Waterboarding flies in face of U.S. laws
Monday, February 18, 20081 comment(s) | Default | Large
ISSUE: Waterboarding
OUR VIEW: Torture should not be U.S. technique
An eye for an eye only makes everyone blind. So goes an old saying that lends perspective in the debate about the torture technique called waterboarding.
It's hard not to be vengeful when it comes to terrorists who plotted Sept. 11, 2001, and other murderous attacks on Americans -- and if given the chance would attack us again. The government says it will seek the death penalty in military courts against those accused as key conspirators in 9-11. As controversial as the cases may be, they cut to the point in the debate about waterboarding.
The U.S. government will not be party to executing the 9-11 plotters without due process. We are a nation of laws.
Rules also must apply to military detainees and prisoners of war -- standards beyond even those international ones so often trampled and standards far beyond the ones held by our enemies, who have time and time again shown their brutality.
The Bush administration has defended the waterboarding torture of detainess such as the 9-11 suspects.
Vice President Dick Cheney recently stated: "It's a good thing" that top al-Qaida leaders who underwent the harsh interrogation tactic in 2002 and 2003 were forced to give up information that helped protect the country. "It's a good thing we had them in custody, and it's a good thing we found out what they knew."
Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world.
Critics in the United States claim waterboarding is a form of torture and is forbidden under the nation's laws governing treatment of detainees. Critics say waterboarding also violates the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
The waterboarding debate has prompted some in Congress to call for an investigation of the administration for sanctioning the tactic. The attorney general has resisted exposing the Bush administration and its employees to criminal or civil charges or even international war crimes if waterboarding were declared illegal.
Most Americans would disapprove of punishing those who extracted information from 9-11 conspirators, Yet most Americans cannot favor torturing detainees in ways that we reject when it comes to treatment of Americans.
Torture, it is said, rarely begets the truth. Confessions, maybe. Continuing its use yields the need for a national confession of our own.
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Diogenes wrote on Mar 2, 2008 11:31 PM:
"Whereas death was a frequent consequence of conscription under convict labor, leased prisoners also endured whipping, 'water torture (where one is strapped down, face up, nostrils held shut with barrels of sometimes boiling water poured down the throat), food deprivations, harsher work assignments and physical torture'." "