Waterboarding Debate

I'll start off this post by saying that I firmly agree with those who say that waterboarding is torture. The United States has considered it torture for many decades, is a signatory to international treaties that ban its use, and has prosecuted others who have engaged in this practice. No amount of dreamed up legal justifications by sycophantic lawyers can change these facts.

And what makes this whole debate about waterboarding so maddening is that many in the press seem utterly incapable of accepting this fact. Instead many of them are distracted by this silly sideshow about CIA briefings to Nancy Pelosi about the torture program authorized by the Bush administration and whether or not the CIA is always clear and forthcoming in the information that it provides to Congress. So let's make it clear what the issue should be about. Waterboarding was and is illegal according to international law. Waterboarding was and is illegal according to US law. When there is clear evidence that laws have been broken, ordinarily investigations take place so that culpability can be assigned. If it is decided for political reasons, for other flimsy reasons such as "the country cannot handle it," or for any other reason other than a lack of evidence that prosecutions should not go forward, then the United States is a joke. Such a lack of action will be confirming that some people are indeed above the law.

It is worthwhile to deconstruct the arguments that likely war criminals (Dick Cheney), the spawn of likely war criminals (Liz Cheney), war crime apologists (Joe Scarborough), and the profoundly foolish (Donny Deutsch) are putting forward. All of these individuals (and there are certainly more than those that I have explicitly named) seem to be in love with this ticking time-bomb scenario. The ticking time-bomb scenario goes something like this:

You know that there is a catastrophic bomb soon to explode (perhaps in five hours or less) and you have in custody a suspect whom you know to have information that will lead you to finding this device and disarming it before it explodes. Would you employ waterboarding (or some other form of torture) to extract the information from this suspect?

The problem with this scenario, and those similarly constructed, is that it cannot logically exist. Required from the start of the scenario is your knowledge that there is a catastrophic bomb soon to explode. The first question that should be logically asked of someone positing this scenario is how do you know there is a catastrophic bomb soon to explode? It is quite clear that in order for a person to know with certainty that a bomb is soon to explode, they must have come across the information somehow.

So how did you get this information that a bomb is soon to explode?

Was it from this same suspect, or was it from a different suspect?

If it was from the same suspect, presumably it was arrived at without waterboarding (since the scenario is assuming that waterboarding is being used for the first time on this suspect), so why now do you feel it is necessary to waterboard the suspect if you arrived at the other information without waterboarding? Is it because you have tried every other non-torturous method on this suspect without getting the information you seek?

If the information came from a different suspect, again, presumably it was arrived at without waterboarding (since the scenario, again, is assuming that waterboarding is being used for the first time), so why do you believe that you must waterboard this particular suspect to get this particular information? Is it because you have tried every other non-torturous method on this suspect without getting the information you seek? Well, if this is the case, why did you not question the suspect who gave you the information about the existence of the bomb further? (This final question would of course lead to the question asked in the preceding paragraph.)

The problem with this scenario is that it rests on the highly implausible construct that you have discovered that some ticking time bomb is soon to explode by means other than the use of waterboarding. Is it really that believeable that you would come across this information that a bomb is soon to go off without waterboarding, but would need waterboarding to find out exactly where it is to go off? Whenever individuals throw around these ticking time bomb scenarios, you may notice that they never ever explain how it is learned that these bombs are soon to go off in the first place.

Another weakness in these scenarios is that these torture fans always assert that you know with certainty that these bombs will explode. How can you know with certainty that a bomb is soon to explode? At the very best you can have a very good suspicion that a bomb will explode. But in order for this stupid ticking time bomb scenario of theirs to work, they need to have this perfect knowledge that this bomb does exist and will explode. Absent these requirements, one would guess (or at least hope) that even these reprehensible human beings wouldn't advocate waterboarding or some other form of torture.

But one must then ask, if you have perfect knowledge that a bomb will explode, why do you not have perfect knowledge of where and when it will explode as well? The answer to this question, and the reason why these torture cheerleaders will never make this part of their foolish hypothetical scenarios, is because if you knew all of this, and yet still tortured the suspect (even if the suspect did have all of this information related to this bomb), you would be nothing more than an inhuman, sadistic monster.

In reality, no one has this sort of perfect knowledge and so no one will "know for sure" that a bomb is soon to explode. And I suppose in some sense no can be accused of being an inhuman, sadistic monster as I described above. However, since these types of monsters (and they are monsters) are advocating for waterboarding (torture) when most accounts suggest that the information derived from waterboarding is unreliable and statistically speaking, you will end up torturing someone who is completely innocent, while they may not be identical to those inhuman, sadistic monsters described above, they certainly are not very far away.