Let me ask you a question. Suppose you picked up a gun and shot someone and then claimed that you did not shoot him. Instead you say you were poking his internal organs with a projectile piece of metal, but weren't shooting him at all. Would that be enough to absolve you from charges of shooting someone? No.
So, too, do the claims of this Administration fall short of convincing in the area of toture.
Let me ask further what would happen to the lawyers who advised you that the above legal theory was sound? They would be brought up on ethics charges and possibly disbarred. That's what WILL HAPPEN to the lawyers who advised our men and women in uniform that waterboarding prisoners is legal. Even if we call them detainees.
Now I can hear all sorts of lawyers shrieking about legal definitions and what tests apply, etc. But I would caution anyone about to commit a Federal crime that such distinctions, as between "prisoner" and "detainee," don't often last very long. And when detainees are recognized as prisoners, the interrogators will become torturers in law as well as life.
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