Accidental Blogger

In my comment on Joe’s post below, I expressed some frustration in failing to locate any official international of national document describing methods of interrogation that actually amount to torture. I searched specifically for "waterboarding."  Although the Wikipedia defines it as torture, Attorney General Mukasey evaded giving an answer during his confirmation hearings by claiming he did not have enough information about the exact technique of waterboarding. As I pointed out in my comment, it is clear to me that although many politicians play lip service to banning torture, they want to leave enough loopholes in its definition in case "we" decide to use it under certain circumstances. It was therefore refreshing to find conservative wordsmith and retired commentator William Safire, a supporter of the Iraq War, say unequivocally that waterboarding in fact is torture.  Safire uses the simple rule of deductive logic that if something looks, walks and quacks like a duck, there is little doubt that it is a duck even if the salesman selling you the bird calls it a chicken.

Some locutions begin as bland bureaucratic euphemisms to conceal great crimes. As their meanings become clear, these collocations gain an aura of horror. In the past century, final solution and ethnic cleansing were phrases that sent a chill through our lexicon. In this young century, the word in the news — though not yet in most dictionaries — that causes much wincing during debate is the verbal noun waterboarding.

If the word torture, rooted in the Latin for “twist,” means anything (and it means “the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce”), then waterboarding is a means of torture. The predecessor terms for its various forms are water torture, water cure and water treatment.

The early phrase Chinese water torture described a cruel ordeal invented by Asian ancients. The purpose of slowly dripping water on the forehead until each little splash became unbearable was not “to elicit information through harsh interrogation” but to drive the victim mad. That phrase outlived its sadistic practice and is in use today, adopted as a metaphor for “repeated annoyance intended to infuriate.” In a 1991 hostage standoff, President George H. W. Bush decried “the cruel water torture of occasional vague promises.”

Looks like Poppy Bush didn’t like the technique. However Bush Jr. would like us to believe that waterboarding is benign, effective, mildly uncomfortable and doesn’t amount to "harsh" interrogation; which is why he has vetoed the bill that was designed to ban the method. Other US presidents and armed forces veterans too have stated that waterboarding is a form of torture. Once upon a time Senator John McCain seemed to agree. 

Senator John McCain — no stranger to both the wrong of painful coercion and the need for antiterror intelligence — strongly denounced the procedure as “exquisite torture.”

Between that time when he denounced waterboarding and now, what happened to Straight Talker McCain, who voted "no" on the recent senate bill proposing a ban on waterboarding?  The alluring vision of the White House has appeared in the crystal ball, no doubt. Joe asked in his post that if torture is banned in the US, why is there even a need to debate the issue? I pointed out that defining "down" torture is often the devious way a government can continue to use torture and at the same time hypocritically claim to be against it. One way to redefine an age old, tried and tested method of torture is to give it a new name.

Why did boarding take over from cure, treatment and torture? Darius Rejali, the author of the recent book “Torture and Democracy” and a professor at Reed College, has an answer: “There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding” — a word found as early as 1929 — “they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them.”

See Safire’s full article in the New York Times here.