A Cool New Way to Catch a Wave...?

When I first heard the term “water-boarding,” I thought it sounded like a cool new way to catch a wave that I’d never attempt. Turns out that it’s a highly polarizing, information-extracting technique that, according to Attorney General hopeful, Michael Mukasey, is “not torture.”

Hmm… Mike, that’s an interesting assertion, considering that water-boarding is tying someone to a table and then covering their mouth with a towel and pouring water on their face, giving the water-board-ee the sensation of drowning. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GcXl1y_mQw)

In reality, water-boarding is torture, a fact agreed upon by most Americans. We know this thanks to the helpful CNN poll (http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/06/waterboard.poll/?iref=mpstoryview).

This gets me thinking about the problems that America has, and what I consider the biggest one, a vast majority of the populace is stupid. Bear with me here, but I am going to blame this, at least partly, on the government (I also want to place a lot of the blame on MTV, but that might just be personal bias against crappy music).

The problem begins with Mukasey’s denial that this is torture. And this is on purpose, instead of having an enlightened populace debate the validity of this practice, we have idiots trying to debate something obvious, the definition of torture. Of course this is torture, that’s kind of the point. We want information that you have; we torture you to get it.

This distracts from the real argument, which is, should we employ this methodology to get the information we want?

This also leads to conservatives making an idiotic case that this isn’t torture, in effort to sway all the idiots in the middle and leads liberals to oversimplify a very complex issue to try to get the middle in their favor.

No one is telling the truth, everyone is just lying and oversimplifying to get all of the idiots that don’t understand the complexities of this issue to come over to their side. I got to believe Mukasey has a hard time sleeping at night.

None of this draws us closer to any kind of conclusion on the issue, it just leads to convoluted debates about things that are obvious, which doesn’t lead us to change in any meaningful way.

Which is I guess the role the government has given themselves, nothing gets done until it is covered in whiteout, rewritten and vetoed thousands of times, and by then, the populace has already had dozens of other meaningless debates and has already forgotten about the issue at hand; which is the lengths the government should go to in effort to extract information from enemy combatants.

As for me, I favor whatever means are neccessary to keep this country safe, however, the government is losing my trust in regards to whether or not they have the capability to objectivly determine when to employ this technique. Water-boarding doesn't kill, I'm sure it's very unpleasent, however, terrorists will kill you, they'll take pleasure in it. If it takes a little water to stop something like that from happening to me or someone I care about, so be it.

I just hope they're using Evian.

More info: (http://people.howstuffworks.com/water-boarding.htm)