On Thursday, the Obama administration released previously classified memos detailing interrogation techniques used against enemy prisoners. In the memos, Bush administration lawyers assured the CIA that waterboarding detainees and keeping them awake for a week or more was perfectly legal. Bush partisans insist that such methods aren’t torture, and that Obama has done grave harm to national security by revealing them. They’re wrong on both counts.
Conservative legal analyst David Rivkin, one of Bush’s most reliable defenders, insists that “any fair-minded observer” would conclude that the documents prove that “the Bush administration did not torture.” But it’s hard to understand how anyone could call what the administration did by any other name. Rivkin’s assertion is on a par with left-wing diehards’ claim that President Clinton didn’t commit perjury.
Let’s start with waterboarding. If it’s not torture, then maybe we owe an apology to the Japanese soldiers we prosecuted for it after WWII. It felt “like I was drowning,” Lieutenant Chase Nielsen testified in a 1946 war crimes trial, “just gasping between life and death.”
True, the CIA administered the “water cure” only to three prisoners (183 times in a month to one of them). And none of the other techniques—“stress positions,” “sleep deprivation,” “cramped confinement,” etc.—repulse us like the rack and the thumbscrew do.
