Torture: Still Does Not Work

Let's repeat it again: Torture does not work. On a rare occasion, someone might extract something from an individual they have tortured, but as policy, it is terribly inefficient and does not work. Oh -- and it violates both the law and every sense of morality that the country is supposed to represent, not to mention that it undermines the argument that we are better than our enemies.

Quick Hits: Around the Blogosphere

While I catch up from another weekend away, here are a few links and other things that caught my eye:

Andrew Sullivan continues to keep his eye on the shame that has become America's acquiescence to torture. He also directs our attention to Dan Savage's powerful piece on his mother's passing.

At Cyber Hacienda Jaime both reminds us of why Cheers was brilliant and in so doing providesa rousing defense of drinking beer in the form of The Buffalo Theory.

At Fire Joe Morgan, Junior takes on both the vastly overrated Rick Reilly and idiotic cliches about bloggers.

Finally, Guenette goes back to New Hampshire and has a mini-photo essay with several involving people we both know. It looks like he had a fuitful trip providing readings and lectures. This gives me the opportunity once again to plug his book of poetry, Sudden Anthem

Supporting Torture, Diminishing the United States

So, apparently the President feels that we cannot win wars in which our strongest claim is that we are better than our enemies without doing things that cast into doubt whether we are actually better than our enemies. That is the message I draw, anyway, from President Bush's decision to veto a law that would have limited the CIA's ability to torture prisoners.

I really do not know what more there is to say. There was a time when the very idea of Americans engaging in such noxious practices inspired outrage. But too many have acquiesced. Does torture make us safer? Does it give us actionable intelligence? We have seen scant cases where either would be the case. in the meantime what we do is diminish ourselves while exposing our own troops to even worse treatment. I would just strongly encourage you all to read every one of the articles in the latest Washington Monthly, which is devoted to advocating stopping these policies. As long as this administration, which has done so much harm and so little good, is in power such cries will represent little more than lamentations. But a better day will come.

Waterboarding = Torture

Let's say it all together, kids: "waterboarding is torture." Justify it if you want. Present your 1% doctrine arguments, discuss necessary evils, present your case for the ugliness of war. I'll tell you why I think you are wrong. But don't dismiss the reality: Waterboarding is torture. (So is sleep deprivation and a host of other stuff, by the way.)

Torture, Mississippi Style

Guess where they once used a form of the "water cure"? Jim Crow Mississippi. That probably comes as no surprise. But guess where the practice was outlawed as being barbaric? Also in Jim Crow Mississippi, in the case Fisher v. State, 110 So. 361, 362 (Miss. 1926). From the blog Is That Legal (With a hat tip to Andrew Sullivan:

Waterboarding, known ironically in earlier times as "the water cure", remains -- in the view of this administration and many supporters -- not torture. And if it's not torture, then it's not cruel and unusual punishment or a violation of due process.

But here's the rub.

In 1926, the Mississippi Supreme Court called the water cure torture. No qualifiers. No hedging. Just plain, good ol' fashion torture . . . and therefore a forbidden means for securing a confession. These men were hardly a group I'd call *activist* or *liberal* and certainly not bent on subverting our country in the name of coddling criminals.

I'm just not certain what case there is justifying these sorts of measures. I think that the United States can withstand bad foreign policy. I'm not certain for how long we can withstand engaging in practices that even repellent regimes have found to be repellent. It's unnecessary. It does not make us safer. It does not provide us with actionable intelligence. And it violates the very principles that are supposed to separate ourselves from our enemies. I can see no defense for waterboarding and similar practices and I do not know why anyone would try to do so.

Waterboarding By Any Other Name

In a convincing op-ed at The Washington Post Evan Wallach, a former JAG and currently a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York and adjunct professor of who teaches the law of war at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School, wants us at least to call a spade a spade in the debate over waterboarding:

That term is used to describe several interrogation techniques. The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as "simulated drowning." That's incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. 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. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding's effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

There can be little doubt that these forms of water-based interrogation are torture. We have always known that they are torture. And arguments of convenience to try to argue otherwise are little more than intellectual chicanery and amoral, indeed immoral, posturing.

The Definitive Case Against Waterboarding

Small Wars Journal blogger Malcolm Nance has what I would hope is the definitive argument that waterboarding is torture. Nance's bio is impressive. He is "a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government’s Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies" as well as "a 20-year veteran of the US intelligence community's Combating Terrorism program and a six year veteran of the Global War on Terrorism."

This should be a no-brainer. In my own work in South Africa I have seen how simulated drowning and suffocation were a popular means of inflicting pain and suffering -- of torturing -- alleged enemies of the state. Examples abound of other totalitarian regimes -- regimes against which the United States has always tried to define itself -- engaging in similar behaviors. I can see no justification for waterboarding and its ilk, and I do not see how illegitimate, indeed evil, means help us fight legitimate wars, never mind highly contested ones.

Hat Tip to Christopher Orr at The Plank

Was Durbin Right? (2007 Edition)

Most of you may remember the imbroglio in the summer of 2005 when Senator Richard Durbin criticized American torture policies and suggested that if you were to hear some of the interrogation techniques carried out against detainees you might be able to mistake them with Soviet gulags or Nazi Germany. Durbin caused more than a bit of a storm as conservatives rushed to see who could condemn him the most harshly.

I wrote something of a defense of Durbin, or at least a call for more intellectually honest debate at the late, great Rebunk. (I was not alone.)

Well, it must be a bit uncomfortable for some of the conservatives who reserved their harshest vitriol for liberals who defended Durbin, or at least asked for an honest rendering of what Durbin had said and within what context. Of course now we know from the yeoman's work of Andrew Sullivan that the very idea of "enhanced interrogation" bears more than a passing resemblance, indeed shares its euphemistic name, with the German "Verschärfte Vernehmung" introduced by -- you guessed it -- the Gestapo.

And now the Sunday New York Times reveals that the administration's approved interrogation techniques were in large part adopted from -- wait for it -- Stalin's Soviet Union.

I, for one, look forward to the apologia from the smug commentariat.