Torture And Moral Causistry

By Cernig

Via our colleague Eric Martin, writing at Obsidian Wings, comes an LA Times story which really puts the seal on the whole sorry tale of Gitmo, renditions and evidence obtained by torture.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

There's no doubt in my mind, certainly, that the Bush administration knew that these techniques were best for eliciting false confessions - after all, that's the main use torture has always been put to by authoritarian regimes since the Witch Trails of Europe and before. The same techniques were used to elicit a false conviction from John McCain when he was incarcerated during the Vietnam War - yet he's just fine nowadays with accepting the Bush administration's parsing of such methods as somehow not being, precisely, torture.

Christopher Hitchens used to join in that parsing - he has now tried waterboarding for himself and has now unequivocally changed his mind.

Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

...The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

America under Bush tortures people - bad people and people it believes are bad who later turn out to be innocent. It gets confessions - many false - from those people. It parses - lies by ommission and misdirection - about whether it actually does torture or not. It commits war crimes thereby. And John McCain, despite having had these things done to him, would continue that program by continuing to parse reality. He may have spoken up against waterboarding, but he's just fine with following the Bush lead in defining other torture techniques as 'enhanced interrogation". It is, as Hitchens says "moral causistry" of the most horrid sort. Do you really need another reason why he shouldn't be president?