Is waterboarding torture? According to Giulani this week, “it depends on how it’s done, it depends on the circumstances, it depends on who does it.”
Meaning, I presume, that if an American soldier commits torture, it’s not really torture. I can’t think of any other way to interpret the words.
Quite simply, that’s wrong. Torture is torture, no matter whether its Americans or Iraqis who do it, and no matter how desperate the situation.
There was a time, in my younger and more naive days, that I thought maybe torture could be justified in the classic ticking-bomb situation: Minutes to go, hundreds of lives on the line, the evil killer won’t talk!
The trouble is, once you start down that road, it never stops. Israel’s Mossad originally allowed torture for that sort of scenario, but it soon downgraded to “Well, this guy is a suspected terrorist, and we know there’s some sort of bombing being planned, so let’s torture him just in case he knows something.” It’s the reason an Israeli judge eventually banned the use of torture.
The same thing happened when the French fought the Algerian militants trying to drive the French colonialists out of the country.
It’s happened at least a few times in the Iraq war: I’ve read accounts by security contractors, reporters and others of prisoners everyone suspected were innocent being brutalized just the same.
It’s a slippery slope and once we start on it, we’ll slip. For example, one commenter on the “captain’s quarters” blog said recently that not only would he torture a terrorist in the ticking bomb situation, he’d torture and kill the terrorists’ kids if that’s what it took to save lives (the guy said he’d find the act horrifying, but he’d do it). Isn’t torturing children–kids who aren’t guilty of anything–the sort of thing we condemn terrorists for doing?
I’ve read statements by plenty fo people, both regular folks and pundits, who don’t give two figs if our soldiers commit torture. For them, the use of torture is totally different from when tyrants and dictators do it: We’re the good guys, God’s on our side, we can’t possibly be doing anything evil, so it can’t really be torture.
Yes, it can. An American judge once said that the torturer “is the enemy of all mankind.” He was right.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Politics, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.