Our National Crime

I read that waterboarding was first used in the 1500s, during the Italian Inquisition. For some reason, I can't figure out why that makes me so sad. Is it because we're using a torture method that is medieval? Or that it's obviously been proven effective over centuries of testing, so no matter how much people try to minimize it ("If it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives."*), it's clearly torture.

Part of the problem with waterboarding is that it works. To a certain extent. Apparently, if you have something someone wants to hear, Saran wrap your head, tilt back and have water poured over you to simulate drowning...and you'll give it up. Because of this, agents do get some of what they are after. Valuable information. The problem is...well, first of all, the problem is IT'S TORTURE! and therefore wrong and illegal...but the other first problem is that while you get valuable true information, you also get the significantly less valuable false and/or useless information. Information that might seem important because it was revealed only after the application of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

It must be a fascinating (if macabre and creepy) dance between victim and torturer: the torturer assumes the victim is witholding. The victim knows the torturer expects him to withold. How much does the victim try to endure so that when he finally breaks, he can hope the torture will stop? If he gives in too early, does the torturer go on, certain there must be more valuable information to be had? Of course, if he gives in too late...

And from the torturer's point of view: how much do you continue to push after you've heard what your victim is claiming is everything he knows? After all, he's trying to keep things from you. But if you push too hard, you know he'll just start coming up with plausible information to get you to stop.

Maybe I'm off-base here. Maybe waterboarding never results in false or manufactured intelligence. Maybe it's so horrifying an experience no one can lie under its influence, and the terror of the victim is so great that any decent torturer can tell when the bottom of the well has been reached.

But ultimately I think what is making me sick is the core fact that we torture at all. That we have sunk so low as a nation. That I am actually writing about this and it's not fiction. In years to come will there be a time when I feel the need as a citizen of my country to apologize for the way we behaved during this war? How can I look at what Americans under the command of George W. Bush did at Abu Gharaib (and only imagining what went on where it was trained CIA officers and not Army grunts, as in the prisons of rendition) and not feel shame for even my miniscule role as a citizen who could not prevent his election or re-election?

It makes me sick at heart that my country would behave in this fashion - and that our president has, at the very LEAST, justifed the behavior, and quite possibly approved/ordered it.

*Actual quote.