On Torture

I feel like I'm missing something in the debate over the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales's replacement. The debate about whether the U.S. should torture people, and more specifically about whether waterboarding is torture.

Today things got even murkier for me after skimming the op-ed piece in the paper by David Reinhard, The Oregonian's lone voice in support of all things Bush. His piece today tries to argue that waterboarding isn't all that bad -- that's it's not really torture, while at the same time arguing that it's bad enough (apparently) that it makes terrorists give up valuable information. He uses the well-worn example of our lives hanging in the balance and the only way to safety is through torturing a suspect.

Of course, it seems to me if our entire security apparatus comes down to that, we're hurtin' gators. I have a hard time going along with this fantasy scenario. Especially since it comes from the so-called "values" crowd. In effect they are saying we NEED to go against our values to preserve the state. So there's "do the right thing" and then there's "well, it would be NICE to do the right thing, but we can't always do the right thing." If anyone else suggested this approach, they would be charged with "moral relativism," which used to be a bad thing, but now I have learned that, appropriately enough, moral relativism is only bad sometimes!

Here's my favorite snippet from Reinhard:

"But is any and all waterboarding torture and therefore illegal? I don't think so. First, if all waterboarding is torture, why does the U.S. government waterboard its own folks in survival training programs? It doesn't gouge out trainees' eyes or rip out fingernails to get them ready to withstand the horrors of capture. Is it because waterboarding is safe and painless?"

It's confusing, and you'll have to take my word for it that it wouldn't make any more sense if I included the whole piece. It sounds as though he's saying we use waterboarding to train our men to "withstand the horrors of capture" -- but if that's the case, he's saying waterboarding is, in fact, a "horror" of capture. That sure sounds like a definition of torture.

I don't really get it.

The other part of the debate that confounds me is U.S. senators (pro-Bush, pro-torture) who say "well, the nominee for the AG's office can't really say it's a crime because then he'd have to prosecute the people who did it." Um... YEAH, that's right! "We can't really call murder a crime because then we'd have to punish murderers." Does that sound any better?