Waterboarding: Sure Seems Like Torture
May 23rd, 2009Mancow and Hitchens Say So
I saw something interesting on the web last night. Looks like Eric “Mancow” Muller submitted to waterboarding and decided it was torture. After six seconds. That’s how long he lasted before giving up and asking to be released. And Christopher Hitchens, who was also waterboarded, agrees. Hitchens won’t even say how long he lasted. He’s embarrassed. Muller was trying to prove waterboarding is not torture. Now he is sure that it is. That proves his sincerity, when he says torture is the right word.
This is not a big surprise to me. What surprises me is that conservatives keep claiming it’s not torture. It is wrong to compare it to certain things our enemies have done, such as lowering live people into plastic-shredding machines, but that doesn’t mean it’s not torture.
A long time ago, I read that the CIA record for withstanding waterboarding was something like 20 seconds. I mean that a CIA employee who was voluntarily waterboarded lasted that long. After I saw that, I was content to agree that it was torture. Anything so unpleasant a serious government intelligence operative (no doubt trying to win a bet and impress his buddies) can’t stand it for half a minute is probably torture.
I’ve joked about how great it was that we were waterboarding the inbred idiots who were trying to destroy our cities, but I never said it in a serious way, because I thought waterboarding was a bad idea. Maybe I shouldn’t have joked about it, but hey, I’m human, and this isn’t the New York Times, and I’m no journalist. This is just a blog. I have joked about cancer and blindness and AIDS and God only knows what else, and so have most Americans. Doesn’t mean anything.
Now conservatives look silly, because people who mean well are using stupid phrases like “having a little water poured up your nose” to describe waterboarding. I can’t understand why waterboarding is so unpleasant. It doesn’t sound all that bad. But it’s clearly a terrible experience, and we ought to admit it.
I remember reading Jacobo Timerman’s books. He was an Argentinian Jew. He as kidnapped by his government, and they tortured him by applying electrodes to his bare skin and cranking up the voltage. I believe this is totally harmless, from a physical standpoint, because the amperage is tiny. Doesn’t sound all that bad, does it? But when he described his response, he said you don’t shout when they turn on the power. You howl. Apparently, the pain is so great, your self-control completely disappears instantaneously. So you don’t have to do anything invasive or disfiguring to torture a person. A little water may be more than sufficient.
I’ve thought about this a little, and it seems to me that the level of discourse on the subject is pretty low. People aren’t saying anything really intelligent. Just “torture bad” or “water up nose okay.”
I’m not sure I would back a total ban on torture. I would have to know more about it. I believe we should consider the possibility that the morality of torture depends on the circumstances. For example, I would not back torturing an enemy soldier to find out where his army planned to hit our troops, even if thousands of lives were at stake. But what about a terrorist who knows which Manhattan address is the location of a Muslim atom bomb? What if you had a few hours to get that kind of information? Would you seriously expect to rely on things like sleep deprivation and insults?
We should probably have one set of standards for uniformed enemies and another for terrorists who target civilians for no legitimate military purpose. We have long accepted the notion that ordinary soldier-to-soldier warfare has rules, even when a nation’s autonomy is at stake. But when an illiterate boob in a khaffiyah decides to roast several hundred thousand civilians alive, maybe he should be deemed to have given up his rights under the usual rules.
Think about this. Imagine you are attacked by a violent criminal, and you believe you’re in danger of serious injury, which, under the law, includes sexual assault. The law says you can do absolutely anything to that person, to incapacitate him and prevent the harm. You can push a knife through his eyeball. You can throw boiling oil in his face. You can set him on fire. You can park your car on him. Anything. His suffering isn’t even a legal consideration. Whatever means you have at hand, you are allowed to use, provided what you do is reasonable and not excessive under the circumstances. Maybe a person who tries to murder or maim a large number of noncombatants should have no more rights than a rapist or mugger.
But if that is true, even then, it is only true when no other methods will work.
Perhaps refraining from torture isn’t the way to maintain the moral high ground. Maybe the reasons we do it are what properly distinguish us from the backward savages who are trying to exterminate us.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:36 PM
Steve, you’ve thrown some cold water on a moldy and often disingenuously handled subject. This is one of the most intelligent things I’ve read. Well done. Much to ponder.
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:26 PM
It certainly isn’t my area of expertese – but I’ve always understood the Geneva Conventions to do precisely what you suggest. Uniformed combatents get substantial protections while uniformed combatents or spies get absolutely nothing.
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Uniformed combatents or spies can be summarily executed – or tortured to the limits of the capturing countries imagination and/or length of attention span.
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It seems to make a great deal of sense to me.
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:35 PM
I didn’t doubt for a moment it was torture.
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It was not premanently disabling or disfiguring torture, but it was torture nonetheless.
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That said, I supported its use – in very limited and urgent situations.
May 23rd, 2009 at 7:56 PM
When somebody with a preconceived notion of the outcome weighs in you’re always going to get a skewed result. Muller came into it only going on the board for show– whether he had lasted 5 seconds or five minutes he was going to say it was hellish.
He’s not exactly a bellwether for its effectiveness, submitting to the process voluntarily.
May 23rd, 2009 at 8:31 PM
What you’re saying is completely backward. People’s hopes tend to skew results IN THE DIRECTION of those hopes. Mancow hoped the waterboarding would be a walk in the park, so his instant about-face has greater credibility. Same goes for Hitchens.
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Claiming waterboarding isn’t torture is pigheaded, and it makes Republicans look like morons. Toeing the party line is not helpful when the party is doing something dumb and self-destructive, which can only end in embarrassment and more losses at the polls.
May 23rd, 2009 at 8:57 PM
May 23, 2009
Water Boarding: The View from the Moral High Ground
By David Bueche
Is water boarding torture?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/water_boarding_the_view_from_t.html
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:11 PM
My reply to “it’s torture!” is “you say that like it’s a bad thing.”
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:13 PM
I just wanted to clarify — not my reply to your “it’s torture” but that of the liberal scolds who think we should hug terrorists to make them love us.
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:58 PM
The link is no longer working, but for a discussion ofthe legal niceties of how WE use “waterboarding go to National review online to the 19 May issue and read an article by Andrew McCarthy entitled: “On ‘Torture’ Holder Undoes Holder.” Or his Fri, 15 May article in NRO on the same subj. Connie Hair also has a good take on Holder and the legalities of it all on the same date (15 May) in “Human Events.”
The upshot of it all is that, according to these interpretations, whatever one’s take on either the morality or practicality of it all is, waterboarding as was practiced by the CIA was NOT technically torture under US law–a pleading Holder’s own Justice Dept is currently making in the 6th Circuit. Go See.
May 23rd, 2009 at 11:10 PM
http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2009/05/22/mancow-gets-waterboarded-absolutely-torture-absolutely-thats-drowning/#comments
Read the comments on that post Steve.
May 24th, 2009 at 7:56 AM
“We should probably have one set of standards for uniformed enemies and another for terrorists who target civilians for no legitimate military purpose.”
What we really need is a clear, unambiguous definition of what constitutes torture. This is Congress’ job. Rather than yapping about whether or not some particular technique is torture, they ought to be working day and night to come up with something that tells us what it is, so it can be avoided without question.
Of course, that doesn’t serve their political ends. It’s much better to have no definition at all, so one side can accuse the other of using “torture” while the other side can claim that their techniques aren’t “torture.” So I don’t expect to see any useful definition offered anytime soon.
May 24th, 2009 at 9:54 AM
The thing that is really being tortured is the definition of torture.
May 24th, 2009 at 11:49 AM
1. One of my tougher Lance Corporals was reduced to screaming for mercy during a CI demonstration of this technique.
2. It is torture.
3. Do ends justify means?
4. I don’t know.
5. After we had lost some troops, despite our officers trying to restrain us, basically shot anything that moved when we were under fire.
6. We were angry and going to make the bad guys pay.
7. Wasn’t right and didn’t do a darn thing towards ending the conflict.
8. Some of us regret that now.
9. The water boarding business will wind up in the same category.
10. Sure don’t feel the same way about these things as I did 40 years ago.
V/R JW
May 24th, 2009 at 12:52 PM
Here is how I see it.
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I am familiar with a few accounts from people who have been waterboarded, including military people, and every last one either says it’s torture or does not deny it.
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A person who has not been through it and who says it’s not torture has no authority in my eyes, because such people have no idea what it feels like and can’t cite anyone who has been waterboarded and agrees with them.
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A person who has not been waterboarded and who says it’s torture, based on accounts from people who have experienced it, does have authority, because he’s citing people who actually know.
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I am still waiting for that singular account, from a person who has been there yet refuses to call it torture. Even if I find out about such an account, it has extremely limited value when balanced against the overwhelming number of accounts taking the opposite view.
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It’s an amazing form of torture, because it looks so benign when you see it happening. That makes it easier to get by judges and policy makers who have not been waterboarded. The Mancow video looks ridiculous. He lies down and has some water poured on his face, and a few seconds later, he begs to be released, and then he says it was torture. I believe him, but to an observer, what he went through looks almost pleasant. Like a clumsy version of a neti pot rinse.
May 24th, 2009 at 7:32 PM
Well the doctor-ordered neti pot rinse freaked me out.
Was it torture? No. Scary? YES!. I demanded they stop and never went back. I thought they were gonna drown me.
What say we take terrorists and strap them into the front seat of Cedar Points’ scariest roller-coaster. Tell them we didn’t manage to tighten all the bolts since the last accident. Run them through it faster and faster each time, approaching the max speed some idiot would pay to go. I’d talk. Is it torture?
As for the legal definition, that was addressed by Virgil’s comment and the link he provided.
Maybe you don’t believe the legal definition cuts it. You could be right. But 7 million lives in a nuclear incident vs. 7 seconds of a scumbag under running water? And he comes out with his fingernails, genitals, eyeballs, etc. intact?
May 24th, 2009 at 11:59 PM
Sure it’s torture. I think the people who deny it are thinking it’s not as horrific as e.g. flaying. Well, they’re right about that, but it’s still torture. Drowning HURTS, man.
You can’t have a war without torture. It happens, and so do a bunch of other horrible things, like innocents losing their families and getting their limbs bombed off and stuff. So, in a way, if you’re pro-war (which I kind of am), you kind of have to be pro-torture as well. When it comes to waterboarding terrorists, my chief moral concern is for the person who has to do the filthy deed.
I still think it ought to be illegal. So much of the confusion around this issue stems from the (leftoid) idea that everything needs to be formalized in perfect detail under the law, including vague and complicated moral issues. But if you decide that torture is sometimes legally defensible, there will always be borderline cases and abuses of that defense. Better to just say torture is illegal (of course you still have to argue about what constitutes torture).
And note, this is not the same thing as saying you’re not going to torture anybody. If there was a ticking-atomic-time-bomb scenario, and it was my decision, I wouldn’t much consider the law. If I felt the situation was so extraordinary that torture was justified, I’d do whatever I had to do and either try to cover it up or throw myself on the mercy of the court. If it’s worth torturing another human being, it’s worth risking retribution against one’s self. Sacrifices made in war, and all that.
May 25th, 2009 at 8:52 AM
1. Was on the periphery of the AT/CT business in the eighties.
2. The people in this work are paid to be paranoid.
3. Almost all of the terrorists being dealt with were chumps. Find that true today.
4. The professionals search for examples of competent terrorists to hold up for examination and justify their existence.
5. The 9/11 bunch weren’t particularly good. We were really bad.
6. Back in the day, the special ops community was viewed as the most serious potential threat: 98% white, right wing political views, competencies to really screw things up.
7. With a couple wars going, the #6 bunch isn’t a current threat.They’ve got plenty on their plate.
8. The examples we are being fed are the pizza delivery crowd that were going to go aboard Fort Dix and shoot people down and the New York crowd of hapless, pissed off ex-cons. Both were ratted out more-or-less instantaneously.
9. In both cases, think the Feds were walking a fine line with regard to entrapment.
10. The biggest justification for the waterboarding was intelligence gotten from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Don’t know any more than any one else, but the differing stories point to his being more blowhard than fount of knowledge.
11. The combination of willingness to torture and the provisions of the Homeland Security Act are troubling. You can be incarcerated indefinitely without due process if you anger or incite the wrong federal official.
12. Am uneasy about the direction we are traveling in.
13. Is it necessary to become the mirror image of our opponents to survive?
14. Answer to avoiding having one of our cities leveled? Fresh out. Sorry.
V/R J. West
May 25th, 2009 at 8:57 AM
That was a demonstration of the little known WordPress “outline” feature.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:14 AM
1. WP 2.0
2. Help for the feeble-minded in marshalling thought.
V/R J. West
May 25th, 2009 at 4:29 PM
my next door neighbor was Ranger wo was waterboarded as part of SERE; a friend’s son is a SEAL and was subjected several times.
Both concluded it was torture and are truly amused at RW warrior set who insist otherwise. At this point, the only people acting as if it isnt torture are a few noble souls at LGF and a couple of commenters at Protein wisdom.
PS- They both said that they would have eventually given the enemy as much as they needed by the third time.
May 26th, 2009 at 9:17 AM
Yours is the 2nd blog I read every day. Please check out the 1st that I read: http://powerlineblog.com/. Go down several articles and read the comments of Leo Thorsness, someone with the authority to comment on definitions of torture.
May 26th, 2009 at 9:24 AM
Apparently, Thorsness has not been waterboarded, so he doesn’t know whether it’s torture or not.
May 26th, 2009 at 1:05 PM
Neither has McCain, so he doesn’t really know any more than two recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. You like his opinion, I don’t. Nobody “knows” anything.
May 26th, 2009 at 1:36 PM
I explained this already.
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McCain’s opinion carries more weight with me than Thorsness’s, because it is based on (or at least comports with) the experiences of people who have been waterboarded.
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The Congressional Medal of Honor is not awarded based on a person’s personal knowledge of waterboarding.
May 26th, 2009 at 3:23 PM
Sorry to make you explain it again. I see you did this before my first comment. I just thought he had an interesting and possibly relevant view of the issue. Guess you don’t. Glad to see you agree that it’s all about opinions and not knowledge though. Thanks for the insight on the Medal of Honor.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:44 PM
1. Thorsness’ MOH was awarded for aerial combat.
2. Having said that, his comportment in captivity was respected by the POW community. As was McCain’s.
3. Not everybody in residence at the Hanoi Hilton behaved as well -as judged by their peers.
4. Didn’t know they were water boarding at SERE school. Back in the day, the mistreatment consisted of shoving you in a 3 x 2 x 2 box, pouring water over you and letting you freeze in Spokane’s lovely weather. Or beatings, if you PO’ed the NCO’s running the compound.
5. Technically, they weren’t supposed to use force. It happened, though. The ostensibly benign nature of water boarding is in line the the directives of that school. I can well believe they added it to the curriculum.
6. Not many Rangers attended SERE School. It was mostly for aircrew.
7. As for SEALS, after a 3 hour beach run in full gear, and other obligatory nastinesses, waterboarding might seem like a form of relaxation.
8. In my day, Seal Team Six was stationed in Bahrain. While they may have waterboarded one another as a form of training, were not conversing with the objects of their attention. That Team had the AT mission, at the time.
9. The Special Activities Division of the CIA is largely composed of ex-special operations troops (Rangers and SEALS, for example).If those were the folks doing the ‘enhanced interrogations’ it all dovetails very neatly.
10. These folks will be genuinely surprised about the fuss. The subjects they interrogated are still alive. Now that’s restraint….
11. Unfortunately the water boarding and the mess at Abu Ghraib have really hurt us.
12. It has made our work overseas harder, recruitment and motivation of our opponents easier.
13. It has also strengthened our tolerance for visiting this crap on ourselves.
V/R J West