Waterboarding
Is Just
Very Unpleasant . . . Right?
By Robert Weitzel
25 February, 2008
Countercurrents.org
“This government does not torture.”
- George W. Bush -
All
right! Waterboarding is a very unpleasant experience, which is sometimes
fatal. I can also imagine that a small percentage of root canals are
fatal, but no one routinely refers to them as torture—just very
unpleasant.
That said, if I were grabbed off the street by five guys in ski masks
who jabbed a hypodermic in my neck, threw me in the back of a van,
striped me to gooseflesh, gave me an enema and jammed a wad of cotton
where only a proctoscope belongs, forced me into diapers and an orange
jumpsuit, plugged my ears, duck-taped my eyes and put a sack over
my head, shackled me in a stress position to the cold, aluminum deck
of an unheated cargo plane for 15 hours, strapped me in a chair at
some black dental site in Karachi and commenced the root canal in
a shower of Punjabi expletives . . . then okay, maybe taken in toto
I’d consider that experience torture.
On February 13 the Senate narrowly passed—on a 51-45 party-line
vote—an intelligence bill that will, among other things, ban
waterboarding as an “enhanced interrogation technique,”
a Bush-era euphemism for torture.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who was tortured as
a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, traded his principled stance against
waterboarding for a White House endorsement of his candidacy and voted
against the ban. Torture is now officially a plank in the GOP platform.
Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama were too busy
campaigning to go on congressional record as either supporting or
opposing the ban.
Such a narrow political plurality against the torture of a human being
is possible in an overly-religious nation because of the mistaken
notion that torturing a person begins and ends with “waterboarding”
and because that term sounds a lot like “waterslide” and
“water park.” Who hasn’t gotten water up the nose
while playing in a pool but still enjoyed the overall experience?
Dick Cheney refers to waterboarding as “a dunk in the water.”
Attorney General Mukasey refuses to call it torture unless, of course,
it’s happening to him. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) defended
his vote against the ban on waterboarding by saying, “It is
not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in
no real danger . . . the impact is psychological."
I have news for Mr. Lieberman. If I were strapped in a straitjacket
and locked in a 2x3x7 foot box, the exquisite psychological pain of
that experience would find no rival in burning coals. And I would
say anything to make it stop. Torture, physical or psychological,
is about as singularly personal an experience as birth and death.
Waterboarding has become the cause célèbre in the torture
controversy that began in this country with the revelation of tortured
Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. Considering the attention it gets—3,810,000
Google hits—one can be forgiven for thinking it is the only
“enhanced interrogation technique” being used. In reality,
it is only the most benign sounding of the Bush-era chamber of horrors,
which includes, but is not limited to: electric shock, hypothermia,
heat injuries, forced sexual acts, prolonged stress positions, beatings,
dog attacks, withholding food, water, and medical attention, sleep
depravation, sensory overload, and mock execution.
We have already become a nation “comfortable” with the
idea that waterboarding is torture. In a November 2007 CNN poll, 68
percent of the respondents agreed that waterboarding constitutes torture.
But only 58 percent of the respondents believe the U.S. should not
use the technique. For now, there is a narrow moral plurality against
its use.
Waterboarding is the thin edge of the wedge that will work its way
into the political and moral discussion and slowly, but inexorably,
desensitize the nation to the overt and covert use of all forms of
torture. Torture will become a “regrettable” but necessary
weapon in the war on terror, much as the madness of “mutual
assured destruction” was thought to be integral to surviving
the Cold War. Once in the arsenal, torture, like nuclear missiles,
will become an unassailable tool of national defense.
Keep in mind, a particular torture technique is not applied in isolation,
but is part of a longer torturing experience that includes kidnapping,
extraordinary rendition, prolonged isolation, denial of legal rights,
no communication with family, draconian sentences, loss of hope, psychosis,
suicide, and execution.
Keep in mind also that too often the victims of a torturing experience
are the innocent, the constitutionally protected dissenter, the political
opponent, the disenfranchised . . . the children of the disappeared.
On June 18, 1940 the Russia army invaded Lithuania and began arresting
community leaders and intellectuals. My aunt’s mother was a
librarian, one of her town’s intellectuals. She was arrested
and charged with espionage. To extract a confession, her interrogators
used pliers to rip the flesh from the inside of her upper arms. I
don’t know what she told them. She was, after all, just a woman
who loved books. Regardless, she was convicted and condemned to death.
After languishing for months in a death cell waiting to be executed,
her sentence was commuted to fifteen years in a Siberian gulag. She
did not see her husband or her children for a quarter of a century.
Her torture did not begin or end with the pliers—a Stalin-era
“enhanced interrogation technique.” The scars from the
pliers were visible on her arms, which she hid under long sleeves.
The scars of twenty-five years were visible in her eyes, which she
hid in books for the remainder of her life.
A society that accommodates itself to the idea of torture, be it torture
of minutes or hours or months or years, forfeits the right to think
of itself as moral or humane. That nation is not the beacon light
of liberty and justice shinning on less enlightened countries. It
is the umbra.
Robert Weitzel is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience. His essays regularly appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He has been published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Skeptic Magazine, Freethought Today, and on popular liberal websites. He can be contacted at: robertweitzel@mac.com
