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I'm saying that KSM wasn't operating under the assumption that we were going to kill him. And yes, after waterboarding (which is agreeably a pretty crappy experience), KSM became compliant - relieved even; telling us that we should waterboard "all the brothers" so as to relieve them of their religious duty to resist (you are, apparently, only required to resist up until a certain point, and then you are free do to whatever you need to).
Give me a break. He didn't know if or when it would ever stop - a soldier in training knows those things. It's not the same, and you're trying hard to make the irrational claim that it is the same. As I said earlier, just because many officers trained in tasers get tased as part of their training would have NO impact on the obvious determination that using a taser during interrogation is (or would be) torture.
A) We executed a grand total of 7 Japanese from those trials - all of them for crimes involving large-scale murder. And the Japanese were performing different acts - notably, forced ingestion of water
Forced 'ingestion' of water is how waterboarding works - it is drowning that is stopped, they breath the water into their lungs and cannot breath. And what difference does it make how many we executed - we tried roughly 6000, and thousands of those served jail sentences, many of them accused of the crime of waterboarding. I'm not sure what you're claiming - waterboarding, although listed among the crimes for which they were charged, shouldn't have been on that list because it's not torture, although we asserted through the tribunal that it WAS?
B) Waterboarding is indeed illegal - for uniformed members of a nation state engaged in Armed Conflict, who fall under Geneva protections. It is additionally illegal for noncombatants. Those who choose to fight in civilian clothing, however, have no such rights under the international system - we could execute every member of Gitmo out of hand tomorrow and be breaking no law other than (perhaps) our own.
Again, if you want to have a discussion about whether torture is justified, then that's fine. But let's not pretend that we're talking about something else.
And as to the legal claims - they're irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Just because we might be able to justify torture and fit it into some legal box says really nothing about whether it's something we should be doing. We now know there is no legal consequence for doing it anyway, unless you're a whistleblower that reveals what was done.