Terry Jones on Torture, The Guardian

[burned]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1239824,00.html

For some time now, I've been trying to find out where my son goes after choir practice. He simply refuses to tell me. He says it's no business of mine where he goes after choir practice and it's a free country.

The thing is, if people don't say where they're going after choir practice, this country is at risk. So I have been applying a certain amount of pressure on my son to tell me where he's going. To begin with I simply put a bag over his head and chained him to a radiator. But did that persuade him? Does the Pope eat kosher?

I tried starving him, serving him only cold meals and shaving his facial hair off, keeping him in stress positions, not turning his light off, playing loud music outside his cell door - all the usual stuff that any concerned parent will do to find out where their child is going after choir practice. But it was all to no avail.

I hesitated to gravitate to harsher interrogation methods because, after all, he is my son.

Then Donald Rumsfeld came to my rescue........

read on

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Kick

[JHB]

2. Anytime someone tries to claim it was just frat-prank level stuff...

tell them they're full of shit, and here's why: reverse the sides; if some foreign army treated Americans that way and claimed it was just frat pranks, would you buy their claim?

[bvar22]

5. Just ask them which fraternity they belong to.

These practices must be very common at Skull & Bones and other republican fraternities.

Rush already told us how HE blows off a little stress: piling naked inferiors in a pyramid, sodomizing young boys, smearing excrement over naked men and attaching electrodes to the genitals, beating naked men to death.......
boy, those republicans are such PARTY GUYS.

[reprehensor]

3. Beautiful. n/t

[Ms. Clio]

4. kick

More Terry on torture:

The March 6 memo, prepared for Mr Rumsfeld explained that what may look like torture is not really torture at all. It states that: if someone "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith".

What this means in understandable English is that if a parent, in his anxiety to know where his son goes after choir practice, does something that will cause severe pain to his son, it is only "torture" if the causing of that severe pain is his objective. If his objective is something else - such as finding out where his son goes after choir practice - then it is not torture.

Mr Rumsfeld's memo goes on: "a defendant" (by which he means a concerned parent) "is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control".

Couldn't be clearer. If your intention is to extract information, you cannot be accused of torture.

In fact, the report went further. It said, if a parent "has a good-faith belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture". So all you've got to do to avoid accusations of child abuse is to say that you didn't think it would cause any lasting harm to the child. Easy peasy