Johnny on the board

In other news, John Ashcroft. Remember that piece of work? He testified to the House Judiciary Committee that waterboarding is a valuable and perfectly acceptable questioning technique. Of course, Ashcroft also stated that he is opposed to torture, and that he does not consider waterboarding to be torture at all. So, if we get some torture experts to waterboard him into making confessions (real or false), wouldn’t his logic mean that this would be perfectly appropriate, and that any false confessions he makes should be treated as real?

The plain facts are that waterboarding is indeed torture, and torturing will result in the detainee saying anything, whether true or not, that they believe would get the interrogator to stop. The practice was developed as a way to inflict cruel and unusual punishment, and to extract false confessions.