Torture has no place as official U.S. policy
Waterboarding — forcing peo- ple to talk by convincing them they’re drowning — has been off limits to American interrogators since President Obama banned the practice by executive order in 2009. That quieted the raging national debate over whether the United States should torture terror suspects, and whether such techniques actually work.
But now, just in time to make the 2016 presidential campaign even more divisive than it already is, the issue is back.
In a recent Republican debate, front-runner Donald Trump was asked whether he wanted to reinstitute waterboarding. Well, of course he did, and then some. Trump noted that in the Middle East, terrorists are chopping people’s heads off in ways that remind him of medieval times, so “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” The next morning, on ABC’s This
Week, he confirmed that he “would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding. And believe me, it will be effective.”
Maybe as politics it will. A Pew Research Center poll last year found that 58% of Americans say the use of torture is justified. Even more important for Trump, the poll showed that 73% of Republicans support the use of torture.
That doesn’t make it smart policy. Convincing evidence suggests that waterboarding so terrifies most subjects that they’ll say anything, most of it useless, to get it to stop. In 2008, when Congress passed a law (ultimately vetoed by President Bush) to ban waterboarding and other types of harsh interrogation, officials with actual experience warned that waterboarding was a terrible idea.
“It produces bad intelligence,” said retired Army lieutenant general Harry Soyster, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world.”
For these reasons, Congress last year turned Obama’s executive order into federal law.
Making torture official government policy feels righteous when confronting barbaric terrorists, but it sends the dangerous message that Americans are no better than radical jihadists. If Obama or some future president faces a rare “ticking time bomb” scenario, he or she could decide to ignore the law and face the judgment of the American public.
The best refutation of Trump’s cartoonish belligerence comes from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whom Trump has derided for being captured by the enemy during the Vietnam War. Unlike Trump, McCain has actually been tortured — not by bad traffic in New York City, but by his captors at a North Vietnamese prison.
“Our enemies act without conscience. We must not,” McCain said in a Senate floor speech last week. “Our nation needs a commander in chief that reminds us that in the worst of times, either chaos or terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering and loss, that we are always Americans — different, stronger and better than those who would destroy us.”
McCain’s correct. Stooping to the level of our enemies, by going “beyond waterboarding,” is unpresidential.