Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Via Ned Resnikoff, both Glenn Reynolds and John Ashcroft have claimed that they would be waterboarded in order to prove that it isn’t torture.  This is a transparently stupid idea — the Khmer Rogue, the Spanish Inquisition and most criminal statues define waterboarding as torture.  But they have a kernel of a decent point — waterboarding isn’t deadly and has no long term physical effects to speak of.  I don’t want to sound like Rambo, but I could probably handle waterboarding in a controlled situation where I know it would stop eventually, and knew that the people doing it to me weren’t trying to harm me.  Of course, that’s not how waterboarding is experienced by detainees.  What makes it torture is that when in captivity, you are being interrogated and then get waterboarded.  You do not know that your assailants are every going to stop, you don’t know what else they’re planning for you.  There is no safeword, there is no way out.

But if we go back to what John Ashcroft actually said, “The things that I can survive, if it were necessary to do them to me, I would do.”  Under this standard, just about everything becomes permissable.  Being put into stress positions for days, Ashcroft could survive, sexual humiliation and abuse could be survived, beatings could be survived, being forced into cold rooms could be survived, not being able to sleep for days could be survived.   Do you notice a pattern.  What makes Ashcroft’s wording especially interesting is how neatly it dovetails with the Justice Department definition of torture: “[torture] must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

I haven’t blogged much about torture, because it’s an issue that really does not need to be discussed.  The ticking time bomb scenario is bogus, it doesn’t work, it’s disgusting, destroys our international image and we didn’t need to do it in World War II.  Beyond that, there isn’t much debate to be had.