The US State Department, on the Iranian woman who’s been sentenced to death for adultery: “Stoning as a means of execution is tantamount to torture. It’s barbaric and an abhorrent act.”
If I understand correctly, in the State Department’s view, stoning to death > torture ( = waterboarding?) > execution, on the awfulness scale. There might be something a bit self-serving about this ordering.
I have: stoning to death = torture > execution. Not sure where they’re putting waterboarding, which of course is actually torture perpetrated by the U.S. against people suspected of being Muslims so it’s different than torture in this situation.
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I’m guessing they did mean stoning to death > torture after all. All that’s saying is, torture + killing > killing. I think it isn’t going to extent of implying that torture is incommensurably worse than execution, that it’s a higher-order-infinity of badness than execution, so to speak.
Re waterboarding, I thought under Obama they had stopped pretending it wasn’t torture, though it’s cheeky to call it worse than death; I imagine Christopher Hitchens, for example, would willingly do a youtube waterboarding video a day for the rest of his life in exchange for a cure to his cancer. For the more medieval and creative torture schemes on offer that too would change of course…
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Logically and contextually at least, your interpretation makes sense.
Off the top of my head, I honestly can’t recall whether the Obama administration agrees that waterboarding is torture. I just have the vague sense of, in general, Bush administration wartime policies being finessed but not strongly repudiated.
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