........And just so there's no mincing about it...


Intel= where Osama is hiding, where Saddam was hiding (wonder who told, and why they told?), Where Saddam was building his WMDs, Where they were/are planning on striking next, where their terrorist camps have moved to, the names of the people who are in their groups, the names of the sleepers in our country, etc. These are things that the public (including the sleepers who are here to spy and gain intel) should not know about before the military has had a chance to deal with it. Intel is NOT confessions of maltreatment at a military base. It should not be twisted up just to suit your purposes. i thought you should know the difference, being the intelligent, articulate person that you are, MMI.

It's not about what we are doing to them, it's what we gain from them with the tactics we use....that is INTEL. If you're playing a game of Chess, you're not about to let your opponent in on your plans for future moves. By the same token, if the public (which includes the illegal immigrants who might be at the ready with a telephone to call Al Quaida, or whatever group is opposing us at the time) hears all of the details such as what i stated in the above examples, they will change their strategy and THEN the poor sap was waterboarded for nothing...and i believe that's even worse than waterboarding in the first place.

The news of waterboarding is no surprise to anyone, is it? Really? Were you actually surprised to hear about it? i was not at all surprised-that's what happens, and has happened all through history. This is not new news.

"It hasn't though, has it? As for "credible intel", I seriously doubt the West is capable of gaining it: so let's not have more "WMD" scare stories." You say...

Well, i say, the WMD "scare stories" are all a part of why we're waterboarding in the first place...Saddam was a WMD who had proven himself to be such by killing MASS amounts of people, including his own countrymen. Four airplanes were used as WMDs. A WMD is anything used to cause.....Mass Destruction . If a person kills 5 or 10 people, he/she is a MASS MURDERER. And as for the gaining of credible intel, see FixIt's post above, where he quotes a page from one of my links, which refers to Abu Zubaydah, who was the suspect waterboarded in that particular link. i think we are capable of doing just that.
From Wikipedia:

On November 20, 2006, Basic Books published Inside the Jihad: My Life with al Qaeda, a Spy's story, an account by Omar Nasiri of certain operations of al Qaeda. According to PR Newswire, "Contrary to popular reports that Zubayda is mentally retarded and delusional, Nasiri's account shows that he was in fact a powerful figure with responsibility for every mujahid entering and exiting the training camps.

In his memoir, former CIA Director George Tenet writes:

"A published report in 2006 contended that Abu Zubaydah was mentally unstable and that the administration had overstated his importance. Baloney. Abu Zubaydah had been at the crossroads of many al-Qa'ida operations and was in position to - and did - share critical information with his interrogators. Apparently, the source of the rumor that Abu Zubaydah was unbalanced was his personal diary, in which he adopted various personas. From that shaky perch, some junior Freudians leapt to the conclusion that Zubaydah had multiple personalities. In fact, Agency psychiatrists eventually determined that in his diary he was using a sophisticated literary device to express himself. And, boy, did he express himself."

POOR SAP!

I'm sure they don't just put their arms around some guy on the street and say,"C'mon, let's go get you waterboarded, it's your turn, we haven't seen you yet," without some sort of intel. i'm also sure that there are plenty of Lynndie England types out there who abuse their postitions, and consider it entertaining to humiliate and injure the prisoners in their custody.

Now, for the Japanese Americans who were rounded up during WWII--Come on, MMI, are you kidding me? Simply to degrade and humiliate? That really sounds like an argument for the sake of argument, and i find it offensive that you would say it. People were afraid. The attack on Pearl Harbour caused them to believe that all Japanese came to this country to infiltrate its defenses. What would you expect them to think, they'd just lost thousands! It was a mistake (which wasn't repeated here in the US when the WMDs hit our Pentagon and WTC). No one set out to do that! It was the end result, of course, but they were rounded up and placed in camps because our paranoid government
was trying to keep our intel from getting into the wrong hands. It was wrong, absolutely, but it wasn't done simply out of spite, or just to humiliate and degrade.