Waterboarding is a despicable practice, one where a cloth is held over the face of the blindfolded victim (strapped down and helpless) as water is poured on to it. The cloth makes it difficult – usually impossible – for the victim to breathe. It simulates drowning. The victim often chokes on the water, gasping for air. Often the victim becomes unconscious. While the victim recovers physically from the procedure, assuming he or she doesn’t actually drown, the mental scars are intense.
Even as the President noted in late July that “We tortured some folks, we did some things that were contrary to our values" – referencing waterboarding among other “enhanced interrogation” techniques, there are many politicians who find that these are moral, legal and acceptable procedures to get prisoners to talk. Former GOP Presidential candidate, John McCain, has been equally vociferous in his condemnation of the practice. During the Bush administration, seriously misinformed lawyers at the Department of Justice issued memoranda that found waterboarding and other rather horrific interrogation practices were “not torture” and were thus permitted, a position that has since been repudiated by the current administration.
Known as the Torture Memos (2002), the legal memoranda were issued by US Assistant Attorney General, John Woo, and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Jay Bybee, effectively gave the CIA the greenlight to apply these enhanced interrogation techniques as legally permissible. Waterboarding thus became “one of the interrogation techniques adopted by the CIA and sanctioned by the Justice Department when the agency opened a series of secret overseas prisons to question captured terrorism suspects.
“Three CIA detainees — Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — were waterboarded while held in secret CIA prisons. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was waterboarded 183 times, according to [the above noted memos] issued by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department… All three men, along with 11 other so-called high-value detainees, were transferred to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Sept. 2006, when President Bush closed the CIA’s overseas prisons.” Washington Post, August 28th.
In World War II, the use of waterboarding by Japanese authorities against U.S. soldiers was enough to justify the conviction and execution of or imposition of lengthy sentences against the implementing Japanese officers for “torture.” See the details presented by Evan Wallach, a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, who taught the law of war as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School, who presents some fairly nasty details in a November 2, 2007 piece in the Washington Post.
The practice has been uniformly condemned as a violation of the United Nations Convention against Torture: “‘I would have no problems with describing this practice as falling under the prohibition of torture,’ the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told a news conference in Mexico City… Arbour made her comment in response to a question about whether U.S. officials could be tried for the use of waterboarding that referred to CIA director Michael Hayden telling Congress … his agency had used waterboarding on three detainees captured after the September 11 attacks… Violators of the U.N. Convention against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' which allows countries to try accused war criminals from other nations, Arbour said.” Reuters, February 8, 2008.
“The International Committee of the Red Cross said [August 7th] that waterboarding is torture, the first time the group has publicly declared that a specific interrogation technique—one employed by the U.S.—violates the Geneva Conventions… The Geneva-based humanitarian organization, which oversees the treaty, weighed in amid renewed U.S. debate over Central Intelligence Agency practices after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which included waterboarding several detainees at so-called black sites overseas.” Wall Street Journal, August 7th.
Why the history lesson, Peter? This is old news. As I have written before, having used these techniques and justified them to the world, we have effectively provided a sanction to those who capture our citizens or soldiers in military situations who use waterboarding in interrogation techniques. Using our own legal memoranda, they are not doing anything that the United States has not likewise applied to their operatives in the past and defined them as moral and legal.
But today, we have one of the most despicable terrorist organizations – the beheaders, murderers of the Islamic State – taken to mimicking the United States (and going well beyond) and its treatment of Islamic terrorist captives, held in many of our “prisons” and using “enhanced interrogation techniques” against American captives. Think those orange jumpsuits worn beheaded journalist James Foley and his fellow American journalist captives “coincidentally” look just like the orange jumpsuits worn by the captives at our Guantanamo prison? Not exactly. And these terrorists are happy to apply the same waterboarding techniques because we used those techniques as well.
“At least four hostages held in Syria by the Islamic State, including an American journalist who was recently executed by the group, were waterboarded in the early part of their captivity, according to people familiar with the treatment of the kidnapped Westerners… James Foley was among the four who were waterboarded several times by Islamic State militants who appeared to model the technique on the CIA’s use of waterboarding to interrogate suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“The victims of waterboarding are often strapped down on gurneys or benches while cold water is poured over a cloth covering their faces; they suffer the sensation of feeling they are drowning… ‘They knew exactly how it was done,’ said a person with direct knowledge of what happened to the hostages. The person, who would only discuss the hostages’ experience on condition of anonymity, said the captives, including Foley, were held in Raqqah, a city in the north-central region of Syria.” Washington Post.
The immoral and illegal practices applied during the Bush-Cheney administration will probably haunt American captives for a very long time. No matter how loudly and clearly American leaders decry the practice today, we did it and justified clear torture under a twisted logic that no one of substance in any position of authority has ever accepted as valid. We are denied the moral high ground on issues of torture as a result, and we lost immeasurable international credibility in the process, credibility we have yet to regain.
Taking what may seem to be an expedient side-stepping of common moral decency – solely because the technique left no permanent physical marks and did not kill the victim – has brought some terrible chickens home to roost. The big question is whether those who might be tempted to take a moral shortcut in the future have learned anything. Time will tell.
I’m Peter Dekom, and there is never any justification for torture.
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