Monday, April 27, 2009 | 2:08 a.m.
There are many opinions on the subject of waterboarding and here is mine.
From my research, I have discovered that it is considered a form of torture in the sense that the person being interrogated feels that he is about to die. I also discovered that government agencies have experimented with the process on their own people and concluded that all of them will confess to anything in an average of 30 seconds or less. This would lead an erudite thinker to believe that information obtained by this form of torture is questionable at best.
Many like me wonder where the interrogators get their subjects. Because we are not in a real war where the enemy is wearing a uniform to identify whose side he is on, the subjects we round up may be the result of an informer giving information regarding someone he does not like with the motivation of a monetary stipend. I am sure that some of the detainees are truly guilty, but all of them?
No, I do not have a better solution, but America as well as the rest of the world will respect the overall process if detainees were given some kind of a hearing in a court to determine whether they are indeed guilty of plotting or performing terrorist acts. Also, we would hope that our interrogation techniques are no harsher than we would expect our enemies to use on Americans who are detained in a foreign country on debatable charges.
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