Kaffee: Don’t call me son. I’m a lawyer and an officer in the United States Navy. And you’re under arrest, you son of a bitch.

Screwbird – much of what I’ve read leads me to believe that a lot of these guys sing like birds when they get swept up. For one, I think they’re actually proud of themselves. For another, a lot of these guys are the kind of hypersensitive types who think that they/their tribe has been getting screwed and it’s time for either a)someone elses son to blow themselves up to rectify the imagined slights to their dignity, or b) blow themselves up in quick, transitory moment – no pain! – before arriving in paradise.

Some are harder nuts to crack. Those are the psychopaths, largely.

In the absence of such a discussion, I’ve made up my own 3 stage sliding scale of seriousness in evaluating things that you read in the papers which may or may not constitute “torture”.

1. If it’s no worse than what I have, personally, gone through in the name of fun, camaraderie, or tradtion, I don’t give a sh*t about that incident and the reporter doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about. In this category my personal yardsticks are becoming a Shellback when crossing the equator on a carrier in the 1980’s, becoming a Bluenose when crossing the arctic circle in s P-3, fratternity initiation in college, etc. About 70% of the “torture” reports fall into this first category.

2. If the alleged treatment is harsher than that, but no worse than what our own service people go through in training, the “victim” still gets no sympathy from me, but I do think that (a)it’s a good thing that we’re using such stressful but not ultimately harmful techniques to extract useful information, and (b) there should be ROE to define what boundaries you do not cross, and some approval process for the more, er, challenging techniques.

Again, from personal experience I include SERE school (and that water board IS effective, but I can attest that there are no lasting effects, and the “soft sell” good cop routine is even more effective), the helo dunker, boxing in flight training (what WAS that about, anyway?) etc. Plenty of other military folks went through more physically strenuous challenges than did those of us in naval aviation. Marine boot camp, the SEAL’s BUDS school, and Army Special Forces training are all highly stressful but fall short of any reasonable definition of torture. I’d say another 25% of media-reported “torture” incidents fall into this category.

3. That leaves us maybe 5% (and I think I’m being generous here) of reported incidents that maybe, possibly, I might have some qualms about. Almost invariably these are cases of abusive misconduct by individuals, ala Abu Ghraib, rather than officially sanctioned actions.

The “ticking bomb” scenario is probably the only case where it’s necessary, rarely, to go beyond the second category above.

We don’t know exactly what the Pakistanis did to Rauf, and I suppose it’s possible that it was actual, no fooling, by anybody’s definition, torture. More likely, if his interrogaters were any good at their jobs, it was more along the lines of my category 2