Under international law, waterboarding is torture. But more to the point.... it is immoral.
"Mr Bush hides behind the fact that he is not a lawyer and he has this folksy you know kind of cute way of say, well the lawyers told me it was legal, as if he didn't know that it's immoral. You know? Immoral and illegal. I mean he can't really hide behind his lawyers... [their] memos were, they don't even deserve the name of legal memos because they are completely flawed from the legal reasoning. But even worse they are morally flawed as well."
"Mr Bush hides behind the fact that he is not a lawyer and he has this folksy you know kind of cute way of say, well the lawyers told me it was legal, as if he didn't know that it's immoral. You know? Immoral and illegal. I mean he can't really hide behind his lawyers... [their] memos were, they don't even deserve the name of legal memos because they are completely flawed from the legal reasoning. But even worse they are morally flawed as well."The new United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez is the first person in that position to have been tortured himself, by officers of the then Argentine junta in the mid 70s. A Visiting Professor at the American University - Washington College of Law, Mendez headed Americas Watch at Human Rights Watch for many years, served as president of the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, and headed the International Center for Transitional Justice.
Journalist Dahlia Lithwick shares Professor Mendez's view that torture is both illegal and immoral, and challenges Americans' growing acceptance of the practice with a question:
