The problems with the military tribunal thing... Options

[Hartmann]

Alright, my issue with the Supreme Court saying that we have to follow the Geneva Convention is that the Convention documents have not really been updated to deal with modern warfare. It mentions torture, but doesn't say what torture is. Is solitary confinement torture? I wouldn't think so, but some do.

There was an article about a Canadian teen who was captured in Afghanistan after killing an Army Medic (as in, they saw him do it). The teen was told threats of being sent to a foreign country for torture, sleep deprived, and put in solitary confinement. To me, none of those sound that bad. Granted they did make him wipe up his own urine which wasn't right, but the other stuff sounds like simple interrogation practices.

I just don't see where we draw the line. Pretty soon we're going to be giving these guys cable tv with link ups to Al-Jazeera and computers.

[pebkac]

Sleep deprivation is part of solitary confinement. They may do it on their own but usually putting someone in solitary is considered worse than sleep deprivation.

We may not threaten our guys with the thought of torture but we've been known to threaten criminals with going after their families, coworkers, etc.

Who knows what we are trying to learn. It's amazing how much information people can withhold until they just break. This isn't a terrorist catch-and-release program that we're trying to run. I think that a lot of the people need to be charged or sent back to their countries to face penalties there but we can't just let them go. Neither of us is in the intelligence industry so we have no idea how useful information is that is gained now.

Whether sleep deprivation is worse than solitary confinement is a matter of opinion that I won't get into. And we threaten criminals with legal action against their friends and family. There's a difference between doing that and threatening to send someone to another country where they will be physically tortured.

Secondly, it's easy to cop out of the argument by saying that we don't know what they're trying to get out of them. However, I really don't see any need to continue torturing people to get info that's 5 years old.