Eric Holder, can I have your babies?
"Yes", said Obama's pick for Attorney General when asked the first question of his confirmation hearing "do you believe that waterboarding is torture?"
:O
The answer was a bit more detailed than that (as was the question), which repeated parts of the question (such as "we've prosecuted our own soldiers for using this technique") and implied that perhaps Mr. Holder only considered it torture in those cases, potentially leaving the door open for future cases to, somehow, not fall under the same definition.
But when asked if, in a hypothetical scenario of a captured suspect and a "ticking bomb", would he resort to the use of waterboarding, Holder's answer went something like this:
1) In such a hypothetical scenario, there are other "coersion" techniques at our disposal that don't rise to the level of torture;
2) In addition to being torture, waterboarding is believed by experts to be inefficient at producing a truthful information, since the interrogated will say anything to make the torture stop;
3) The other techniques have a better chance of producing the truthful information.
When further asked to clarify, the questioner noting that former AG Alberto Gonzales (or "AGAG", as I am prone to call him) failed to give a satisfactory answer, Holder said that the technique is torture no matter why is it is applied and no matter who (or what country) applies it.
WIN.
~Sean
:O
The answer was a bit more detailed than that (as was the question), which repeated parts of the question (such as "we've prosecuted our own soldiers for using this technique") and implied that perhaps Mr. Holder only considered it torture in those cases, potentially leaving the door open for future cases to, somehow, not fall under the same definition.
But when asked if, in a hypothetical scenario of a captured suspect and a "ticking bomb", would he resort to the use of waterboarding, Holder's answer went something like this:
1) In such a hypothetical scenario, there are other "coersion" techniques at our disposal that don't rise to the level of torture;
2) In addition to being torture, waterboarding is believed by experts to be inefficient at producing a truthful information, since the interrogated will say anything to make the torture stop;
3) The other techniques have a better chance of producing the truthful information.
When further asked to clarify, the questioner noting that former AG Alberto Gonzales (or "AGAG", as I am prone to call him) failed to give a satisfactory answer, Holder said that the technique is torture no matter why is it is applied and no matter who (or what country) applies it.
WIN.
~Sean