I don't know if anyone mentioned this or not but the Spanish Inquisition used a form of water boarding to torture people into making confessions.

If you commit crimes you gotta pay the price

BookWorm88 wrote:If you commit crimes you gotta pay the price

If.

Is waterboarding torture? This is a good question, and I've seen a few different perspectives on it, but none of the ones presented seemed to approach it from a semantic one. Granted, I only read the third page, so this could've already been brought up.

When asking a question like, "Is waterboarding torture?" the best way to start is looking up the definition of the word "torture." I'll use Dictionary.com Unabridged because I like its definitions, since they actually tell me what the word means in a way that a human being can really comprehend.

Dictionary.com Unabridged wrote:torture
–verb (used with object)
6. to subject to torture.
7. to afflict with severe pain of body or mind: My back is torturing me.
8. to force or extort by torture: We'll torture the truth from his lips!
9. to twist, force, or bring into some unnatural position or form: trees tortured by storms.
10. to distort or pervert (language, meaning, etc.).

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I think, in the context of the use of the word "torture" in the question, that definition seven fits best. So with this, it says that to torture is to afflict severe pain of body or mind. Since the severity of something is relative, I think it's fair to say that the amount of pain afflicted on body or mind caused by waterboarding should be roughly equal to the pain caused by things which we can all agree is torture. Power drilling holes into kneecaps, pulling teeth using crude tools and without anesthetic, extreme enough exposure to the elements to cause frostbite and necrosis, and severe genital mutilation are things that I'd call "torture."

Is the amount of pain and anguish caused by waterboarding roughly equal to those things? I guess it'd depend on the person you do it to. However, for most people, I get a feeling that they simply would not be. I'm reasonably certain that I'd prefer to be waterboarded than to have those things done to me.

For this reason, I believe that describing waterboarding as torture is an exaggeration. Waterboarding is not truly torture.

they arent simply running their heads through water...

They are drowning them, then, at the last minute letting up. I have thought before how drowning is one of the worst ways to go, as you are fully aware, you know what is happening to you, and it takes a bit of time. It's the mental torment of it.This happens to these guys multiple times.

If this is such a feather on the foot, why don't we use this on our regular prisoners? Hell, why not do it for kids who get detention? Hating these people is no reason to treat them this way. We treated Jeffry Dahmer better than this, and the level of depravity in that man far exceeds what is in these guys (even the ones guilty of terrorism).

You aren't actually drowning someone when you're water boarding them. You're playing with a few simple errors in neurology to make it feel like they're drowning. After watching the demonstration found in this video, waterboarding to me looked like the kind of "torture" that brothers do to eachother for laughs. It does not, to me, come off as something as grotesque or devastating as the things I mentioned in my previous post.

I think I'm on board with Frank 013 on this one, ultimately. I don't think it's absolutely horrendous on an ethical level to do this, but I don't think it's going to be very effective, and I don't think it has been.

if your brother was doing that to you when you were a child then he is a psychopath who needs help. You need to stage an intervention before he goes columbine on you.

TRM: "You aren't actually drowning someone when you're water boarding them. You're playing with a few simple errors in neurology to make it feel like they're drowning."

You mentioned physical and mental pain. Would terrorists killing all your family members in front of you be torture? Mental torture, sure. But then at what point do we classify something as mental torture? I think waterboarding is torture, but it's hard to see as such since it's a bit physical, and a bit mental.

If someone played a 'magic trick' and killed your family in front of you, you would still think your family is dead, so it would still be torture.