Matt Corley has Liz Cheney explaining that waterboarding’s not torture because we subject soldiers to waterboarding when they undergo SERE training.
Matt observes that what goes on when we torture a captive is actually pretty different from a training exercise. That said, the larger issue here is that SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. And by “resistance” they mean resistance to torture. What we do when we train soldiers isn’t torture, because it’s training. But it’s training in torture resistance. When we look through the torture-resistance manual to find ways to do interrogations, we’re looking through the torture-resistance manual to find ways of torturing people.
It’s important to recall that the SERE people asked to provide information to interrogators about how to do torture specifically warned the would-be torturers that their techniques would be illegal to apply and unlikely to produce reliable information.
This whole argument is an insult to people’s intelligence. It’s like saying that shooting someone in the head isn’t really murder because police officers do target practice.
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