well, I knew you were going the "dipshit" route, but like watching a catastrophe in slow-motion, I followed along anyway.

between you and Tex, I will say this--two pumpkins does not equal one brain.

So back to my original question: Where is waterboarding explicitly prohibited by US law? If all we have here is the vague language of "severe" or "extreme" or "harmful" or whatever, there is going to be reasonable differences of opinion.

as you know, laws are usually written to deal with general circumstances, and judges and juries interpret them.

What is self-defense?

What is manslaughter?

Even if for some reason you thought that waterboarding did not constitute:

You would then look at the case law, right? You would say to yourself, has waterboarding previously been considered torture, and have people been prosecuted for it by the US government?

I guess Bybee was just too lazy or incompetent to look at case law.

So the church should excommunicate him for being lazy or incompetent? For merely opining that waterboarding may not meet the definition of torture?

Mike, I get it that you don't agree with waterboarding. That's an entirely reasonable interpretation of the torture statute. In my opinion, rational minds can conclude either way on that specific issue. However, to assert that what Bybee has done is worthy of excommunication is completely unreasonable.

I believe that Bybee conspired with administration officials to implement torture, in violation of US law and common Christian decency and morality.

Moreover, I do not believe that waterboarding can be reasonably interpreted as not torture.

Don't tell me the same hands can both torture and bless. If you conspire to break the law to torture human beings, I mean, what is the list of things that are worse?

If you can't excommunicate a torturer, I'm fairly certain the list of things that ought to be excommunicable is pretty small.

Lastly: I grant that we all make mistakes. I grant that repentance is part of being in good stead. In Bybee's case, however, with years to think about what he did, and years to consider what happened as a result of what he did, and having looked at the fact that others have called him wrong, that his policy has been rejected, that he knows prior case law, that he knows of things like the Khmer Rouge, he says "I WAS RIGHT."

He is dragging the church through the mud, again and again, as it is repeated again and again how he is LDS.

Next, we should answer the question of who should be prosecuted in the military for waterboarding our own soldiers as a part of training.

And let's find that SOB who waterboarded Christopher Hitchens.

And if Keith Olbermann waterboards Sean Hannity, I expect to see him arrested and maybe executed too.

many people do things to themselves that would be considered torture if it were forced upon them involuntarily.

Again we see religion does not equal ethics, in Tex's juvenile display of misunderstanding.

I'm not sure you've demonstrated yourself to be reasonable.

QED

I think anyone who drills a hole through another person's hand, regardless of whether it was voluntarily, would still be arrested and charged. Your condition doesn't hold for many more "traditional" forms of torture.

You make me laugh. At you. Not with you.

So what about someone who puts a hole into people's tongues. Is that torture, Tex? Labia?