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History Repeats Itself: The Debate over Waterboarding
03/14/10
“The waterboarding, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’”
“The enlisted men began to use . . . the water cure. Nobody was seriously damaged.”
Both of these quotations concern the use of a prisoner interrogation technique known as waterboarding. One of the statements was made in 1902 by President Theodore Roosevelt, and the other was made in 2005 by Jay Bybee, an assistant attorney general in the administration of President George W. Bush. Can you match the statement with the speaker?
The first quotation comes from Bybee, while the second belongs to Roosevelt. Both men’s perspective, though, is an immensely controversial one, for the practice of waterboarding has been criticized by many Americans as blatant torture—and thus anathema to longstanding American ideals of justice and morality.
Waterboarding involves placing a cloth over the face of an immobilized prisoner, then pouring water over the cloth in such a way as to induce the sensation of drowning. First practiced during the Spanish Inquisition, the practice spread throughout the world over the ensuing centuries. By the early nineteenth century this “interrogation technique” was largely abandoned because of near-universal revulsion about its sadistic elements. But it made a comeback of sorts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was employed by American soldiers in the Spanish-American War, by the British in 1930s colonial Palestine, by the Japanese against American prisoners of war in World War II, by the Khmer Rouge against its own Cambodian countrymen, and by Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s.
The U.S. government steadfastly condemned the practice throughout this time. It prosecuted Japanese officers as war criminals for conducting waterboarding during World War II, and in 1983 the Reagan Justice Department convicted a Texas sheriff of waterboarding prisoners. But in the early twenty-first century the Bush White House secretly sanctioned waterboarding as a legitimate tool that could be employed in the “war on terror” against al Qaeda. This reversal of longstanding American policy on waterboarding rested in large part on legal opinions rendered by lawyers within Bush’s justice department, and especially on arguments presented in the 2002 Bybee Torture Memo written by Bybee and his deputy John Yoo.
When the American public learned that the Bush-era CIA used waterboarding against prisoners, a battle erupted between critics and supporters of the practice. Critics assert that by approving and carrying out waterboarding, top members of the Bush administration became war criminals who should be prosecuted for violations of international law. Defenders like former Vice President Dick Cheney, on the other hand, say that waterboarding does not constitute torture and claim that the technique is a valid national security tool.
- Do you believe that the position taken by both Roosevelt and Bybee—that waterboarding does not produce long-term “damage” and does not constitute torture—is correct? Why or why not?
- Are there any meaningful differences in the political and societal environments in which Roosevelt and Bybee made those statements?
- If you support waterboarding as a legitimate CIA interrogation tool, do you feel that the United States has erred in its past prosecutions of waterboarding? Why or why not?
- If you condemn waterboarding as torture, are there any extenuating circumstances under which you could condone the practice as necessary? Why or why not?