Situational torture

kc — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:55:39 -0800

With the revelations that the Bush Administration has indeed waterboarded terrorism suspects, and the defense of such actions, a new term has been coined: situational torture.

Yes, those conservative paragons of principle are now using situational ethics to justify their actions. How low the cause of conservatism has sunk. These are the same folks who have no problem justifying their opposition to stem cell research, even if it ends up saving millions of lives. To do research on a human embryo, even one that would normally be flushed down the drain, is murder to them. As is letting a brain-damaged woman in Florida die, or letting a woman get an abortion because the pregnancy poses a threat to her life. To bad, they say. Have to stand on principle.

But when it comes to torture, those principles just fly out the window.

And their justifications for such deviations from principle are about as far fetched as the TV shows they evidently watch. They all seem to think that the show "24" is a true account of fighting terrorism. Their dream situation is that we have a terrorism suspect who we know has information on a planned attack, so we must torture him to get that information. And after being properly motivated, the suspect fesses up and the attack is stopped, the hero gets the girl, and all things are right again. Que the music.

In reality, how would we "know" that a suspect has information on a pending attack? And, how do we know the information obtained by torture is true? They don't tell you those things on television.

But one of the defenses that really irks me is the part were it's claimed that because we use waterboarding on our own elite soldiers as part of their training, that it isn't torture.

I've seen criticisms of this claim before, but none have ever really captured how idiotic it is.

Let's start at the beginning. Waterboarding works as a torture method because the victim feels he is dying a very painful death, in slow motion. It's the fear of death that makes this torture. Waterboarding is by far more hideous than mock executions, which are a banned form of toruture.

The soldiers know that these training exercises aren't real. There is no real war, no one is going to die and that at the end of he exercise, they will go home to their families. As much as the military wants to make these exercises real, they cannot erase this reality. It's a fake situation and everyone knows it.

The trainee being waterboarded also knows that the people who are torturing him will not let him die. But it goes even further. His make-believe torturers are his brothers-in-arms, men who have sworn what amounts to a blood oath to risk their own lives to save his. There is a bond between soldiers, a trust that they put their lives in the hands of their comrades. This can't be erased by a training exercise.

The trainee also knows that the information he is being compelled to reveal is also fake. If the trainee "breaks," there will be no harm done. The "enemy" isn't going to kill his friends, kidnap his family or destroy his country.

In the end, the trainee knows that this is simply a matter of will, a challenge to see how long he can hold out. It's like trying to hold your breath for as long as possible in a nice, safe swimming pool, as opposed to finding yourself trapped in a sinking car in the middle of a flash flood and not knowing if you can make it out alive. There is no way you can compare the two situations, and the effects they will have on the human mind.

You can't volunteer to be tortured, anymore than you can volunteer to be raped. The difference here is consent. And consent (or lack thereof) can't be faked.

Unfortunately, any logic or reasoning on this subject will fall on deaf ears in the White House. These explanations for their actions are after-the-fact excuses used to cover their backsides. There's little doubt these issues were never really debated at the time of the actual waterboardings. Their decisions were more driven by emotions than logic, a need to strike back at the enemy and prove who was more manly.

Which also brings up an interesting aside: would they feel the same torturing a woman? If one of those suspects had been female, would they have waterboarded her? And how would most Americans react to that?

Can we now get past this debate and rejoin the reality-base community?

KirkCaraway.com - Situational torture - Comments

Situational torture