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Top SBC ethicist calls waterboarding torture: Land: Torture "violates everything we stand for"

Southern Baptist ethicist Richard Land, a leading Christian conservative who helped advance the Bush administration’s agenda on a range of social issues, says that the formerly sanctioned practice of waterboarding of suspected terrorists is torture and “violates everything we stand for.”

Land, who is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, repudiated the simulated drowning technique in an interview May 5 with Religion News Service.

Done in our name: Before we turn the page on torture

After President Obama released memos from Bush administration lawyers that defended waterboarding, Dick Cheney told Fox News that extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding helped the country gain important information and deter terrorist attacks. He called for the release of more classified documents so “the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”