Time and again the Bush Administration has indicated that "We don't torture", yet "waterboarding" remains one of the tools that remains in the CIA's arsenal of techniques for obtaining information from prisoners. Never mind that when the Japanese used waterboarding on American POWs during WWII, we called it torture. Never mind that the International Community is of a consensus that waterboarding is indeed torture, the American people SEEM to think that it is not. Follow me below the fold for a discussion of what waterboarding is, a few hypotheses as to why the American people don't seem to be concerned about it, and perhaps what we can do about it.
Forgive me if everyone already knows what precisely waterboarding is, but I will share what I know about it just to make sure we are all on the same sheet of music. I also feel I should point out that I really don't enjoy writing about such things, but I firmly believe that knowledge is power, especially when dealing with the Bush Administration. My main source on this material is Wikipedia which I cross-checked a bit.
Waterboarding is not one precise method of interrogation (torture if you will), but rather a family of techniques that all revolve around drowning the victim. I don't claim to know which one, or ones, we as a country are using. Water torture was used during the Inquisition and involved forcing a person to drink copious amounts of water by pouring it into their mouth. The choice was drink or suffocate. This is not what we are doing. The Inquisition also had another technique where a person was strapped to a board, their feet were brought above their head and their head was tipped back into a bucket of water. It would suffocate the victim and typically force water into their nose. The head being lower than the body, they could not fill their lungs with water, thus the person could be revived. The dunking stool is a later variation.
Modern variations appear to include putting a thick cloth over a persons face and then pouring water onto it to restrict breathing, or replacing the cloth with cellophane which would further restrict breathing and allow water to be funneled into the persons nose. A variation that was (is?) popular in South American is "El Submarino" in which the persons head is dunked into water that might have excrement or other nasty materials in it.
So is this torture? I think that most of the people that have read this far would agree that it is, but if you are still in doubt, ask yourself these questions. 1. If it is not torture why would these characters volunteer information otherwise. 2. Why would South American regimes, who also use things like electric shock and burning, keep it in their arsenal of interrogation tools? The answer to the last question is simple. One, it leave no marks and two, different people have different phobias so finding the right method of torture to break a person is sometimes key.
I believe in having above the board discussions of topics and one thing we keep hearing is that "torture doesn't work". This is an incorrect statement. The correct statement is "torture doesn't always work and there are other methods available". Some people will break when tortured and some won't. Some people will volunteer information when treated nicely and some won't. Some people will volunteer all sorts of useless or wrong information which then must be checked out wasting substantial amounts of time for intelligence personnel. This last statement is what leads to the line "torture doesn't work", except when it does.
So if torture works sometimes, why shouldn't we try it? It's hard to believe we have reached a point where we actually have to come with answers to such questions. The reasons are multitudinous, but I will throw out a few.
1. It violates a persons human rights and that is not what we stand for as a country.
2. We have signed the Geneva Convention and the International Convention against torture. We cannot break these treaties without looking like hypocrites.
3. A country that sets up secret prisons and tortures people does not follow the "Rule of Law" we hear so much about again makes us look like hypocrites.
4. Enemy soldiers fight harder if they know they will be tortured after capture.
5. Sources of information from locals start to dry up when word gets out that you are torturing their countrymen.
6. It ruins people's lives long after the pain has stopped.
So why do are Americans unconcerned about waterboarding and other forms of rough interrogation. I don't pretend to have the answer, but I have some hypotheses.
1. They STILL believe what their President says when he says it is not torture. I have no solution for those people that blindly follow the President..
2. They just don't think this is torture compared to some of the more fearsome tortures that are out there. Frank discussion of what we are doing would help here as opposed to the obfuscation by the BA.
3. They are scared, know deep down it is torture, but won't admit to it because they want to be safe. Explaining that there are other ways of getting intel and ensuring safety is the only way to address those people.
4. The 24 Factor. They know it is torture, but think that torture will get them detailed, immediately actionable intelligence and that everyone will sort of be buds when it is over. Not in the real world unfortunately. Intel is rarely precise and the effects are long lasting. People that have been waterboarded extensively can't take showers and are uncomfortable when it rains. The reality is not pretty.
5. They simply want to see Arabs tortured to make them pay for 9/11. No hope for these people either, I don't think.
Anyway, I think the support for these practices stems from a variety of the reasons I listed. Hopefully if we start discussing intelligently what we are really doing her (which is pretty much the foundation of any democracy) we can help to counteract this. I'm out of time for a great summary and I can only spend so much time writing about torture. Please answer my poll question because I am still struggling with trying to understand how we got here.
Blanchy