Waterboarding IS Torture

I was reading today about waterboarding. I don't know what triggered it, but an hour of fascinated wikipedia clicking later, and I knew enough to categorically declare waterboarding torture.
I also read that there are some reported and admitted cases of the US using waterboarding to interrogate prisoners in morden times (the last 5-10 years). I'm sure there are also a bunch of false reports, but the fact that there is even one substantiated and confirmed report makes me sick to my stomach.
While the concept of torture is an interesting one, from a scientific point of view, subjecting humans to anythin remotely close to what I have read about today is nothing short insane.
Victims will say anything to escape the torture. Sometimes interrogators are lucky and they go after someone who actually has something of value to disclose, but if it was me on that board, I'd admit to the whole holocaust if it meant that I didn't have to be tortured.
Some might call me wek minded, but torture is an attrocity, and anyone performing it should receive the harshest possibly punishment.
Totrure shoudl not be performed. In any way shape or form. There can be no exception here whatsoever. Even the Geneva Convention backs me up on this one.

The worst part is that there is no oversight. There is noone to monitor the monitors. Supposedly the police are to be the monitors. If you do anything wrong, they punish you. (police / legal system). This isn't the case though, because the military can do things the police can't, and they don't have to tell you about it. What's worse is that the intelligence agencies do even worse things, and it's not that they don't have to tell you about it, but peopel never find out.
Even if countries have strong willed leaders who are against these sort of things, intelligence organizations, such as the CIA for instance, do whatever they damn well please, and noone is the wiser.

The torture has to stop. Humans need to be treated like humans. Not even when they are proven guilty should human treatment be abandoned. There is never a reason for torture.
And even if there was, what if you've got the wrong guy? What if your assumptions are wrong? What if he doesn't know anything? There are so many "what if"s that any argument for torture can be swiftly dealt with by the massive amount of uncertainty surrounding the authorization of torture.

Governments publicly declare that they are against torture (most of them anyway), but when pressed on specific issues (like waterboarding), they squirm and shed responsibility by claiming that a specific interrogation technique isn't classified as torture.
Anything that more than basically a heated conversation with possibly some screaming should be considered torture. Inflicting pain or the threat of pain, both mental or physical, is torture. There are no two ways about it.

Some of you, undoubtably, would say that there are exceptions. Much like how banning certain forms of expression and thought might seem convenient, who determines where to draw the line?
A lot of people would love to ban nazi symbols and racist speech. Make it a punishable offense. This might seem, by most, as an aceptable thing to do, but who's to say that the next "bad" thing isn't being republican. Or muslim.
If we let governments get away with this sort of thing there is no going back. There is no revoking the privilege. History shows that privileges given to governments are never given back.

The problem, as with most things human, is that there is no easy solution to the problem of government. Humans are inherently power-hungry, and they will do all they can in a position of power to make it last longer, or get elevated into a position of more power. One could argue for direct democracy, that everyone votes on all the issues, but that's not feasible. Besides, most people don't care about most decisions anyway, nor are they informed enough to make a proper decision.

I realize that we are moving away from the central issue here, which is that torture is bad, but this issue arises due to the fact that there is very little the population can do about the behavior of the government. Fear is an excellent way of controlling a population, and most governments have mastered it and made it an art.

Don't believe everything you hear. Question everything. Make sure that you know the facts.
You should even question what I wrote here. Don't take my word for it, investigate!

Now the UK is also off-limits for me.

For the longest time (basically since the introduction of the PATRIOT act) the US has been off-limits for me. Not because I've committed any crime punishable under it, but rather because it gives law enforcement the legal right to do whatever the fuck the want to people without having to prove anything.
Now, after a long line of similar atrocities, the UK is also on my no-fly list. Almost once a week I read about new legal development in the UK (usually on Slashdot and on Bruce Schneier's Blog) that gives the police similar freedoms there. You'd think that people in an EU country would be more resilient to big brother-ness like this, but apparently law makers don't listen to the people anymore (when have they ever, right...).
One could argue that the big grey mass of people would like to give up liberty to gain security, which doesn't actually work, but the reality is that the big grey mass of people probably don't vote anyway, should something like this actually be voted on via referendum.
The US and UK are now right up there with North Korea and China on the list of countries that don't give a flying fuck about the liberties of their citizens, and will do anything to bring about a police state much in the same way that Germany worked back in the day (can someone say Gestapo?). Bush seems intent on finding a final solution to the liberty problem, but other than the problem statement, there are a lot of similarities between him and some other guys in history I can think of.

Thoughtcrime

It appears that EU is Moving to Ban Online Hate Speech.
When will people stop trying to regulate what other people think and say? I dislike racists and whatnot just as much as the next guy, but that doesn't give me the right to limit how they can express themselves.Also, people who are "targets" of these sort of things needs to relax a little bit.
Seriously. Being called all those things can be bad, but there's got to be a limit. Soon we'll turn into some society where people sure each other as much as in the US, and the government sends people to Siberian prison camps like in the USSR, at the same time.
I, for one, do not want to live in such a society. Shape the fuck up people, it's not as serious as you think!

Stop trying to regulate my brain!

Things are not as they Seem

I might have been a bit off the mark the other day when I claimed that the laws the British passed raped our collective civil liberties less that the American counterparts.
I believe I wrote something like:

The US pass laws that are disgusting violations of our civil liberties, the UK does the same, but on a smaller scale.

Well, I stand corrected. It turns out that unless you are willing to surrender pretty much every piece of information available (or not available) about yourself to the government, you will not be allowed to leave the country, except as a boat refuge. Great Britain will, from March 26th, stop issuing passports to anyone who refuses to bend over and take surveillance so far up their ass that the metal casing of the cameras tickle their mouths.

It turns out that my home country isn't much better. A recent bill proposes to let the communications arm of the military (FRA - Försvarets Radioanstalt) wiretap anyone they damn well please with absolutely no judicial oversight. It's not clear who proposed this bill, other than "the government", but there seems, luckily, to be many vocal critics of this bill such as the head of the Bar Association, the head of Säpo (Swedish Secret Police), and others. I doubt it will pass, but the very idea to propose something like this is atrocious as best.
As if this wasn't enough, it was discovered when this bill was proposed that FRA has been doing these sorts of things without oversight for decades anyway. Apparently up until the point when the telephone company became privately owned.

I will admit that I don't know what goes down behind closed doors here in the Netherlands, but I can't possibly imagine that it could be as bad as any of the atrocities I have just described.