Is Waterboarding Torture?
Yes.
By way of the Daily Show, which remains indispensable, I saw pieces of the Pres-o-dent's appearance on the Today Show. I had to pause the dvr to explain to my wife what "waterboarding" means. It's only when you say these things out loud that you realize just how awful they are. Now the Pres-o-dent wants to tell us that waterboarding is not torture. And his attorney general has memoed that it isn't torture because it doesn't cause "grievous bodily harm," if I recall the phrase correctly. Whoa. Neither does attaching electrodes to your testicles, I guess.
But when confronted with the brutality of this, the apologists always say something like "we need this tool to protect you and your families." This is not an argument that waterboarding ISN'T torture; it's an argument that IT IS, but that we gotta do it anyway. And even on that score it's a bizarre argument. First, it's obvious that in the long run lowering the standards on torture makes the world more dangerous for everyone, including me and my family. I haven't heard a serious argument on the other side of this question. But second, I've yet to hear any evidence that IN THE SHORT RUN torture has saved any lives. In fact, the torturers at Abu Graib managed to produce a kind of hallucinogenic intelligence environment, one in which decisions were made that sent the occupation seriously off the skids. No doubt the waterboarding of Al Qaida detainees has produced equally distorted intelligence, and may be one reason why the war on terror more generally has gone of the skids.
Isn't it remarkable that the nation depends on four Republican senators to keep us from embracing the mutilation of the world's consensus on torture?
Yes.
By way of the Daily Show, which remains indispensable, I saw pieces of the Pres-o-dent's appearance on the Today Show. I had to pause the dvr to explain to my wife what "waterboarding" means. It's only when you say these things out loud that you realize just how awful they are. Now the Pres-o-dent wants to tell us that waterboarding is not torture. And his attorney general has memoed that it isn't torture because it doesn't cause "grievous bodily harm," if I recall the phrase correctly. Whoa. Neither does attaching electrodes to your testicles, I guess.
But when confronted with the brutality of this, the apologists always say something like "we need this tool to protect you and your families." This is not an argument that waterboarding ISN'T torture; it's an argument that IT IS, but that we gotta do it anyway. And even on that score it's a bizarre argument. First, it's obvious that in the long run lowering the standards on torture makes the world more dangerous for everyone, including me and my family. I haven't heard a serious argument on the other side of this question. But second, I've yet to hear any evidence that IN THE SHORT RUN torture has saved any lives. In fact, the torturers at Abu Graib managed to produce a kind of hallucinogenic intelligence environment, one in which decisions were made that sent the occupation seriously off the skids. No doubt the waterboarding of Al Qaida detainees has produced equally distorted intelligence, and may be one reason why the war on terror more generally has gone of the skids.
Isn't it remarkable that the nation depends on four Republican senators to keep us from embracing the mutilation of the world's consensus on torture?
posted by jnerone at 11:05 AM
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