Townhall...
Bin Laden’s Death
Doesn’t Vindicate Torture
By Jeff Jacoby
When US Representative Steve King learned that Osama bin Laden had been
killed by US troops in Pakistan, he couldn’t resist a little crowing
about the efficacy of torture.
“Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?” the Iowa
Republican tweeted on May 2.
It was an outrageous remark, but King wasn’t going out on a limb. A
parade of others, mostly Republicans, have joined him in claiming that
the death of bin Laden had vindicated the use of waterboarding -- the
most notorious of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” the Bush
administration employed to extract information from senior al-Qaeda
detainees.
On the Senate floor, for example, Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss called the
bin Laden killing “one of the clearest examples of the extraordinary
value” of the CIA’s interrogation practices, while former Bush staffer
Marc Thiessen wrote in a Washington Post column that Obama should award
the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the interrogators who waterboarded
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into cooperating with US intelligence agents.
US Representative Peter King of New York, the House Homeland Security
chairman, told Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly that waterboarding
loosened the first crucial detail in tracking down bin Laden. “And so
for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, to say that it
should be stopped and never used again -- we got vital information
which directly led to us bin Laden.” When candidates in the Republican
presidential debate in South Carolina last Thursday were asked whether
they would “support a resumption of waterboarding,” three of them
raised their hands to lusty audience applause.
I don’t know whether waterboarding was indispensable to rolling up bin
Laden; for every interrogation expert who says it was, another expert
argues the opposite. But the case against waterboarding never rested
primarily on its usefulness. It rested on its wrongfulness. It is wrong
when bad guys do it to good guys. It is just as wrong when good guys do
it to al-Qaeda.
Some Americans have convinced themselves that waterboarding is closer
to “a dunk in water” than to genuine torture. In fact, it is an
agonizing, terrifying form of abuse. “The victim experiences the
sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing,
vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling
of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched
in the gut,” Evan Wallach, a former JAG who teaches the law of war at
the Brooklyn and New York law schools, wrote in 2007. “The main
difference is that the drowning process is halted. . . . It can cause
severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.” There
was good reason why waterboarding was one of the war crimes for which
Japanese officers were hanged after World War II.
Torture is unreliable, since people will often say anything -- invent
desperate fictions or diversions -- to stop the pain or fear. Obviously
that doesn’t mean waterboarding will never yield valuable information.
Then again, feeding a detainee into an industrial shredder, as Saddam
Hussein’s torturers sometimes did, might yield valuable information
too. But some techniques are forbidden, as I wrote in 2005, “not
because they never work, not because they aren’t ‘deserved,’ but
because our very right to call ourselves decent human beings depends in
part on our not doing them.”
Like chemical and biological warfare, torture is something we refuse to
engage in, despite its potential effectiveness, on the grounds that it
is fundamentally immoral and uncivilized. Our repudiation of torture is
absolute -- the international Convention Against Torture, ratified by
the United States in 1994, allows for “no exceptional circumstances
whatsoever.” That unconditional repudiation is one of the lines that
separates us from the barbaric jihadists with whom we are at war.
The killing of bin Laden was gratifying, but it was no vindication of
torture. Republicans rightly argue that much credit is owing to George
W. Bush, who launched an effective war on terror and pursued it with
fierce resolve. But Bush was wrong to permit waterboarding, and wrong
to deny that it was torture. I don’t agree with Obama on much, but when
it comes to waterboarding he is right. America will defeat the global
jihad, but not by embracing its most inhuman values.
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