Thread: Waterboarding
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JF Ossan
 
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04-28-2009, 09:35 PM

The Convention Against Torture prohibits practices that constitute the intentional infliction of “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental.” The federal torture statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2340A, similarly prohibits acts outside the United States that are specifically intended to cause “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”

Waterboarding is torture. It causes severe physical suffering in the form of reflexive choking, gagging, and the feeling of suffocation. It may cause severe pain in some cases. If uninterrupted, waterboarding will cause death by suffocation. It is also foreseeable that waterboarding, by producing an experience of drowning, will cause severe mental pain and suffering. The technique is a form of mock execution by suffocation with water. The process incapacitates the victim from drawing breath, and causes panic, distress, and terror of imminent death. Many victims of waterboarding suffer prolonged mental harm for years and even decades afterward.


Open Letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales | Human Rights Watch

This was a part of a letter sent to then Atty. General Gonzales in 2006 by a long list of over 100 law professors.

Notice in the definition of "torture" no where is "long term effects" stated, simply “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental.”
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