More Waterboarding
November 5, 2007 Leave a comment
As you can tell, I feel pretty strongly about this whole waterboarding thing. What is frustrating is that you have an administration trying to pretend that this is not torture, just “harsh interrogation” and pretending like there's an actual debate on the issue (with which the media tend to generally go along) despite the fact that there is simply no debate. In recent days, I've actually learned (not from TV or newspaper News stories, mind you) that not only has waterboarding long been considered a gold standard of torture, the United State has actually 1) court martialed US Soldiers involved in waterboarding; and 2) successfully tried as war criminals Japanese commanders who ordered the torture used against Americans in WWII. From NPR:
In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World
War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the
U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for
waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard
labor.
“All of these trials elicited
compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted
in severe punishment for its perpetrators,” writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.
On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post
ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding
of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique
induced “a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make
him talk.” The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months
later, the court martial of the soldier.
And here's attorney Evan Wallach in a powerful Op-Ed in Sunday's Post:
That term is used to describe several interrogation techniques. The
victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and
mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that
the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the
practice as “simulated drowning.” That's incorrect. To be effective,
waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is,
breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and,
eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one
experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that
the drowning process is halted…
After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for
waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his
captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces
officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the
Japanese, testified: “I was given several types of torture. . . . I was
given what they call the water cure.” He was asked what he felt when
the Japanese soldiers poured the water. “Well, I felt more or less like
I was drowning,” he replied, “just gasping between life and death.”
Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo
War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government
elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing
Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which
their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call
waterboarding.
So, just so you are clear on the big picture here… Not only is George W. Bush attempting to claim that waterboarding is not torture completely morally repugnant, it is somewhat akin to claiming the sky is not blue.
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