The practice of waterboarding U.S. detainees has returned to public discourse as a talking point in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Several candidates, most notably Sen. Marco Rubio, R-FL, and Donald Trump, have come out strongly in favor of removing the current ban on the practice, which was instated within days of President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, while less enthusiastic than Rubio and Trump, also seems to be in favor of using waterboarding under select circumstances. There are three primary arguments used in favor of removing the ban: waterboarding promotes national security, is not severe enough to qualify as torture and is morally justified when used against people who are guilty of crimes against humanity. Upon inspection, these arguments are unsupported and in some ways actively self-contradictory.
The primary argument in favor of waterboarding suspected terrorists is that doing so will allow the United States to gather military intelligence and protect American lives. There is no evidence that waterboarding actually does this. December 2014 saw the public release of an abbreviated version of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation program from the Bush era. This program used a variety of coercive interrogation methods including waterboarding. The report — compiled after reviewing millions of pages of documents including interrogation transcripts — found that there was not a single case where the so-called Enhanced Interrogation program produced unique, valuable information. Some detainees subjected to coercive techniques did reveal accurate information, but there was no case in which the program was the only source of this intelligence. If all of the information produced was redundant, the program was not necessary for national security.
In fact, the program’s most notable output was inaccurate information, resulting from detainees telling interrogators what they wanted to hear. This led to misinformed military missions, the imprisonment of innocent people and other actions that wasted resources but supported the illusion that coercive interrogation was advancing the war on terror. In this case, the comprehensive failure of the CIA’s program was not in practice but in principle. People subjected to coercive interrogation will say anything to get even a brief respite. Any method that uses physical force to pressure people into divulging information will, by its nature, incentivize false information without necessarily improving national security. There is no reason to think that a revived waterboarding program would perform better, which is to say, accomplish anything.
The next argument for waterboarding states that it is not truly torture. Earlier this month, Cruz explained that waterboarding is not torture per se, which by “generally recognized definition” must involve pain equivalent to that of organ failure. The phrase “generally recognized” here is misleading. Most of the world, including the United States, has ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture. This document classifies torture as any act by which a state official intentionally inflicts severe mental or physical suffering on a prisoner to obtain information. The requirement that pain be analogous to organ failure is a U.S.-exclusive interpretation of the term “severe” articulated in the Aug. 1, 2002 memo from Judge Jay Bybee to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. This memo states that “severe” in the context of pain means “difficult to endure,” then concludes somewhat bizarrely that to be difficult to endure, pain must give the impression that enduring it without receiving medical treatment would result in permanent harm. The memo makes no attempt to claim that waterboarding deviates from the definition of torture in any other respect.
Under the more sensible readings of the passage generally used outside the United States, waterboarding unambiguously qualifies as torture. But, even under Bybee’s memo’s absurdly limited definition of torture, waterboarding is not cleanly excluded. Waterboarding involves placing a cloth over the mouth and nose of a person and pouring water over it, effectively smothering them and convincing their brain that they are drowning. It mimics the sensation of imminent death by asphyxiation and causes extreme panic and involuntary physical reactions as the body tries to prevent system collapse. While not causing the type of physical damage people associate with torture, waterboarding actually does a better job of causing the type of pain associated with organ failure than, say, flaying a prisoner’s fingers would. No sensible appraisal of its impact on a prisoner can state that it is not a severe technique.
The final argument I wish to address is that the use of waterboarding or other forms of torture is justified or even necessary when the prisoners in question are guilty of crimes against humanity. Trump has cited the fact that ISIS decapitates people as rationalization for bringing back waterboarding and permitting additional methods of torture. Essentially, he claims that we have to fight ruthlessness with ruthlessness or risk appearing weak. This is morally and strategically absurd. ISIS’s habit of cutting off heads and other similar practices is contributing to their current downward trend because, as one would expect, cruelty alienates a significant number of the local people they are trying to control and motivates international intervention (Trump himself is, in this very argument, using their own tactics against them). ISIS’s brutality is a short-term strategy that has significant downsides for its political goals. Bringing back or expanding the enhanced interrogation program would have a similar impact on the United States: increasing international hostility, lowering the United States’ moral standing and giving rallying material to our enemies. We don’t need to fight a bad strategy with the same bad strategy. The only logically consistent reason to torture a detainee is the sadistic desire for revenge, which is tactically meaningless and morally deplorable.
When viewed as a whole, these arguments are self-contradictory. The idea that waterboarding is fairly benign is not compatible with the idea that it could produce valuable intelligence. The theoretical upshot of treating a prisoner harshly is that he will betray his cause to make the abuse stop. A humane method of forcing your enemies to tell you how to defeat them makes absolutely no sense. Waterboarding is, as it turns out, neither humane nor effective, but could not even in principle be both. Still, the solution is not to simply graduate to harsher methods as Trump has suggested. More severe interrogation techniques would create the same problems of falsified information and international backlash without giving a better chance to produce valuable information or even pretending to obey international law.
The renewed discussion of waterboarding is a shrewd attempt by presidential hopefuls who want to be perceived as tough on terrorism and differentiate themselves from Obama’s policies. But the previous coercive interrogation program did not achieve its goals despite violating internationally accepted standards for the treatment of prisoners. The program wasted resources, tiptoed around international law and permanently harmed the international image of the United States. Bringing back waterboarding would be a moral failure and a strategic mistake.
Avery Rock ’18 can be reached at avery_rock@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
