Torturous Debate Over Waterboarding

By Eric Alterman, George Zornick

Washington, D.C. is in the thick of an apparently arcane, but actually fundamental debate, hinging on one question: "Is waterboarding torture?" George W. Bush's nominee for attorney general, Judge Michael Mukasey, refuses to answer the question one way or another. Most media speculation has therefore focused on the politics of this non-response. Will it destroy his nomination? Would a straight answer either way have done more damage, or less?

Unsurprisingly, some of the commentary has focused on the question itself: Is waterboarding really torture? We heard the self-appointed expert Mort Kondracke opining on Fox News, predictably saying that it "doesn't result in any lasting damage." And an expert on CNN saying "you wake up feeling fine the next day." CNN even ran a playful report from Jeannie Moos, showing people waterboarding themselves, and ending with footage of someone surfing on the ocean -- on a real "water board." Get it?

Even the "responsible" media outlets danced like Fred and Ginger around what to call waterboarding. Most went with "interrogation technique" or "interrogation method," although some added the understated adjectives "coercive" or "harsh," and we heard much talk of "simulated drowning" and heads being dunked in water.

Yet as former Judge Advocate General Evan Wallach wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, those characterizations fall far short of the truth. "To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death," he wrote. "That is, the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut."

Allen S. Keller, director of the Bellevue Hospital Center/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, informed the senators present at the confirmation hearings, "There is a real risk of death from actually drowning or suffering a heart attack or damage to the lungs from inhalation of water. Long term effects include panic attacks, depression, and PTSD." One prisoner who underwent waterboarding during World War II, when asked how it felt, replied, "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning ... just gasping between life and death."

Waterboarding has been defined as torture for decades precisely because it causes such obvious physical and emotional suffering. In 1898, for instance, U.S. soldiers were often court-martialed for using the practice on Filipino guerillas. The officer who suspended one soldier for waterboarding wrote that "the United States cannot afford to sanction the addition of torture." And after World War II, the United States held many Japanese prison-camp officers and guards legally responsible for torture -- including waterboarding -- that they conducted on American prisoners.

On January 21, 1968, the Washington Post published on its front page a photo of an American troop pouring water over a cloth on a North Vietnamese prisoner's face. The caption explained that the method seen in the picture induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk." The soldier was court-martialed on February 28, 1968.

Even the loose definition of torture adopted by the Bush administration and crafted by University of California at Berkeley Professor of Law John Yoo while on loan to the Justice Department, would appear to include waterboarding. According to Yoo, for a practice to constitute "torture," it "must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the moment of infliction but it also requires lasting psychological harm, such as seen in mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder." But as Wallach wrote in The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, "None of the Memo's analysis explains why water-boarding does not cause physical or psychological pain sufficient to meet the criminalization standards it enunciates."

In his terrific new play "Rock 'n' Roll," Tom Stoppard has his character, Jan, a former Czech dissident, wonder aloud, "How did the propaganda paper and the capitalist press arrive at the same relation to the truth? Because all systems are blood brothers. Changing one system for another is not what the Velvet Revolution was for. We have to begin again with the ordinary meaning of words. Giving new meanings to words is how systems lie to themselves, beginning with the word for themselves -- socialism, democracy. ... An invasion becomes fraternal assistance, and a parasite can be someone who is punished by unemployment and punished again for being unemployed."

And "waterboarding becomes a normal interrogation technique," he might have added, without anyone knowing which system -- communism or "democracy" -- he was describing.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, "Altercation," appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation. His seventh book, Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will appear early next year.

George Zornick is a New York-based writer.

Comments

[rollingdivision]

If it comes down to doing everything possible to save thousands of innocent US citizens, torture is not and should not be ruled out.

[mae692]

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2006/10/05/PH2006100500898.jpg

On January 21, 1968, during the Vietnam War, The Washington Post published a controversial photograph of three American soldiers waterboarding a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang. The article described the practice as "fairly common." The photograph led to the soldier being courtmartialed by a U.S. military court two months later. Another waterboarding photograph of the same scene is also exhibited in the War Remnants Museum at Ho Chi Minh City.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding

[ProfessorDuh]

Somebody should tell Mort the Whore that "lasting damage" does not define torture. That's maiming someone, or perhaps murdering them. Torture is the deliberate infliction of agony. All civilized people know that already, but apparently Republicans do not.

[kellygrrrl]

due to the Writer's Guild strike
Americans will be forced to tune in to Reality Programming

"BlackWate­rBoarding"
and
"SopranosD­ynastyDall­as: The Bush Family"

[JustAnotherJoe]

This whole debate is but small part of the Bush administration's attempt to cover its collective asses starting with Cheney. They're doing all they can to avoid accountability here or at the Hague.

[SamThornton]

The Bush administration's use of torture is one of the behaviors that most foreign policy experts agree has so tarnished the American image world-wide that it will require 20-50 years to repair the damage.

As painful as it might be for some, the single act that can accelerate this process is for those who authorize and perform torture to be brought before the bar of justice and tried for those criminal acts, whether that occurs in US or international courts.

If restoring our world standing is important, some sacrifices will have to be made by those responsible for the problem, starting with the Commander in Chief.

[hopeless277]

There is no debate on waterboarding. It's legal, constitutional, and desirable. It's the new American way. And the way they toss around the word 'war'. What it really is is 'enhanced visitation'. And murder, which is actually 'accelerated life expectancy'. Torture is bad. Waterboarding is good. The congress of the United States of America has said so. Let Their will be done.

[Dap]

Everything is relative, it all depends on ones POV, on the water-board, or above the water-board looking on?

Got Conscience?

[ceu]

Why is there a debate on this subject? Why does every subject have to be discussed as though there are two equally compelling viewpoints? Creationism, evolution, torture, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Some things just are - no gray areas, no debate necessary. Waterboarding is torture. Does anyone think there were be a debate or discussion about it if it were being done to a member of the US military as a POW??

[realist333]

Further to the issue of torture, I believe Gen. Hayden of the CIA when he tells Charlie Rose that torture is the least effective way of getting useful information from a prisoner. He doesn't speak for the entire Company, unfortunately, but he and other top intelligence people all agree that psychological methods of interrogation are far more successful than torture.

[realist333]

You are correct. There has never been the least doubt that waterboarding is a physical and psychological torture.
When a jurist as experienced and capable as Mukasey equivocates on so simple a question, we must assume that his potential employer has instructed him to do so.
Nor is it hard to see why.