

To deprive food and water is to inflict starvation and dehydration. Dehydration can cause death in a few days. Starvation takes longer.

Might as well keep up with the waterboarding to hydrate the torture victim.

What would you do?

Let me expound, and I speak from the circumstance that terrorists have just crashed 3 planes into key buildings and massacred thousands. We need intel quickly to prevent more attacks and to disrupt their organization.
Now you have some choices you HAVE to make. Will you beat and hurt and pummel and kick and hammer that information out of him or will you subject him to isolation and deprivation with the choice left to him? I actually see a stark contrast there because on the one information is illicited by force and the other is by compliance.
Again, I would never ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do myself and first, so what would you do?

Just depriving someone of food and water will eventually kill them which means it definitely will not be effective against people who aren't afraid to die. Water boarding works and qualifies as a method of torture because it can't kill them, it has no time limit and no end which gives it the potential to be worse than death.

If waterboarding goes uninterrupted it too can cause death.

Waterboarding is torture. It causes severe physical suffering in the form of reflexive choking, gagging, and the feeling of suffocation. It may cause severe pain in some cases. If uninterrupted, waterboarding will cause death by suffocation.

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/04/05/o ... o-gonzales

I couldn't condone any of these tactics.

You'd think blasting gangsta rap and/or Disney tween starlet songs all day long would be perfect alternatives to physically destructive methods.

Take 25 men, deprive them of food and water and sleep, how many will end up talking? Odds are good at least one. No one said waterboarding is ineffective