How did waterboarding become so commonplace a term? When did we first hear it, and how did we learn about it? How did we become so conversant in methods of torture?
It used to be, in my life at least, that torture was something hinted at in movies by lingering shots of knives and hooks and bizarre deformed scalpel-looking things, then perhaps a shot of the bound hero’s face, frightened but resolute. Or, again in movies but this time more arthouse ones, a South African or South American freedom fighter beaten with cables or doused in water—but still vague, still something too gruesome and inhuman to be more than hinted at.
And now we’ve all become so sophisticated about torture, about stress positions and sleep deprivation and waterboarding (a word Microsoft Word identifies as a misspelling—for now, anyway).
It’s not a kind of sophistication I wanted, but it’s been forced on me. These days, responsible, informed citizenship involves knowing at least something (though hopefully not pornographically much) about the horrendous, inhuman things our government is doing to people supposedly in the name of our safety. So when did our education in torture begin? What began waterboarding’s slide from outlandish to everyday?
Back in 2004 (so in paywalled archives), it was “water boarding,” two words. The New York Times first used it on May 13, 2004, in an article by James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis titled “Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited In Top Qaeda Interrogations.” They wrote
In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as ''water boarding,'' in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.
The Washington Post didn’t use it until June 23, 2004, and then to poo-poo the notion it was being employed at Guantanamo:
Drip, drip, drip: CNN had to endure its own kind of water torture yesterday, repeating at least five times in five hours that a story was wrong, dead wrong, couldn't have been more wrong when it said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had signed off on an interrogation technique called "water boarding" for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly chastised the network, telling the House Armed Services Committee: "I'd like to clarify at least one thing that's been seriously misreported for almost the last 24 hours by CNN claiming that Secretary Rumsfeld authorized some kind of extreme interrogation method in Guantanamo. . . . I was in discussions with Secretary Rumsfeld where he specifically ruled out the use of that kind of technique."
A retraction posted on CNN.com said, "The tactic involves strapping a prisoner down and immersing him in water and making the subject feel as though he is drowning." CNN senior Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre chalked it up to an "honest misunderstanding," telling Wolf Blitzer, "Let's just say that we had another discussion today in which it was clear that the understanding that we had yesterday was not the same understanding we had today."
As clear as water.
The Post took the concept a little more seriously in a July 15, 2004 editorial, describing the practice
What is known, mostly through leaks to the media, is that several of the CIA's detainees probably have been tortured -- and that a controversial Justice Department opinion defending such abuse was written after the fact to justify the activity. According to reports in The Post, pain medication for Abu Zubaida, who suffered from a gunshot wound in the groin, was manipulated to obtain his cooperation, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to "water boarding," which causes the sensation of drowning. Notwithstanding the Justice Department opinion, parts of which recently were repudiated by the White House, U.S. personnel responsible for such treatment may be guilty of violating the international Convention Against Torture and U.S. laws related to it.
And concluding
The Pentagon and Congress are investigating the Army's handling of foreign detainees; though they are slow and inadequate, these probes contrast with the almost complete absence of scrutiny of the CIA's activity. This failure of oversight must be corrected. Though the United States is at war, it cannot be acceptable to hold enemy combatants indefinitely in secret prisons, with no external review or humanitarian oversight of any kind. Congress, or the courts, must step in to correct what appears to be a systematic violation of international law -- and fundamental American values.
Remember that? When you didn’t know what waterboarding is? When it was two words instead of one and we didn’t know the litany of details we now know about how exactly it’s done? Didn’t know that
In waterboarding -- one of a number of drowning-simulation techniques that date to the Spanish Inquisition -- a prisoner is generally strapped down with his feet higher than his head. Water is then poured on his face while his nose and mouth are covered by a cloth. The technique produces an intense sensation of being close to suffocation and drowning, according to interrogation experts and human rights advocates.
Proponents of torture are fond of trying to put us on a slippery slope: If someone knew where a bomb was that could kill thousands of people, wouldn’t it be ok to torture them? And then, having said that torture might under that one circumstance be permissible, you get the next circumstance, and the next. But they’ve also put us on a slippery slope with regard to torture techniques. First we hear about waterboarding as a sort of rumor, then we hear a little more and a little more, until finally it’s commonplace and even the fact that it dates to the Spanish Inquisition, even the fact that it’s not just being put under water (and who hasn’t stayed under water a little too long, we’re supposed to think) as the early reports indicated, that it’s a fairly complex and controlled process that doesn’t just simulate drowning but begins the process, even these facts don’t really give us too much pause. As progressives, as human rights advocates, many of us oppose it but still, we become inured to it, as to so many other things.
It’s worth considering, too, in what other ways the debate (on this and other issues) has been shifted on us, the ways that our horizons as progressives have narrowed from doing better to just not doing worse. In this case, I could’ve sworn waterboarding had been in common usage for much longer than 2½ years. Of course, those 2½ years have felt more like 10, but it highlights how vigilant we need to be against this kind of goalpost-moving.