20 May 2009 No Way It’s Torture, Says Mychal Massie

No way it’s torture, says Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie in his latest independent column for WorldNetDaily.

Some excerpts (I particularly like the line about Senator John Kerry):

It is a misnomer to call the techniques employed in the extraction of information from terrorists “enhanced” anything. They should simply be called “basic interrogation techniques.”The word enhanced, by definition, means to augment with improved, advanced or sophisticated features. Therein lies my complaint in part. Forced nakedness, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, sensory bombardment (e.g., prolonged loud music and/or bright lights), scriptural desecration, simulated drowning, i.e., waterboarding, and stressful positions are not enhanced or extreme, nor are they torture.

Torture would be a battery with cables connected to one’s more personal or sensitive areas. Torture would be being placed in a stressful position that caused bones to break or legs and arms to pop out of their sockets. Torture is pliers to fingers, hammers to toes, and the removal of teeth by blunt force trauma. Rough interrogation is being beaten until the person is bloodied and permanently disfigured beyond recognition.

Keeping someone awake is not torture, nor is it sophisticated. Keeping bright lights on in a room with the temperature turned up is not torture. It is being made uncomfortable…

…Neither time nor space allows me to explain fully the difference, but the plaintive cries and pleadings that the Geneva Conventions were somehow violated are scurrilous. Captured terrorists are being treated with more respect than they deserve – certainly more than Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and John Murtha, D-Pa., have shown our military personnel. In my mind, John Kerry, D-Mass., has treated our military more inhumanely with his specious accusations than the pouring of water on someone to help them remember information could ever be.

This isn’t about whether Nancy Pelosi lied about being briefed. It’s a reasonable belief that she did. It isn’t about mistreatment of captured terrorists. It is about saving the lives of American military personnel and American citizens. It is about the disruption of terrorist activity and the incapacitation of terrorists…

…Political correctness and politically correct verbiage has sullied and redefined everything it has been applied to – and EIT is a further example. With that said, when does America’s treatment of the captured get the recognition it deserves as the most humane in the history of warfare?…

Read it all here.