What a Vile Human Being: Ms. Fiorina Endorses Torture

Evidently Carly is just fine with torture.  Link is here.

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has endorsed waterboarding, the controversial interrogation method that has been called torture, as an important tactic that was used only “when there was no other way to get information that was necessary”.

In an interview with Yahoo News, Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who surged in recent polls of Republican primary voters, said: “I believe that all of the evidence is very clear – that waterboarding was used in a very small handful of cases [and] was supervised by medical personnel in every one of those cases.”

The 2014 Senate report that called waterboarding – in which water is poured over a cloth on a prisoner’s face in order to simulate the feeling of drowning – tantamount to torture and said it produced little useful intelligence. Fiorina called the report “disingenuous” and “a shame” that “undermined the morale of a whole lot of people who dedicated their lives to keeping the country safe”.

Naureen Shah of Amnesty International told Yahoo of Fiorina’s comments: “This is completely rewriting the history of what happened.”

Yet...everything can still be a bit nuanced.  I'm sticking to the title of this piece, "What a Vile Human Being," although a dear friend and I had a large difference of opinion over this one last night at dinner.

He, a former military officer, recalled that during his SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training, he  and his fellow recruits were briefly waterboarded to demo the technique and familiarize them to it.  His opinion: while unpleasant, it surely wasn't torture.

Plus the fact that he was in the Pentagon fourteen years ago when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into it.  I can see how that experience might make someone hold the opinions he does.