If it’s not torture, why do you bother doing it? Enforced hygiene?

Quick rundown of the process:
-Enter the chamber, already full of gas
-Run around in place for a couple minutes, to make sure nobody is holding their breath
-Remove the mask
-Go through the process to don (put on) and clear (get the bad air out without inhaling it)
-Remove the mask and run around some more to make sure we got a good lungful of the stuff
-Exit in an orderly fashion, which was arguably the hardest part of the process

Some of the acts that would be considered torture are part of the training in SERE school (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). This is standard training for SpecOps and aircrews. The instructors work hard to make the training as realistic as possible, but there are still limits to how far you can suspend disbelief.

* It doesn’t have to be “torture” to be a war crime. Common Article 3 prohibits “cruel treatment” of detainees. (And violations of Common Article 3 are war crimes and federal crimes under the War Crimes Act of 1996.)

* The definition of “torture” under the (Senate-ratified) U.N. Convention Against Torture has a “purpose” clause:

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

So, the same act can be torture when done for such purposes and not torture when done for purposes of training.

that is why it is specious for GOPers [to offer] some sort of defense for using REAL waterboarding against prisoners.

Thank you, Praedor. I am running way behind here, trying to do a little real work, but your post gave me some relief from the rage I am feeling about the blatant defense of war crimes. This is why we need war crimes prosecutions, soon. Real judges in real courts would not even allow testimony in support of those kinds of specious “defenses.” It is no defense, and therefore irrelevant, that certain things are done in training. Those arguments would just be excluded. And the defense that “Office of Legal Counsel said I could” would eventually be rejected because the torturers were heavily indoctrinated in the Geneva Conventions and knew what they were doing was a war crime.

CPAC is going on today

So that’s where all those brainless-looking Gen-Nexters on the subway were going this morning. I felt like I was in a zombie movie but somebody forgot to tell me . . . .

As an old hippy with decades of inherent “profilabilityness” under my belt, I can relate to your paranoia, but Ilament the union of what should be very different “security” images.

There’s supposed to be a world of culture between those two “groups” you mention, like so many others, we seem to hold them in the same “uniform” opinion. And as the contemporary images of Iraq and Afghanistan become our new visage of what “war” looks like, there is a growing blend of what xhould be very separate and unrelated services.

And what is the bastard child of this match-up??

The Doberman pups from “Animal Farm” have matured…

Blackwater Zietgiest?

…cosmic, the way names and labels converge into meaningful icons…

So, who WAS President in 1984, when the first seeds of this dark image were growing in North Carolina and Texas??

Orwell was a prophet.