The Wall Street Journal editorial board argued today that waterboarding doesn’t necessarily constitute “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of U.S. detainees. The paper’s editorial was dismissive of Congress’ concerns about the technique, chiding lawmakers who “want to denounce what they call ‘torture.'”
This comes a day after National Review’s Rich Lowry scolded John McCain after the senator took a stand against torture. McCain said Michael Mukasey’s waffling on waterboarding raised concerns, prompting Lowry to write, “The senator sure knows how to court conservatives” — as if the right doesn’t much care about torture either way. (As Matt Yglesias asked, “I wonder if there’ll come a time when the editor of National Review circa 2038 wonders when it was, exactly, that the decision was made to make robust enthusiasm about torture a defining value of the American conservative movement.)
It’s leading to a “debate” that should hardly be necessary, but which we’re inexplicably having anyway.
Six years after the Bush administration embraced harsh physical tactics for interrogating terrorism suspects, and two years after it reportedly dropped the most extreme of those techniques, the taint of torture clings to American counterterrorism efforts.
The administration has a standard answer to queries about its interrogation practices: 1) We do not torture, and 2) we will not say what we do, for fear of tipping off future prisoners. In effect, officials want Al Qaeda to believe that the United States does torture, while convincing the rest of the world that it does not.
But that contradictory catechism is not holding up well under the battering that American interrogation policies have received from human rights organizations, European allies and increasingly skeptical members of Congress.
The consequences of the contradiction include the degradation of the nation’s moral authority.
It’s painful to read stories like this.
At a House hearing last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted that the United States had mishandled the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was seized in New York in 2002 on suspicion of terrorism and shipped to Syria, where he was imprisoned and severely beaten.
But Ms. Rice refused to acknowledge the torture or to apologize to Mr. Arar, perhaps to avoid exposing to attack the policy of extraordinary rendition, in which the United States delivers suspects to other countries, including some that routinely use torture.
C.I.A. officers have been criminally charged in Italy and Germany in connection with rendition cases. The torture issue has complicated Americans’ standing in criticizing other countries.
At a House hearing on the crackdown on dissent in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, where protest leaders have reportedly endured waterboarding, Jeremy Woodrum, a director of the United States Campaign for Burma, said American conduct was thrown back at him, testifying: “People say, ‘Why are you guys talking to us about this when you have the mess in your own backyard?'”
Americans can’t even criticize Burmese officials without being reminded of the muddled U.S. picture on torture.
And yet, we have conservatives like Bill O’Reilly insisting publicly that Abu Ghraib was “blown out of proportion.”
The mind reels.