Waterboarding

There are a bunch of questions. Was Mukasey giving an evasive semantic answer to a substantive question when asked a substantive question whether waterboarding is torture? Is it torture? Does it simulate drowning, or is it drowning?

Mukasey was evasive. He didn't want to say something that would condemn illegal acts on the part of the administration. This was clear from the say-nothing follow up memo. However, the particular response that most people were carping about was correct. Waterboarding, as explaned by Senator Whitehouse, is not per se illegal torture. The description given was not an airtight legal definition. It would include applying what would normally be torture to willing volunteers for training demonstrations, and could possibly include some other applications short of legal torture.

On the other hand, in a vernacular rather than hypertechnical sense, waterboarding, traditionally referred to for hundreds of years as the water torture or the drowning torture, is pretty clearly torture when practiced in the form being discussed. I wish Mukasey had been asked whether the rack, the iron maiden, branding irons, thumbscrews, rape, mock execution, the capucha, flaying, electric shocks, mutilation, or burning were torture. He would have given either legalistic "that depends" answers for those too, which would beg for some elicidation, or not, which would beg the question of why his answer for the drowning torture was different. Either way, you'd put him on the spot.

The definition of waterboarding as a "interrogation technique" is misleading. Traditionally, torture has been practiced not as a means of interrogation specifically, but as a more general form of coersion or punishment. It has been used to force religious recantations or conversions, solicit information, or terrorize a population as a form of collective punishment or deterrence. This was supposedly Dick Cheney's rationale for using torture: not to get information, but to deter people who might not fear death or imprisonment from assisting al Qaeda. Such use of waterboarding is illegal because it fits the definition of terrorism (except in domestic law, wherein actions practiced by the United States against its enemies are excluded from the definition).

NPR said yesterday that to drown was to die of suffocation by water. I could find no source for this. The definitions I found all just said that drowning was suffocation or asphixiation, not necessarily fatal. Waterboarding is drowning.

Is there a law against practices that are not torture but sound like torture? There should be. If one uses dental surgery without anesthetic, or uses a blowtorch, the damage to the image of the U.S. will come from the way that sounds, not whether it meets a technical definition of torture. Keep those things put away. Using them, or waterboarding, in a manner just short of torture, would have may of the negatives of the real thing. And just as little benefit.

Torture is almost always counterproductive and ineffective. It is not without effects, though, and some people want to achieve those effects for their own sake: terror, coersion, and yes, you can get some information. You can pick up tiny clues even from confabulated stories. Is there ever an occasion where torture is the best or only way to get information? I find that highly unlikely. So unlikely, that this is a good place just to draw a hard line and not cross it.