Torture?

If waterboarding is torture, and I am not opposed to defining it as such, but regardless, it is a definition and subject to being redefined. As Alan Dershowitz has noted, everyone would use waterboarding if it would save their child from suffocation in a grave.

 

Denials are specious, because it is easy to take a principled position when no personally valued life is at stake. I trust Obama to make the right position at the right time because he is a realist and would not sacrifice many innocent American lives for a definition. I would love to hear from those who think he will.

 

The Constitution does not protect our servicemen from torture. The Geneva Conventions do not protect our servicemen from torture. Both are useful if we ever get into a war with France.

 

Unfortunately, nothing protected our Japanese prisoners from torture. Nothing protected our Korean prisoners from torture. Nothing protected our Pueblo crewmen from torture. Nothing protected our Vietnam prisoners from torture. Nothing has protected our Iraqi prisoners from torture. The amount of torture that exists in Mexico today is unbelievable and it will not increase or decrease regardless of what we do.

 

Despite all of the international conventions against torture, it exists TODAY in many (most?) nations of the world. Those conventions do not stop the rape and murder today in Darfur and several other African nations, they did not protect the women in Bosnia from rape rooms, and they did not protect the women of Iraq from rape rooms.

 

Pronuncios from representatives of People for a Perfect World unfortunately indicate that those representatives live in that Perfect World but it is not in this world. Theirs is a parallel universe unrelated to reality. Certainly, torture should be rarely used but innocent American lives have been saved by the RARE use of waterboarding. That seems to be a humane exchange – discomfort (not death, not disfigurement, and not permanent damage) saved lives.

 

I would do that and so would you.

 

Let’s paraphrase the Dershowitz scenario. Your daughter has been kidnapped and you have received a call to pay a ransom to save your daughter who is being held in a casket below ground with an estimated six hours of oxygen.

 

You have already called the FBI before the ransom call.

 

Four hours after the ransom call, the FBI says they have the man who made the call and he is bragging that your daughter has just two hours of oxygen left.

 

Would you authorize waterboard the man to find the location of your daughter before her oxygen runs out?

 

I don’t give a RA how you phrase it, personal or policy, the President of the United States will do what is necessary to save innocent American lives.

 

Law or no law. Policy or no policy. Geneva or Paris or Whatever conventions.

 

If a President weighs discomfort against tens, or hundreds, or thousands of innocent American lives he or she will make the right decision and so would you. Hang the consequences. I hope you would support his or her decision.  

 

My support for waterboarding is case specific, not generalized torture for torture sake as was the case in WWII.

 

 I have no problem with not torturing as a national policy, or even including waterboarding as torture, I am saying what a President SHOULD and WILL do in extremis to save innocent American lives. Policy is one thing, reality is yet another.

 

If policy trumps all, we do not need a human in the White House. Policy without exceptions can EASILY be run by a computer. Humans decide when policy furthers the national goal, and when it impedes the national goal.

 

Exceptions do not prove a rule, they test a rule. I do not argue for torture, just warn that there are rare exceptions and that the rule is not absolute. There have been three rare exceptions in the past five years — at least some of those I believe were acceptable. If you hold that there are NO EXCEPTIONS, then you do believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact.