Water Boarding is TORTURE

In his recent testimony Mukasey seemed unable to form an opinion on whether waterboarding was 'torture or not' and furthermore, whether it was constitutional. As my thirteen year old daughter might say, like duh.

Let's help him out.

David Corn has an old post showing some photos from Phnom Penh where you can see a waterboard in action as part of something the Cambodians use to illustrate the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. This email to Matthew Yglesias makes the point well:

As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

As Matthew notes, "you don't see the world's great geopolitical successes -- the twentieth century USA, 19th century Britain, 18th century France -- torturing their way to the top of the heap."

During WWII our interrogators never, NEVER used torture. They wanted the truth. They played chess or ping pong with their prisoners. They served tea and had long philosophical conversations.

They didn't do what the Khmer Rouge did because they didn't want false 'confessions' they wanted the truth.

Given where we are, we need to ask, is the reason for waterboarding that the 'truth' isn't good enough? Is Mukasey so bought and paid for he can't condemn a universally reviled technique employed by the Khmer Rouge and showcased in a Cambodian museum as par exemplum of Pol Pot's odious reign of terror? Or is the logic that we need torture to build false confessions for the nonexistent boogieman of 'islamofascism', perhaps?

Like Oedipus did when discovering he'd killed his own father, if they were an honorable people on realizing what they've done, and where they've gone morally, the politicians who excuse this excercise of state terror and torture on any level should justifiably pluck out their own eyes.

Why? Because there is no excuse. Water boarding is torture.