Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

You’ve put in your 11 hours driving. You’re tired and hungry. You go inside the restaurant and take a seat at the counter. Fox News is on the television above your head. There are 3-4 other drivers on either side of you. It’s good to be with other people after fighting with 4-wheelers, other truck traffic and dispatchers all day long.

O’Reilly or Hannity is just coming on and former VP Dick Cheney or some other “official” or talking head is bloviating about water boarding and torture. Some have called it “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And the counter comes alive with comments and discussion. It is one of the “hot” topics on the road now.

How do you feel about water boarding? As a parent with a son that is joining the Army with hopes of becoming a Green Beret and a Ranger, I’m honestly “terrified” just thinking about it. Thank goodness we haven’t seen any photos of our young men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan being subjected to such torture. Some Special Forces soldiers volunteer to have it to done to them as part of their training here in the US. I don’t believe water boarding would be being discussed so “liberally” as an “option” if our own people were captured and subjected to such “techniques.” It is one thing to hear about it being done to 3 suspected “terrorists” at GITMO a hundred or more times vs. it being used by the Taliban to “extract” information from one of our pilots that had been shot down and captured.

Former Republican Presidential candidate and Sen. John McCain, who as we all know spent 5 1/2 terrifying years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, says ” "All I can say is that it (water boarding) was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today, It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture. And I’m against it.”  Based on what I hear “around the counter” drivers are split down the middle on the issue. The question being debated is: “Would you water board a suspected terrorist to obtain information that would save thousands of our citizens?” How do you weigh in on the subject?

Photo credits are: http://friendsofmccain.com/about/, http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/media/waterboard6.jpg