When President Bush proclaimed last week that Americans “do not torture” – even as his vice president and secretary of defense were continuing to fiercely oppose the popular McCain amendment outlawing any “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” — he opened the door to a torrent of criticism.
The debate over this issue has been roiling the blogosphere for a few weeks now, led particularly by anti-torture absolutist Andrew Sullivan. But this weekend saw a new burst of commentary, centered around an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that appeared on Saturday, trashing the McCain amendment and unapologetically supporting the use of torture.
The editorial claimed that the McCain bill would “telegraph to every terrorist in the world that he has absolutely nothing to fear from silence should he fall into U.S. hands.” The WSJ editorial board argues that both the terms of the Geneva Convention and the word “torture” itself are ill-defined and misunderstood by Americans, and are the source of much unnecessary hand-wringing about our interrogation methods.
“As for ‘torture,’ it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques,” the editorial stated. “No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to ‘torture.’ The ‘stress positions’ that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized ‘waterboarding,’ which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.”
Andrew Sullivan, as expected, has a fit. He then provides copious evidence – including historical information from torture expert Darius Rejali – on why “waterboarding,” the interrogation method approved for use by the military, is indeed torture. (Waterboarding, for the uninitiated, roughly translates to holding-a-prisoner’s-head-under-water-until-he-starts-to-suffocate.) The closest historical analogy to “waterboarding” is, according to Sullivan, a method practiced by the Nazis. The conclusion he comes to is that “this president re-made the rules that made torture not just an emergency measure or an occasional failure – but a policy. Where torture was once tolerated, at worst, in some of our allies in the past, it has now come to be endorsed by the commander-in-chief of the United States as a policy inflicted by men and women in the uniform of the U.S.”
Other less high-profile bloggers who haven’t just announced that they are going to grab onto the MSM’s tail (see Sullivan on his new Time gig), are just as incensed by the WSJ’s position. Laura Rozen at Suburban Guerrilla wishes she “had 100 WSJ subscriptions to cancel. Appalling and history’s scum. I will never post another WSJ story here. Ever. Even their website outreach guy sends me about 3 emails a day with their stories. Save it for the pro-torture media… Honestly, this one should be saved for the history books, like those photos of lynching, about a low point in American history. The WSJ editors should truly be ashamed of themselves. And I hope the advertisers are ashamed of their association with such views that do not befit a first world country, or a democracy.”
At Joe’s Dartblog, Joe thinks the whole debate has been blown out of proportion on both ends: “Certainly, there is a critical degree of pragmatism missing on both sides of the debate. We’re either a savage militant state or the world’s Last Action Hero. Such high rhetoric is a grand American tradition. The pity is that no one in politics seems to have quite the eloquence of the founders of that tradition. So both sides can easily look stupid. The ACLU-types are obvious enough. But even this editorial makes a crucial mistake: it allows ‘waterboarding’ to be lumped in with other things deemed not even ‘close to torture.'”
Marty Lederman at Blakinization points out two ways in which the WSJ editorial goes even further than opponents of the McCain amendment have been willing to go. First, the WSJ sees Cheney’s objection to McCain’s bill as being too narrow. Why only exempt the CIA? What difference does it make, after all, “which department is doing the interrogating”? But Lederman makes the point that “the Journal apparently is not aware that many of the CIA’s techniques — namely, assaults, threats, and cruelty and maltreatment — would be criminal (under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and federal assault statute) if performed by the military.”
Lederman also scorns the Journal‘s label of waterboarding as a mere “psychological technique.” “I suppose I was being unimaginative in thinking of mock burial, and of the “water cure” as assaults, and sadistic threats of excruciating death,” he writes. “[I]n truth, we’ve merely been trying to psych ’em out: We’re jus’ keeding!”
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.