I’m a little skeptical about the series of waterboarding videos that people are making, the latest of which was made by the “shock-jock” Mancow.
Think about it. An American citizen with everything to live for vs. an top-ranked Al Qaeda operative seeking favor with his god with plans to ram a plane into Los Angeles. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a month before giving up the goods. KSM had sufficiently more incentive to resist. He was told that he wasn’t going to die.
These videos trivialize what is going on, when the “victims” come up with their wet shirts and say, “it’s torture, it’s torture.” We American softies really have no clue unless we go through SEAL training or something similar. I dare say that we should be thankful that waterboarding works so that we don’t have to treat the enemy like North Korea treated Senator John McCain.
We don’t waterboard to take pleasure in being cruel. We don’t go around waterboarding everybody. There are people hostile to freedom and our way of life who been condemned by their own documents as having information about future attacks on us.
Protecting citizens is a messy business. That doesn’t make waterboarding right, but saving lives makes it slightly less wrong. Weigh it in your head: thousands of people cooked in jet fuel and crushed in collapsing buildings, or making a person think he’s drowning. Picture yourself telling someone that they lost a loved one in a terrorist attack that you failed to prevent because a terrorist leader, captured and hostile, can’t be afforded the illusion that he’s drowning.
The question is not whether waterboarding is evil but whether it is more humane that other techniques of the same effectiveness (by a mile). Soldiers use guns in the service of our citizens. I’m sure they’d rather use less violent means if it got the job done.
That said, I do think these extreme measures should be done as sparingly as possible, for ticking time bomb scenarios only. These guys, captured in the battlefield or at a terrorist outpost, have the opportunity to avoid waterboarding even while they are in our custody. We’d rather take a simple deposition and move on.
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“North Korea treated Senator John McCain.”
(Dan….wrong war.)
Touché. North Vietnam. Thanks.
I agree. The fact that people have the curiosity to want to experience it for themselves proves that it is, at worst, a borderline case. Nobody’s volunteering to have their fingernails pulled out or have the soles of their feet beaten with cables so they can be sure whether those things are torture or not.
That the outrage over waterboarding is nothing but moral preening is proven by the complete lack of concern in the same circles about what has become a Mossad-style policy of terrorist assassination. If the waterboardees had been a bit craftier and managed to avoid detention, they likely would have ended up incinerated with their families by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator, as so many of their colleagues have met their ends. I doublt we’ll see “Mancow” and Hitchens et al, volunteering for that treatment.
You can’t make somebody do something they don’t want to do. So the issue is breaking down the willpower to resist interrogations by making them want to tell you.
The options are simply to lock a prisoner away and leave him and just fight the war. The problem with that is in protracting a war wherein more innocents die because we protected the mental stability of one prisoner.
But how to properly interrogate someone? what is the time frame? and what resources are available in which to pursue interrogation?
Waterboarding is easy to do, and is often effective in a short amount of time.
But in the end, no amount of interrogation or torture can make someone say something if they have proper motivation not to speak.
It’s a truism among those who have actually undergone torture that, on the contrary, everyone breaks. Everyone- without exception.
The trouble is precisely that torture will eventually get anybody to admit to anything- including things he hasn’t done. Torture a person long enough and severely enough and he will tell the torturer exactly what he believes that he wants to hear, no matter how false or even absurd.
Good point, Bob.
In most cases torture just gets a person to admit to whatever the interrogator wants to hear, not to the truth. But if the person isn’t afraid to die, then torture is generally ineffective as an interrogation tactic.
A good interrogator can use torture-like means to get at the truth of things. The trick for the interrogator is to know how to stay on task and not simply turn into a torturer. It is a fine line.
A good interrogator doesn’t tell his subject what he wants to hear, he asks pointed questions and listens for details to slip out, then puts the details together later.
Help me out here. If the prisoner tells the interrogator what he wants to hear, but it’s false, did the prisoner really break?
There has to be some level of hope for the prisoner that telling the truth would be beneficial to him.
If KSM decided after 183 times to give up information that allowed us to interdict a Los Angeles 9/11, then he made a value judgment that stopping the attack on LA was preferable to simulated drowning the 184th time.
If the interrogator is getting falsehoods from his prisoner, he’s not doing his job, no matter what method he’s employing.