More on the waterboarding issue

As noted in a previous post, a debate has been ongoing in a forum I am a member of. One of the other members attempted to minimize the severity of waterboarding, noting that it’s actually performed on US Service members who attend  Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) training. Here is my reply

Don
It is one thing to go through SERE. I will GUARANTEE you that what was done viz waterboarding at SERE was NOT the same as what is being practiced on the people that the CIA and others are picking up. I understand and acknolwedge that in a situation where you KNOW that they (the inflictors of waterboarding) are NOT going to kill you, that in fact there is only but so far that they can and will go (i.e. SERE) that you can overcome such treatment with self discipline, through training.

THAT is not what is going on right now. As I said previously - and I’ll allow that maybe not as explicitly stated (Although I thought so) , my objections to waterboarding have much less with the fact that suspected terrorists/terrorists are being waterboarded, as they are WE are conducting waterboarding on ANYBODY. So what that air crew etc et al are exposed to a lite version of waterboarding at SERE? (And it IS a lite version. As I alluded to above, a SERE attendee KNOWS that no one is going to kill him/her. A SERE student KNOWS that they (the staff) will and can ONLY GO SO FAR.  Can a SERE instructor rape a female trainee? Not on your life.)  That has nothing at all to do with my point.

The point I am making, and I guess not very well, is that when you blur the lines we (Americans, especially Military) operate under and allow, and in the case of this administration implicitly/explicitly encourage bluring the lines, it becomes easier and easier to justify ever increasingly brutal and increasingly inhumane actions until we are no better than our opponants, and even, one could argue, worse because we should and do know better.  Other than the fact that they are human beings, I could give a rat’s @$$ about pretty much the entire population of the middle east, no matter WHAT their faith. They refuse to act like rational humans. My concern is not really what is done to them, but what WE are doing.

Saying that waterboarding is nothing more than unpleasant MAY BE TRUE IN THE ABSTRACT.  But let us consider Chief’s Initiations from say 10-15 years ago. I think no one would say that Chiefs are brutal inhumane bastards. BUT. We still had, not a lot but just a few instances where a few e-7s, 8s and 9s went over the lines. I won’t psychobabble about the psychology involved other than to say this: When you have a dominance situation, and you begin to remove or negate constraining factors, and/or loosen inhibitions, you ALWAYS get a negative spiral of increasingly bad behavior. The more stress or violent/intense emotion you inject or are subjected to, the faster and deeper said spiral goes. Simply put: Chief’s initiation, plus alchohol resulted in slugs getting treated badly, to the point of injury and criminal behavior. This cannot be argued. Was documented.  A SMALL number of initiations got out of hand.

So considering this, what constraints are there on the interrogators? Ain’t the law. Someone noted above that laws on CIA ops are vague to give tacitcal flexibility. Professionalism of CIA interrogators? Aren’t Chiefs considered the Acme, the ne plus ultra of professionalism? And yet WE had episodes. Is it the belief that these terrorists are deserving of protection under the law? Oh, yeah, we’ve said that they don’t fall under our laws, don’t fall under the Geneva conventions, that their status is ‘vague’. I was always taught that EVERYONE was subject to some law somewhere. We go overseas, not only are we subject to US Federal Law as well as the UCMJ, but we are also subject to the host nations laws.

So we have muddied the waters. As far as I can tell there are NO restraints on the behavior of the CIA interrogators. And there is even LESS when we outsource ‘interrogations’ to third world dictatorships whose secret police don’t even attempt to behave along civilized norms.

An aside on the outsourcing of interrogation. If we have to send these guys to said third world nations, because they’ll do ‘what has to be done’, aren’t we really saying that This is just too close to or over the line legally at least if not morally? Seems so to me.

So in such an environment what is to keep the interrogators from going over the line from an action from just being uncomfortable to where it becomes potentially or actually deadly? Or torture? Better not to go there in the first place. The first sin is the hardest. After that they all get progressively easier.

When we start equivocating about whether or not something is or isn’t torture, what we are really doing is rationalizing a descent into brutality. Because what isn’t ok today, can become ok tomorrow, if we just ignore that twinge of conscience.

I cannot remember who said it, but I’m minded of the saying “All it takes for evil to trimuph is for good men to do nothing” Ultimately I’m not concerned about the health and welfare etc of the suspects. I’m worried about the souls of our people. The soul of our Nation.

Tags: abu ghraib, Abuse, America, American, Army, betrayal, Bush, Chaney, constitution, cuba, Extreme Rendition, facism, guantanamo, Marines, NAVY, nazi, terrorism, terrorist, tomahawk, tomahawkgod, Torture, US Military, USN, war on terror, Waterboarding