Wednesday, December 24, 2014

 

Comparing Apples to Oranges

I ran across this article at über lefty Mother Jones. It cherry picks from long indictments of Japanese war criminals brought by us after WWII and says that we convicted Japanese soldiers of waterboarding but now, hypocritically, say waterboarding when we do it is not torture.


So I took a closer look at the descriptions of supposed "waterboarding" by the Japanese.


Remember that we take pains not to actually get water in the lungs of the people waterboarded, because that would be actually drowning them. We merely trigger a feeling of drowning by wet cloth over mouth and nose. We get water on the face and in the mouth and nose but that's as far as we go.
Let's go to the Mother Jones article.


The [war crimes] archive has multiple examples of the United States charging Japanese soldiers and prison guards with war crimes for waterboarding prisoners (often referred to as the "water cure" or the "water treatment")
But was what the Japanese did and called the water cure or the water treatment just like our waterboarding of captured Muslim terrorist more than a decade ago?


I think not. It takes a while for the Mother Jones writer to include an actual description of the Japanese methods.



When [Major Wyatt] refused to do [what the Japanese wanted], he was subjected to treatment known as the "water cure". The Japs forced him to swallow two or three gallons of water then jumped on his stomach, forcing he water out. His fingernails were torn out and vinegar poured on the wounds.


So the water cure described there is nothing at all like ours. We don't make the detainee swallow even a drop. We don't then force out large quantities of water from the stomach by jumping on the stomach and we certainly don't rip out fingernails. Except for the inclusion of water in both, the water cure described here has nothing whatsoever to do with our waterboarding.


And the water cure or treatment the Japanese used during the war was not at all a simulated drowning but more like real drowning with large amounts of water introduced into the lungs of the victim. One of the cited articles states:



...a description of the type of torture known as “the water treatment,” in which “the victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness,”



And these cherry picked charges are not the only things the Japanese guards and soldiers were accused of. The indictments are long and full of horrible detail. Mother Jones pretends that these tidbits are the whole of the indictments. They are not.


Normal lefty journalism, however.




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Comments:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/12/top-10-climate-discoveries-of-2014/

You're welcome!
 
I did see that this morning. Pretty clever. It seems all the credible deniers are luke warmers who only deny the 'catastrophic' element of 'catastrophic anthropogenic global warming'.

 
It's just so hard and takes so long for reality-minded folks to counter the (gasp!) OMG the SKY is FALLING headline grabbers.

http://www.cato.org/blog/you-ought-have-look-examples-real-world-realities-vs-naive-thinking
 
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