Academic

Is American Waterboarding Torture? Duh!

By Robert Justin Lipkin

Finally, the truth is revealed; the Bush-Cheney administration has used the technique of water boarding as an "interrogation" technique. Though Cheney contends the technique has saved American lives, neither Congress, nor the courts, nor the people have any way of verifying this claim. In a constitutional democracy transparency is not always required, but oversight is. In a constitutional dictatorship, such as the Bush-Cheney soft dictatorship, oversight is a quaint, but archaic element of American government. Of course, necessity is trotted out as the justification for torture, but we have no way of knowing whether that's true. Accordingly, those who claim necessity for this form of barbarism need to answer two questions: (1) Where's the proof? and (2) Even if effective, what is sacrificed in adopting our enemies methods? We can readily understand those who scoff at the second question because they have lost a son or daughter in battle, but the craven politicians who wrangled their way out of serious military service cannot be taken seriously.

Yes, and don't forget those who trot out the ticking tomb bomb examples.  Here's a version. "If water boarding a known terrorist would prevent a dirty bomb from being released in Penn Station, saving millions of lives, it would be irresponsible and morally reprehensible not to water board." Maybe. But if one attends to the rhetorical structure of this argument one sees that it is designed to quiet conscientious concerns about whether the United States should engage in torture. And accepting the possibility of water boarding in some contrived and extraordinarily remote circumstances makes it easier to accept the practice as legitimate in ordinary circumstances. That's the inevitable consequences of touting the self-evidence that water boarding must be justified in some circumstances. Those sophisticates who offer these hypotheticals know better. Their protestations are merely a ruse for justifying lawless executive power. In the end, for American constitutionalism to survive, it we require a investigation and remediation of the insidious damage Bush-Cheney has done to our constitutional practices and republican democracy. It's quite clear that "the Bush-Cheney administration has squandered our human and material resources . . . [and] they have blown away our moral capital." More devastating is that "they have compromised the principles that define us as a nation, [and] that is a tragedy.

The next president will inherit a broken democracy.  He or she must conscientiously attempt to repair. But the American people should not let the next president to do it all alone. The electorate must be more actively involved in ridding the American political landscape of the poison sown into the American soil by the current administration.

Credit for First Image
Credit for Second Image

Full post as published by Essentially Contested America on February 08, 2008 (boomark / email).